Thirteenth Legion – “My God Justin, What Have You Done?”

by kabael@bu.edu

Hello out there, my soon-to-be-loyal readers, allow me to introduce myself to begin my hopefully monthly column, mainly because I cannot think of any other way to begin. I’m Derek Guder. I’m also Kintaro Oe. No, wait, I’m also kabael. I’m the trinity all rolled into one. "Some of you may remember me from such things as…" alt.games.whitewolf, the various World of Darkness email lists and my fanboy reviews on RPGnet.

Anyway, I’m a college gamer from New England whose laziness continues to astound even myself. Amazing that. Even more amazing that I finally sat myself down to write this column. It got me all excited just thinking about it.

So just what the hell do I intend to do with this electronic space so freely given me? I intend to perform the greatest of all flatteries, imitation, and when deciding to imitate, you might as well go for the gold, so for the time it takes me to type up this column each month, I’m going to pretend that I an Kenneth Hite, the Lord God of Occult, Historical and Conspiratorial Information as it Relates to Gaming. Those of you unfamiliar with his work should go to Pyramid Online to read his Suppressed Transmission if you have a Pyramid subscription (it really is worth it, just for Hite himself). Or you could go to his column Out of theBox if you want to read some quick reviews and get some news on the gaming industry as a whole. Some other examples of his work are Nightmares of Mine (by ICE, I believe, all about horror games) and Cainite Heresy, the wondrous Black Dog sourcebook on heretical vampires for Vampire: The Dark Ages. The man is brilliant.

For those poor souls without a subscription to Pyramid Online, Hite’s weekly column The Suppressed Transmission is all about gaming and ideas for it. He talks at length about many topics, from historical celebrities to occult conspiracies to the "A to Z Guide for ______". That’s what I hope to emulate, his wandering "let’s try this" attitude and ability to both come up with something new and make it not only not suck, but actually seem appealing. He is the only man who could make UFOs and greys sound remotely interesting.

And that’s what I wish I could do. Since I can’t, I’m going to do the next best thing, I’m going to try.

What am I trying this month? The oh-so-controversial metaplot that is sweeping across the World of Darkness during this Year of the Reckoning, I’m going to talk about how to use it, how to not use it, and how not to use it.

Lots and lots of people (damned near everyone, I’d say) has an opinion on the metaplot. I like it. There, I admit it, I’m a canon-junkie. I feel dirty when I deviate from The Word (but I’m getting better, really). Many people hate it, which is fine, I bear them no ill-will.

Although I like the metaplot for the most part (I find that it makes the setting seem more alive to actually have it develop and change), I think sometimes that it is not implemented in the best of ways.

Three examples include the slaying of the Tremere antitribu, the breaking of the Assamite Curse, and the fall of the Ravnos Antediluvian and the subsequent disintegration of the clan. The first two were mentioned in quick comments in two different books and the Ravnos incident was given an Appendix in Time of Thin Blood. I won’t rehash the details of all of them, but they were all well-done in my opinion, the problem was that they were done and not begun. I think that they would have done better as stories or chronicles. White Wolf could have published a large volume called "Tales of the Reckoning" or "Kiss Your Ass Goodbye" or something, but alas, that was not the case. I hear that the details on the demise of the Tremere antitribuwill be dealt with in Transylvania Chronicles IV, so I’m only going to deal with the latter two.

The Assamite Curse and Ur-Shulgi: Vampire: The Masquerade Revised Edition (mine was the extra-spiffy black leather printing — definitely worth it) was the first mention of this. The entire clan simply woke up one night free from the Curse, no explanation given. Quite the mystery, that. I liked it a lot myself, it had great potential to shake up the clan (and hopefully cause the clanbook to spontaneously combust). Then Children of the Night came out and we found out that the great Assamite Methuselah Ur-Shulgi had just awoken to herald Haqim’s return and with but a wave of his pinky, he had broken the Curse.

In some ways, that was very anticlimactic, but it was certainly nice in others. I was expecting something long and complicated to break the Curse, but I got an ultra-powerful Methuselah. It was a nice plot in many ways though: it advances the encroachment of Gehenna and proves beyond a doubt that generation is not a substitute for age, as the Tremere Inner Council is likely now acutely aware. It didn’t live up to my dreams (then again, nothing does), but it was certainly good.

How else could it have been handled? As an adventure of one sort or another. To showcase the oft-overlooked Assamite viziers and magi, let’s make this hypothetical game a Noddist Chronicle. These are so much fun as damned near every secret society wants it’s hands in the Book of Nod pie.

The characters travel about the world gathering tablets and scraps that speak again and again of "awakenings" and "in the cradle." What does it all mean? In a flash of insight, the group travels to the Middle East (the cradle of civilization) to await the awakenings of one sort or another. They arrive to find the scene that was detailed in Ur-Shulgi’s character write-up — dead soldiers, empty sarcophagi and the knowledge that something big indeed happened here. A few games of cat-and-mouse with Assamite and Setite assassins and scholars later and you are ready to lift the Curse. Have the players meet Al Ashrad and let them know that he wasn’t the one who did it. Leave it at that, let them wonder about the details.

I like that format much better than the speedy "The curse is lifted mysteriously by Ur-Shulgi. Sshh!" It allows for more information to be given to the PCs as well as being much more rewarding and exacting. Putting the metaplot in canonical adventures also gives the metaplot more veracity or anything else. It makes it immensely more alive, which is the same thing that metaplot does for the setting.

In their Trinity line, White Wolf is doing just that, as far as I know. Revealing the "Story So Far" metaplot through adventures, the Darkness Revealed and Alien Invasion trilogies of supplements. While I have never actually read either myself, I do think that they are the right way to do a metaplot, and all of the response I’ve heard about them have been great. White Wolf has proved that they can put a metaplot in a book of adventures and do well by it, it’s too bad that they don’t do so in the World of Darkness as well.

Well, moving on to the fall of the Ravnos. I posted a review of Time of Thin Blood that I wrote for RPGnet (it should be put up on their website within two weeks) to both usenet and the vampire-l mailing list, but suffice to say that while I thought that the section on Ravnos’ ultimate demise was exceedingly well-written, I think that there were some problems in it’s manner of execution. The plot came largely out of left field in my eyes, there was very little foreshadowing to the fall of the clan and I’m still wondering why it was in Time of Thin Blood at all (and why the Sabbat hasn’t produced dhampires and more high-generation vampires than anyone else).

I would have done the same thing with the Ravnos plotline that I would have done with that of the Assamites and Ur-Shulgi. The only hinting at the fall of the Ravnos that I remember strongly was the mention of awakening Eldersin the Revised Edition as well as perhaps "Ghivraan Dalaal, the Dead God" from Children of the Night. Initially I was puzzled by his presence in the book, but I think he was there to show how the clan had "fallen" in a sense, becoming more like the Sabbat than one would think.

So, what’s one way to utilize the metaplot in the story about the Ravnos? Maybe Callirus, "The Jackdaw King,", also of Children of the Night fame, shows up at the character’s doorstep posing as an authority figure within the Camarilla. He manipulates them into defending him from awu of Kuei-jin tracking him down. He departs before they discover the whole story, that he had attempted to infiltrate the Infinite Thunders Court of Sri Lanka (see the Kindred of the East Companion) as part of the Ravnos clan jyhad to wrest complete control over the Indian subcontinent from the Cathayans. The deal went sour and he had to flee, and that is where the characters entered.

Now the game turns from mystery to chase, as the characters track Callirus back to Calcutta, where he’s posing as the leader of some debauched bloodcult – who is actually not Callirus but Ghivran Dalaal…. The players show up and harass Dalaal (sure, the book says he’s in New Delhi, but we’ll pretend we didn’t read that part). Enter phase three of the chronicle, Heavy Foreshadowing and Prophecizing. The players might start getting visions, Chimerstry becomes more and more unpredictable and powerful, and prophets start foretelling doom like nothing before. Everything points to something BIG happening.

Then Ravnos and his three Bodhisattva dance partners appear and the Week of Nightmares reaches it’s climax. At this point, the players should leave, because while Ravnos can survive the bombs, they most assuredly cannot. When the dust clears, they are in a most un-enviable position. They have information about an event that way too many people want to know about.

This kind of chronicle would be great for scene cuts to other parts of the world as Chimerstry runs rampant. Dealing with the repercussions of having millions of people have their dreams and nightmares given form before them could be an entire story in itself.

By necessity, the metaplot is rather sparse on details and sketchy on definitive information. That’s okay with me, because I think that part of the fun of the metaplot is determining those details yourself in the game. I often like to role-play good pre-generated characters because I find them to be a challenge I can rise to. The same can be said for the metaplot. For meat least, it tends only to spur my creativity on further.

Well, this section should be short and sweet, I think. The best way to not use the metaplot is to simply ignore it. Diverging from canon is not that difficult, especially with much of the metaplot as it stands now.

So far, all that has been done is that the Assamites have been freed from their Curse and the Ravnos have fallen. Fool’s Luck: The Way of the Commoner had really nothing to do with the Reckoning, despite it’s billing. Cainite Heresy seems to be more of a foreshadowing of the Red Star and such than anything else. We also have the re-appearance of the Cappadocians in the form of the Harbingers of Skulls and the near replacement of the Tremere antitribu with the Salubri antitribu. From what I hear, Rage Across the Heavens will likely be along the same scale of shake-up as what has gone before, while Ends of Empire may very well be the veritable end for Wraith: the Oblivion sadly. I’m desperately trying to ignore the rumors, but I fear that my favorite White Wolf game will soon be walking in the footsteps of Changeling: the Dreaming.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that the metaplot as a metaplot will likely take a minimum of work to ignore if you really hate it. Time of Thin Blood, for example, had only an Appendix on the Ravnos (and it still seems like it was in the book because there was no where else to put it), and the rest of the surprisingly large book dealt with the thin-blooded, Gehenna and dhampirs. Even for the die-hard metaplot hater, there is enough in the book to make it worth buying.

"What about in the future, when the material will take the changes into account?" What about it? How many plots revolved around the Assamites and their Curse? How much published material relied upon the Ravnos as a clan and not as individuals (which still survive)? The Harbingers of Skulls and the Salubri antitribu are even easier to ignore. Just forget about them. Voila! The metaplot demon flees. That is really why I can’t understand why people are so concerned and annoyed by it. Sure, if it was horrid then I could see a problem, if it also irrevocably changed the setting. But since it is, so far, neither, then there is little to complain about.

Something else that I think needs to be addressed when talking about the metaplot is how not to use it. This is just general storytelling advice, but I think it bears mentioning that the metaplot just shouldn’t be used to screw a character over. Don’t want only kill of a Tremere antitribu just because the Guide to the Sabbat says that they are all gone. The same goes for the Ravnos. Sure both groups have been decimated in the plotline, and sure it would likely be common sense that the player character would as well, but unless you’ve talked it over with the player, wanton slaughter is only going to cause problems. Resentment and discontent is not the most conducive environment to having fun.

Also, if you are running a game that either deals with the metaplot or is the metaplot (like the examples I gave above), don’t feel absolutely pressured to be a slave to the details. Ghivran Dalaal was supposed to be in New Delhi, but I moved him to Calcutta for plot’s sake. White Wolf is producing a generic product, they cannot take into account everything that you might have in your game, so feel free to twist and bend and pull. That’s actually what the writers expect you to do.

A similar thought is that you are in no way obliged to use all of the metaplot either. Maybe you like the Ravnos falling ("Stupid Gypsies, never did like them bastards anyway.") but find the idea of the Assamites throwing off their Curse abhorrent ("What? Now the cool challenge has gone out of it, now their honor bleeds away like their conviction in the Jihad of Haqim."). Who says that you have to use both? If you can let me know who they are, I’ll be more than happy to slap them around for you. The books are collections not of standards and requirements, but of ideas to be incorporated or discarded as the case may be.

I also warn against trying to make sure that the player characters understand every little in and out of the plot you’ve written up. I know this from experience, when dealing with conspiracies (especially with 10,000 year old conspirators), trying to get every little twist and turn across only turns the whole tale flat, sadly. Sometimes you just have to settle for hints and allusions that may or may not be understood. If you have such a burning need to share your brilliant vision, wait until it’s over, and then you can spout to your heart’s content to the players, just keep it bottled up until then, it works much better that way.

You know what? I think that this is about as far as I can stretch out this whole discussion on the metaplot. Got rather long there, didn’t it? Anyway, that’s just my ramblings on the subject. I will hopefully be writing one of these columns every month to be posted on this site, so make damn sure you come back later on. I’ll be waiting here.

I’m all for feedback and suggestions. If people want me to talk about a certain subject, feel free to let me know. I have no specific plans of any sort (for the most part). This kind of electronic column works best if I get people to actually respond to me.

What do I have planned for next month? My tentative idea is "How to Make the Ventrue Grab You by the Balls, or Revamping Cliches and Stereotypes in Splats." Despite that title, it will be a general column for the World of Darkness, so if anyone has any ideas on what Tribes, Traditions, Guilds, and Kiths they find to be extremely dry and bland, let me know so I can spice ’em up enough to make you breathe fire.

Until we meet again (well, okay, not really, but pretend), my good readers.