As a thought experiment I have slowly begun to patchwork together Vampire the Masquerade’s two versions and Vampire the Requiem and it’s been a fun exercise.

Using the like... four or five good ideas V5 and retrofitting them onto V20. Asking myself what a world where the Jyhad exists but the Camarilla isn’t a monolith would look like.

Having fun smashing the various versions of things together and seeing how to make them distinct works.

But it really does highlight the difference of approach in metaplot versus toolkit.

Like bloodlines, the minor factions for those of you who don’t play.

There are so many Masquerade bloodlines that exist because they were needed for like one plot beat in an adventure somewhere.

Top TTRPG scientists still working around the clock to explain why the Daughters of Cacophony exist. “I think they were in WoD Chicago 1e?” Says expert.

And then in Requiem there is i think literally about 100 bloodlines, all of them are totally optional, and about 15 of them suck ass which is honestly not a bad ratio.

But they’re all hyper specific.

Castilian Spanish duelists obsessed with social decorum. Ancient Egyptian dream warrriors who eat memories. Indian righteous devils who fight vampires that abuse the mortals.

Versus the Masquerade ones that are like “these are all women and they sing” or “these guys eat people” or “let’s make a surviving splinter faction of the Necromancer guys again.”

daughters of cacophony are both ???? and unfortunately my thing

I mean I get it! It’s just a setting where everything has a reason to exist and they just seem to have as far as the lore cares be there. Dark Ages Vampire gives them two different origins and Victorian Vampire gives them another one and none of them seem to be canon and they just kind of vibe?

Are they a Malkavian or a Torreador bloodline? Wouldn’t you like to know Storyteller! Are they are a secret Talmahera plot? Fuck you for asking! Do they have any allegiances to the clans or the sects? lol lmao.

Apparently the LARP stuff made the Sons of Discord canon???

My boyfriend played a Son of Discord once

truly the issue with oWoD design approach to vampires is that they were trying to make it viable for every single bit of human mythology to be covered by some kind of vampire

werewolves? vampires.
mages? also vampires.
fae? you guessed it,

i take issue with a lot of nWoD/ChroD bloodlines because it feels like they start to dilute the otherwise much better focus of what VtR is doing, and also some of them are lowkey highkey kinda racist.

but i also can't deny that a lot of them are fun as hell.
carly and i at one point repurposed one into a faction rather than a bloodline and it was GREAT.

I’m using a lot of them as little associations that Caitiff have made for themselves.

It turns out a lot of the problematic elements get highly lessened if you make it something that people willingly choose to join.

♥ 不死的黑蛇 ♥ : yeah i think a lot of that is fascinatingly because VtM was the "first one" and they had no idea they'd later go on to make Werewolf or Mage or Changeling or anything else

despite being vampires vtm 1e essentially ended up being a blanket excuse to play your horror monster of choice

(eg. malkavians in 1e were practically just fae, the mental illness hadn't really been codified yet, gangrel being werewolves in a funny hat, etc)

and then 2e went "oh shit right those are other game lines now we gotta fix it"........ without being able to completely move away from those codified identities bc people liked them

some moved more then others (malks fae thing in modern nights is like, what, one paragraph in the malkavian clanbook that amounts to "yeah we have a deal with arcadia. rule one is don't fucking talk about the deal with arcadia"?) (vs gangrels who are. still basically just werewolves, sorry guys,) but it's a fascinating bit of unintentional design

that VtR completely avoided because by the time it was written, they knew there were other types of horror out there, because those books already existed and were popular

skulltaffy 💀 : funnily enough I didn't even know that about malkavians (I am ultimately an nWoD player who is working on making the full jump to proper ChroD); I was thinking of the Kiasyd.

but yes, I did know All That was because it was the first game line of the bunch!

I just wish that these devs would stop trying to make the games all things to all people, and let them instead focus on doing the genre they're doing and doing it well.

(funny how gangrel manages to make the jump to VtR super cleanly, though, simply on the basis of "well, clan flavor notwithstanding, Protean is just That Stuff Dracula Did.")

—truly, I'm not sure if it's even the fault of any one team, given that surely there's next to no overlap between VtM with white wolf and Exalted 3e decades later with onyx path.
but I feel like I'm starting to see it with the bloat in exalt varieties in 3e too, now!! blease... it is okay for a game line to not let you play literally any Type of Guy.....

So the part that kills me about the Kiasyd is looking at them from an out of game perspective; they are invented for the Sabbat as some weird shit that exists there and nobody really explains, then later editions kind of demand explanations for everything.

So they get ties to Changeling the Dreaming and a huge ornate backstory about them as a weird experiment and their ties to the Lasombra and also DA Fae as a weird exprriment -- we wind up knowing their whole deal kind of to their detriment? But that’s the story of most WW/OP games.

And then V20 introduced the Maeghar which are just the 1e Kiasyd again and their entire write-up is like “these guys aren’t a clan, they don’t serve a purpose, they have no plot relevance, they are only vaguely nominally associated with the True Black Hand, they don’t associate with each other or embrace pretty much ever, fuck off, why are you reading this?”

It is one of my favorite little weird things in the game like tbh.

♥ 不死的黑蛇 ♥ : honestly i only know about it because i'm a freak who went out of my way to read all malk lore in an attempt to reconcile it. iirc it's part of why one edition tried to make the kiasyd vaguely related to malks, too, since they ended up kinda picking up the fae associations that the malks cast off