Big Changes At White Wolf Following Controversy

TrippyHippy said:

Silence of the Lambs wasn't particularly 'historical' when it was written - serial killers were still a thing. Survivors were still alive when they started making Vietnam movies.

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Very true.

One could cite The Lord of the Rings as a big fantasy metaphor for World War 2, when it was written, and 'The Two Towers' movie was seen by quite a few people in the aftermath of 9/11 as having some allegorical reference.

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One could, although JRR Tolkien explicitly and repeatedly denied that Lord of the Rings was an allegory for anything, certainly not for World War II. He had a particular dislike for allegory. I think he doth protest a bit too much in some spots, though, most notably "Scouring of the Shire" but he discussed the issue pretty clearly as to why LotR isn't one for World War II. As to The Two Towers as an allegory for the World Trade Center... wow. That's quite a stretch.

Casablanca sets up a romance set in the middle of World War 2, while the war was actually happening in the real world, while comedies like Duck Soup were also being banned by fascist governments just prior to this.

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Totally agree. Uncle Tom's Cabin helped spark the American Civil War.

No - it makes fantasy less escapist and more socially aware of real life issues.

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White Wolf back in the day was no stranger to controversy, but they were often careful, especially as time went on having gotten burned a few times. Back in the day, Rich Dansky, the Wraith developer, was very careful when White Wolf released a book on The Shoah to write an introduction about the topic. He was very sensitive to the issue as he was Jewish and if I recall right had a close connection (related to a Holocaust survivor?---can't remember, this was twenty years ago). One thing that they were careful to try to avoid was making all human tragedies "vampire plots" given how easy it is to trivialize them fictionally that way. Still, overall, a lot of times White Wolf games drew attention to things that probably could have used it. Certainly developers like Bill Bridges were quite open about their political viewpoints.

The internet of twenty years ago isn't the kind of global water cooler it is today, though. Also, White Wolf in 1998 was an American company and the vast majority of their market was in the USA or a few English-speaking countries. Mostly they sold TTRPGS and also did some book publishing in an area that was very niche. White Wolf today is owned by a Swedish company looking to push White Wolf properties into video games and other areas. I bet there's a lot more going on we don't know about---someone else indicated potential legal action.

5ekyu said:

But you know what... we wont agree I have stated my position and I am done with this no-win bear trap of a discussion. You have the floor, enjoy.

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That's awesome! I have to remember that quote. In fact, I'm going to use it elsewhere.

Jester David said:

The vampires in Chechnya don’t represent anything. They’re not an allegory for AIDS or homosexuality or communism or McCarthy.

The Chechnyan government has maintaining that the western media is committing propaganda against them and making false claims.
Having a Western RPG company slander their leader bolsters their claims that the West is lying about their country and leader.

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The vampires in Chechnya represent a murderous regime. It’s an obvious and clear allegory.

The Chechnyan government has now used the fact of White Wolf not publishing as evidence it was all propaganda against them. Go and read my earlier report from a Russian correspondent on this thread. White Wolf removing the text is basically doing his job for him.

Moreover, it’s not slander to suggest their leader is a monster, when he IS a monster. He is persecuting the LGBT community with torture and murder. That makes him evil in my book, and well suited to the allegory used. Whether he is offended or not by a written text pointing out this allegory should be the least of our concerns - he is a monster and the more people who can express that the weaker he will be.

And as others have pointed out, literary techniques for horror are every bit as relevant to a role playing game as novels or movies or any other creative medium. Silly argument, this.

TrippyHippy said:

The vampires in Chechnya represent a murderous regime. It’s an obvious and clear allegory.

The Chechnyan government has now used the fact of White Wolf not publishing as evidence it was all ppropaganda against them. Go and read my earlier report from a Russian correspondent on this thread.

Moreover, it’s not slander to suggest their leader is a monster, when he IS a monster. He is persecuting the LGBT community with torture and murder. That makes him evil in my book, and well suited to the allegory used. Whether he is offended or not by a written text pointing out this allegory should be the least of our concerns - he is a monster and the more people who can express that the weaker he will be.

And as others have pointed out, literary techniques for horror are every bit as relevant to a role playing game as novels or movies or any other creative medium. Silly argument, this.

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In college I had a friend who thought the Britney Spears Crosroads film was a masterpiece and the best film of that year.
You can find depth in anything. But that doesn't mean it was intended.
(And, seriously... vampires representing a muderous regime is the shallowest symbolism imaginable. Uwe Boll level filmmaking.)

And even if it was intentional, that doesn't mean you get a free pass to offend. Again, making art doesn’t let you freely use and capitalize on the arrest and torture of innocent people.
This book crossed. A. Line.
It broke a “rule” they knew back in the 1990s and attributed a modern crime against humanity to a fictional supernatural being. It reduced people to a plot point. For a game. That’s uncool.

Whether or not you personally agree is irrelevant. Outrage doesn’t have to be unanimous. You don’t get veto privileges over people being upset.

LuisCarlos17f said:

We can use speculative fiction, and the RPGs, to talk about conflicts of coexistence and tolerance, but we can't forget the respect of the human dignity or then we could condemn terrorists to be eaten by dogs, like Ramsay Bolton, character from "Game of Thrones". Would do Sansa Stark that if she had been a pious Christian?

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Well, given what pious Christians have done to each other, let alone to others, over the past 2k years.....

epithet said:

I suppose there's something to be said for pissing off both sides of the conflict.

I'm reminded of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, which was a popular book that became a move based on the (obviously fictional) premise that the Confederacy was a cover for vampires. There is also a movie in theaters now (Overlord?) that is about Nazis creating zombies. I think it is perfectly natural to look at real-world villainy and associate it with horror genre supernatural elements, it makes for a good story. Games and other fiction have to set up Capital-E-Evil so that the heroes can fight against it, because you can't have Bellerophon with the chimaera. Still, it seems like the fallout from using an ongoing, current real-world issue was predictable. We are living in times of elevated sensitivity and maximum scrutiny, where if something could possibly offend it will definitely offend, and there is a cultural inclination to pillory the offender immediately and without reservation or consideration of other factors. It seems like White Wolf should have known better.

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If they’d presented the conflict/crisis as a point of potential conflict for PCs to engage with, without presenting it as a conspiracy to mask vampires abducting people, I don’t think there here’d be much outcry.

I mean, the Brujah exist. There are definately brujah in Chechnya ready to throw down in the name of stopping LGBT folks from being disappeared and killed, and formenting violent action in that vein, and it’s an easy jump to put other vamps in places of opportunism, taking advantage of the government’s oppression for their own ends.

Jester David said:

All of which are historical.
It has the value of time and no one still alive being affected.

As @Dannyalcatraz says, what would the response be if they claimed the ICE camps were the result of vampires? The attacks and lynchings of Black Lives Matters activists?

Or, the best one, what would the reaction be if White Wolf had put out a book that said Sandy Hook Elementary massacre was really the result of a rogue vampire pack, and the shooter was a cover? Because like the Chechnya one, that also accidentally overlaps with claims that the story presented by the western media is not the truth and is really propaganda.

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Gorram that one has punch to it. “It’s not crisis actors and false flags, it’s that Obama is a ghoul and the shooting was really a vampire attack!” Would be...very bad.

mycomics007 said:

It would appear that all the more noisy hysterics from ppl that don't take part in a given side interest, fuming and shouting, have done in something else that was harming no one, similar to gluten.

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Is there a script y’all are reading from?

The Christianity shown in the media and the one from real world are very different. Galileo Galiei wasn't sentenced to death, but to recited penitential psalms, and this wasn't bone by him but by his nun daughter. Lavoisier was guillotined but media doesn't tell. Please, real Church isn't like in the "Assasin's Creed" videogames, the emperor's cult from Warhammer 40.000 or the Sigmar's cult from Warhammer Fantasy. If a mason, John Wyck, tells a lot of horrible things about the Vatican Church from his "7th Sea" this doesn't mean real Catholic Church to be like in Umberto Eco "the name of the rose". Do you know anything about the Taiping rebellion in China? Hong Xiuquan self-proclaimed Christ's brother (his family wasn't Christian ever) and 20 millions or more lives were lost. With Mao 100 millions of Chinese lives were lost, and that if we don't count the forced abortions against parents' will. Media will not try to warn you about revolutions may became nightmares as Robespierre's French Terror. Madam Roland before being guillotined said: "Oh liberty, how many crimes are committed in your name!"

To use speculative fiction to show religion like a menace like the republic of Gilead from Margaret Atwood's "the maid's tale" it isn't only annoying, it may be more dangerous you could imagine or suppose. The worst genocide suffered in Spain wasn't by Inquisition, but by the red terror, the communists who burned convents and tortured in the chekas, but the current media don't tell anti-capitalist/anti-system movement may be so dangerous as religious fanaticism. The stereotype of the religious zealot or the hypocrite preacher is very common in the actual speculative fiction, also in videogames and RPGs, but most of time this is not true, real Christians aren't like Carrie's crazy mother, the character from Stephen King's book, or Joseph "the father" Seed, the main antagonist from "Far Cry 5". But persecution against Christians in other parts of the world, for example the land-grabbing in Pakistan or attacks against Copts temples (and they aren't allowed to rebuilt) is very real, with more mortal victims than racism or homophobia. And Hollywood doesn't tell about this. The fact is a lot of people would want to watch the movie "Gosnell: the trial of America's biggest serial killer" but cinemas didn't want to broadcast it. What is happening?

Now we are in the beginning of the "cultural counter-revolution", a rebellion against the "ministry of post-truth", against the imposition of certain ideas by the main media, and the RPGs also will be affected. People is noticing "ultra-capitalist" Detroit in "Robocop" movies can't be worse very much than real Detroit (closest one in real USA to a post-apocalypse zone), or Cuba or Venezuela.

Voltaire said: "I would not wish to have to deal with an atheist prince, who would find it to his interest to have me ground to powder in a mortar: I should be quite sure of being ground to powder. If I were a sovereign, I would not wish to have to deal with atheist courtiers, whose interest it would be to poison me: I should have to be taking antidotes every day. It is therefore absolutely necessary for princes and for peoples, that the idea of a Supreme Being, creator, ruler, rewarder, revenger, shall be deeply engraved in people's minds". the character from "Game of Thrones", Joffrey Baratheon, with a crossbow, is a perfect example to explain the reason of this quote. It wasn't G.R.R Martin's goal but "Games of Thrones" shows us as Western civilization would be without Christianity.

We can, we should, use the speculative fiction to promove values against the hate, intolerance and the fanaticism, but to get this we have to recover the respect of the human dignity. And do you know? I see in the real life Christian believers are more coherent with this. If I see cartoons like "a family guy" are too nasty and rude again I think they have forgotten the respect of the human dignity for people with a different point of view. That isn't acid humor but toxic personality.

Listen, here in Spain, Ortega Lara, who was kidnapped by a terrorist group, ETA, but found and rescued by the police, when he wanted to participated in an act he met a group of extreme-left radicals who were shouting menace words like "¡Os fusilaremos como en Paracuellos", ( = we will shoot (execute by firearms) you like in Paracuellos (a zone where the communists commited a deadpool for the Spanish civil war)! Do you notice it? If there is a problem about fanaticism and intolerance it isn't because Christians are wolves with sheep's clothing and may back to the old ones but because the anti-Christians and anti-Capitalists regret nothing. The anticapitalism shown in the modern fiction, or the stereotype of religious zealot may be so dangerous as the racism or the homophobia, or worst. Do you remember marvel comics event "Dinasty of M" where the mutants weren't the victims of intolerance but the new tyrants?

Now it is the time to tell who needs a sermon about respect and tolerance, for a better coexistence, are not us but the hypocrites who self-proclaimed defenders of the freedom but don't allow a different opinion. Trust nobody who doesn't show arguments to explain the reasons of his point of view but only tries to humiliate and psychological mistreat (with "fresh acid humor") who dares to take the opposite to him.

Jester David said:

In college I had a friend who thought the Britney Spears Crosroads film was a masterpiece and the best film of that year.
You can find depth in anything. But that doesn't mean it was intended.
(And, seriously... vampires representing a muderous regime is the shallowest symbolism imaginable. Uwe Boll level filmmaking.)

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Evidently, you can dismiss everything in a shallow way too, but your perspective doesn’t trump mine.

And even if it was intentional, that doesn't mean you get a free pass to offend. Again, making art doesn’t let you freely use and capitalize on the arrest and torture of innocent people.

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Actually we do get a free pass to offend other people, with words, in a free society. The Chechnyan government think that LGBT people don’t get the freedom to offend them by their existance - and that is why they oppress them. It’s the basis of authoritarianism.

You are literally arguing against freedom of expression in exactly the same way. People don't have a right to not be offended. They have a freedom to not buy or argue against things they don't like - but they have no protection in law against being offended by words in countries with freedom of speech laws. If that were the case, I could claim that your words were offensive, just because I didn't like them, and try to stop you from speaking too.

This book crossed. A. Line.
It broke a “rule” they knew back in the 1990s and attributed a modern crime against humanity to a fictional supernatural being. It reduced people to a plot point. For a game. That’s uncool.

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The ‘rules’ you cite don’t break any law and the offense you claim are evidently in the eye of the beholder. I didn't find it offensive, for the reasons I have already cited. Wanting to censor writing because you don’t accept or understand a metaphor being used, is uncool. So is the desire to ban books you don’t like.

Whether or not you personally agree is irrelevant. Outrage doesn’t have to be unanimous. You don’t get veto privileges over people being upset.

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Just because some people find material upsetting, doesn’t mean they get a veto on another’s right to expression. Again you are pushing an authoritarian argument here. Your views are closer to the Chechnyan government than you seem to realise.

Just because some people find material upsetting, doesn’t mean they get a veto on another’s right to expression.

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No, but editors, managers, owners, and other superiors in a given hierarchy DO. And here, they did.

They weighed the two sides and found they’d rather not appear to be tin-eared to the complainers.