(Kindred of the East) Shadow War

The toughest part of reading a series like Kindred of the East (at least to me, a white guy who has no personal connection to any harmful stereotypes that may be present and is likely to overlook half of them when they show up) is disentangling the racist elements from the genre elements. I sometimes use the phrase "Asia as genre" to describe a common rpg approach to Asian culture and that can range anywhere from "extremely racist" to "well-meaning liberal-type racist," but how can one even be certain that "Asia as genre" is what's happening? Maybe something just gives off "Asia as genre" vibes because it's meant to occupy a genre of Asian origin. "This does not resemble the real China, but rather a heightened-reality version of China because it takes its cues from Chinese literature and/or cinema" is something to not only be not avoided, but actively encouraged. And then you have the third option, which is telling a by-the-numbers story in a genre of "Western" origin that just so happens to be set in Asia, but then your completely conventional story beats that would not be out of place in an Anne Rice novel accidentally wind up dovetailing with Orientalist stereotypes because you didn't fully contemplate how your standard tropes would look when placed in a new geopolitical context.

Suffice to say, Shadow War (Edward MacGregor and Bryant Durrell) might fall into the first category and might fall into the third category, but probably doesn't fall into the second (though I don't want to rule it out because my knowledge of Asian literature and cinema is shallow as hell). Let's get started with the most generous possible interpretation of the material - that it is a Vampire: the Masquerade supplement, set in Asia.

There's an argument to be made for this. It is one of the foundational pillars of the vampire genre, especially in White Wolf's interpretation, that elder vampires beyond a certain age are out of touch weirdos who are full of mysterious ancient secrets, but are a nightmare to deal with because they'll make you do dumb shit for no reason (except it's actually 500 year-old dueling etiquette and you'd have made a total ass of yourself in the court of Louis XII carrying on like that). Get two of these guys together and let them do your event planning and that's a surefire recipe for boring-ass rituals that you have to grit your teeth and sit through because they will literally tear you to shreds for signalling the wrong thing with the flower code.

And that's one possible interpretation of Shadow War's system of highly-mediated kuei-jin vs kuei-jin conflict. You got beef with another vampire and your modern sensibilities might encourage you to get a couple of your friends, maybe a bigass wolf or something, and jump them in a darkened alley. But, of course, the ancient ghoul who thinks the Industrial Revolution is just a bad dream humanity is going to wake up from any day now, who can survive a ground-zero blast of 20 pounds of C-4, that guy is going to insist you do things by the old forms. Agree beforehand to the scope of conflict, declaring either a limited-scale "twilight war" or a nearly-full-scale "midnight war." And if it's a twilight war, you need to engage the services of a professional twilight war matchmaker, who can pick a suitable challenge for you and your rival to test your essential vampire skills (like smuggling 100 pounds of jade across international borders or manipulating a particular politician to visit one of two unlikely locations without directly interacting with politician). But if it's a midnight war, that's a whole other thing where you have to give some very precisely staged public speeches, exchange gifts with various bystanders and revered elders, and commit to the destruction of your declared enemy even if you later  learn that they were framed for the offense which inspired the war.

It's all quite elegant. Very civilized. A lot of pointless jumping through hoops, but I think it's a gauntlet the players are going to want to navigate. You wouldn't be playing a vampire game if you wanted to interact with sensible people doing reasonable things out of relatable motives. Shadow War really does make you feel like you're putting up with some thousand-year-old creature's bullshit. It presents a series of scenes that the characters are going to absolutely hate, but which the players will eat the hell up.

And more relevantly, it's right in Vampire: the Masquerade's wheelhouse - a veneer of elegance concealing the deep rot of cynicism and ambition.

It's probably the best way to look at Shadow Wars: it is the Book of Humoring Old People in China, and as such is a pretty decent sourcebook for any vampire-type game. It's got good general advice about vampiric manipulation and conflict - laying out the pros and cons of using your mortal family as catspaws in your schemes, suggesting tactics and resources that young vampires might use successfully counter the amazing mystic might of the ancients.

That's the good news. The bad news is that this book might not actually be about vampires. It might be about Asia. Or, at least, White Wolf's fantasy version of Asia. A vampire's mortal proxies are called their "scarlet screens." Young vampires who rebel against the elders call themselves "Bamboo Princes." 

Now, those terms aren't necessarily more poetic than "catspaws" or "Anarchs," but, well, "catspaw" is just the English word for that kind of relationship whereas "scarlet screen" is almost certainly a White Wolf invention and "Anarch" has a clear derivation from "anarchist," an apt description of their goals, whereas it seems highly unlikely that "Bamboo Prince" has a similar degree of cultural transparency.

There's no delicate way to put this - giving flowery, obfuscating names to straightforward concepts is one of the main tools in the exoticism toolbox. And in general this is an area of overlap between vampire fiction and Orientalism (for example, calling the vampires' plan of hiding from humans "the Masquerade" is also a use of this trope), but take it from me, the vibes in Shadow War were not that fun.

Some kuei-jin want to change the world. To a Westerner, that may not sound like a radical idea, but the Middle Kingdom has been a world unto itself for millennia. Its societies have grown from a foundation of ancient polytheism, Confucianism, and Taoism. It has been a place where elders are honored and old ways are revered, where the foreigner is distrusted, the innovative ignored, and the different shunned.

That's from the beginning of the chapter that focuses on elder vs neonate conflict and the next paragraph implies that there are certain attitudes that were cultivated by the elders in order to encourage obedience to the elders, but it never quite makes clear that paragraph I just quoted was meant to apply to vampires and not to Asians. Likewise, all that stuff about twilight and midnight wars I was telling you about, it was inundated with talk of "honor."

Sigh. So honor is definitely something that survivors of ye olden tymes would care about, but it's also something that, stereotypically, Asians care about. And if there's one thing I learned from the Asians Represent Podcast it's that white people talking about "Asian honor" is like bad bad. I don't really understand all the nuances of "honor" as an Orientalist trope, but my gut tells me that Shadow Wars was on the wrong side of the line, which makes all the baroque ceremonial stuff kind of a drag in retrospect.

On the other hand, there were some signs that Kindred of the East is becoming marginally less Orientalist as time goes on. One of the chapters is about the ongoing vampire race war between kuei-jin and kindred and it's . . . not great, but the general thrust seems to be "maybe they aren't so different after all." The kuei-jin as a whole are presented on the same level as a vampire sect, so the conflict is more like "Camarilla vs Sabbat vs the Five August Courts and House Genji" and less like "white vampires vs Asian vampires," even if it often shakes out that way in practice. So the theory is that it is basically inevitable for organized conspiracies of vampires to try and muscle each other out, and that the reason it's happening now is nothing more mysterious than recent advances in travel and communications technology.

It's an explanation that could work, if Kindred of the East had banked more goodwill, but this is still the game that mixes Japanese and Chinese terminology willy-nilly, which covers an area spanning "from Mongolia to Burma and from Hokkaido to Xianjang," but gives vampires a common culture almost everywhere inside that box (and a "basically Chinese" culture at that). I think it's destined to always be hopelessly problematic, such that even when it shows us things that should and could be baroque vampire nonsense, we'd be fools to trust it.

Ukss Contribution: When two kuei-jin are engaged in a (theoretically) low intensity twilight war, the rest of the court will enthusiastically bet on the outcome. That's pretty funny. Betting on a blood feud, behind the backs of the people involved (though, of course, they know all about it because they themselves have bet on other peoples' feuds).

(GURPS: Transhuman Space) Under Pressure

Once more I'm confronted by the warring impulses aroused in me every time I read a full Transhuman Space supplement - do I rant about the detailed-to-the-point-of-uselessness mechanics related to the book's physical environment, or do I obsess to the point of distraction over the utter incomprehensibility of its politics. I can, of course, do both, and Under Pressure (David Morgan-Mar, Kenneth Peters, and Constantine Thomas) definitely gives me fodder for both, but it's still agonizing deciding which to do first.

"People with blocked sinuses or other air cavities such as decayed teeth will feel increasing discomfort and pain when compressed, even slowly, as the cavities are squeezed. Such pain causes a -1 penalty to DX and IQ-based rolls until it is relieved."

Now, I don't know a lot about diving. It never occurred to me that high ambient atmospheric pressure, such as you might find on a deep-sea habitat, could exacerbate dental pain. So that's a very interesting bit of setting texture. It makes descending into the stygian darkness of the ocean depths feel just a little bit more real to me. But a million people could play this rpg for a million years, and not one would ever apply that fucking penalty. Who the fuck are you trying to fool here? What is wrong with you?

PLAYER: All right! I've loaded up on supercaviating ammunition, taken a shot of Myelin Replacement Nanovirus to help with gas narcosis, and am ready to get in the pressure chamber for our transition to the deep parts of the Elandra colony.

GM: *Makes a roll behind the screen* Oh, sorry, but I've been tracking how many times you've mention brushing your teeth before taking a long rest and I'm afraid you have tooth decay. The pressure will impose a -1 DX and IQ penalty until you see a dentist.

I'm imagining this game. It probably also uses an adapted form of the seatbelt rules from Rigger 2 and the protein-percentage provisions rules from The Wilderness Survival Guide. What is the social contract? If you're playing in this game, do you get mad when the GM doesn't blindside you with some bit of extremely granular forced "realism." Like, you made a point of tracking on your character sheet exactly how many meters of fishing line you bothered to pack, so at some point the GM needs to make that matter. I won't say that I don't get it. Because a part of me, the part of me that enjoys hypothermia and food spoilage in my survival video games, that part of me understands the appeal. But what kind of mind do you need to run a game like that in a tabletop environment? To be harsh but fair, and more inconceivably, fair but harsh?

It's staggering to contemplate. Though I suspect that we were never meant to actually apply this rule. "A -1 penalty to DX and IQ-based rolls" is just GURPS' way of saying, "this is significant, but not 'stop the game' significant."

But don't let my complaining fool you. There are virtues to this sort of "every damned thing gets a rule" approach. It's rare for me to leave an rpg setting section feeling like I've learned something. But I definitely had my mind expanded by Under Pressure. A few fun facts that I found so surprising I had to verify them on the internet:

The Sun affects the tides. I guess it shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. I'd have thought the Sun was so far away that its gravitational influence could be considered uniform over the whole globe. Nope. The solar tides are about half the strength of the lunar tides. Wow.

Go deep enough underwater and you have to start breathing a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. Apparently it's a real thing called hydrox . . . and man, those cookie guys really screwed up with their choice of name.

You can build a ship with a concrete hull. I mean, I work through this logically, thinking about water displacement, and the related but incidental fact that if I wanted to ship a bunch of concrete across the ocean, I'd trust a boat to get the job done, and it all seems to check out, but some part of my brain still rebels against it. I want my boat to not sink so why wouldn't I make it less like a stone? And yet, concrete boats have been a thing since the mid-19th century. You couldn't make this shit up. Literally. I would not believe you. I would say, "science fiction nonsense is one thing, but you have gone too far! Stay here while I look something up on wikipedia, I want to see your look of humiliation when I prove you're full of shit . . . "

But, of course, truth is stranger than fiction and now I'm the jackass here. Although I worry that maybe the existence of concrete ships was common knowledge and my harping on it is doing naught but reveal my ignorance.

So I guess, all told, Under Pressure's oceanic lore dump is probably worth the terrible burden of knowing that somewhere, there's an alternate universe where people are using the ballast rules for the ship construction system ("For added realism, multiply the time required to empty the tanks by the square root of the outside pressure in atmospheres times the percentage of the tank being emptied.")

Which means all that's left is to talk about the book's politics. Libertarian seasteading. Releasing GMOs into the wild. Lobotomizing an orca and fitting it with cybernetics so that it can be piloted around like a remote drone. Some people might complain about these things. But Under Pressure reserves the label of "terrorist" exclusively for those who would take up arms against these practices.

It's possible that "ecoterrorist" is meant as a nonjudgemental, morally neutral term. One of the suggested campaigns is called "Taking a Stand," and it's about being a member of an ecoterrorist group . . . or infiltrating them on behalf of law enforcement. However, my gut tells me that any empathy extended to ecoterrorism is part of a deliberate effort to embrace a high-handed neutrality. The narration is rarely overtly judgmental, but there's a difference in tone between the way it treats activists - like they may do some good, despite their crimes - and the way it treats corporations - like they may commit crimes, despite being good.

The best example of this is from something we've discussed before, with the book Deep Beyond - The War Beneath the Ice.

To quickly recap - scientists discover that Europa has its own biosphere. A faction called the Green Duncanites moves to Europa to oxygenate the ocean enough to change its biochemistry and allow for the release of invasive species with the eventual goal of terraforming the planet enough to allow genetically modified transhumans to colonize. There is an organization called The Europa Defense Force that is set on stopping the Green Duncanites by any means necessary.

Even more than Deep Beyond, Under Pressure treats the War Beneath the Ice like it's a political controversy. 

"While the Europan biosphere appears to be largely intact, the EDF claims that indigenous life near the Avatar (Ed: Green Duncanite) farms has been adversely affected by increased oxygen toxicity in the water and competition from imported Avatar bacteria. Avatar strenuously denies this, but it is enough justification for the EDF to step up their offensive."

Not stated: what's actually happening. I guess "appears to be largely intact" is close to an objective voice. But it's a really bland way of framing the conflict, one that obscures more than it reveals. "Largely intact?" So you mean "partially damaged." As in, the sort of state you might expect the biosphere to be in when Avatar has only made 5 years of progress on their thousand-year plan? It's "largely intact" after the EDF's efforts to constrain and thwart Avatar as much as possible?

It's clear to me that the author didn't really know how to make the EDF's case persuasively. The closest we get is the head researcher of Genesis station (the scientific mission sent to study Europa's biosphere, before Avatar or the EDF arrived) describing the Duncanites as engaged in "irresponsible tinkering with a virgin ecosystem."

That rather undersells the issue . . . by, like, a lot. Later we learn that the researcher guy "sympathized with the Preservationist view, [but] he could not condone the EDF's violent approach. As a result, he attempted to keep [the research station] out of the conflict."

And how do I put this? You're Giovanni Montaldo, the "fiery Italian microbiologist." They put you on a rocket ship and shot you 500 million miles across the solar system, with an opportunity to become the 22nd century's Charles Darwin. But when you get to the Galapagos, you find that pirates have beaten you there, and not only are they hunting the finches for sport, when they're done, they're going to bulldoze the islands and build a series of shopping malls. 

Maybe you don't care for the EDF's methods. Maybe the thought of killing a fellow human being disgusts and horrifies you. I can certainly relate to that. But the nearest government is so far away that light itself would take a half hour to reach them. And for all the EDF's violence, they have still not found the minimum amount of force necessary to get the Duncanites to stop.

That's the reality of the situation. You either organize to recreate the state's monopoly on violence or you let the Duncanites keep doing what they're doing. There's no middle ground there. If you stay out of the conflict, you are siding with the Duncanites. 

But it's unclear whether the authors of Under Pressure even realize that the Duncanites are committing a crime. It's established that an EU and a Chinese military vessel are each on their way to Europa . . . to apprehend the EDF. The Avatar group is actually looking forward to their arrival. Not sweating it at all. It seems like such an oversight. The EDF gets the scuffed-up villain treatment - they kidnapped a journalist and some of their members celebrate their kills with unseemly enthusiasm, but the Duncanites are completely normal.

Like, seriously, here's how the campaign section pitches a game where the PCs are outside law-enforcement, sent to resolve the situation on Europa - "They will have to judge the situation carefully, whether they come offering an olive branch to the EDF or bringing its destruction."

Not discussed: giving them a fucking medal and hanging those Duncanite bastards from the 21st-century space equivalent of a yardarm. 

And maybe I'm getting a bit heated here, but what the Duncanites are doing, it would be like if a biotech corporation "had been releasing gengineered food fish into the wild, causing the decline of several natural species by competition for food sources." And the text's sort of casual acceptance of their activities would be like if they brought up the invasive frankenfish as an off-hand reference and then never mentioned them again . . .

Anyway, Transhuman Space as a whole is pretty hard to peg down ideologically. I don't think I've ever encountered a science-fiction setting so enamored with futurism while simultaneously being so reflexively solicitous of the status quo. It's like . . . the politics that eschew "politics." Right libertarianism fares better than most other points of view, but I think that's only because that's what the creators of the game genuinely believe and so they don't really notice it enough to scrub its influence.

It's fascinating, in its own way, but on the balance I have to call it a weakness.

Ukss Contribution: Finpants. They're pants that make you a mechanical mermaid. I trust I need not elaborate further. 

(Kindred of the East) The 1000 Hells

From time to time, maybe about once or twice a year, but more frequently in recent months and with anticipation of even greater frequency in the months to come, I get on my high horse about Orientalism in tabletop rpgs. I talk about it as if I'm some kind of expert and even at my most generous I posture like, "ooh, this is embarrassing, maybe even dangerously immoral, aren't we all glad that we know how to spot this sort of thing nowadays and are too virtuously worldly to succumb to it."

But my all-time favorite rpg is Exalted. 

It's a hypocrisy that I'm aware of. And maybe it's just the spotlight effect of social anxiety talking, but I worry sometimes that a deep, complex, self-reflective discussion of the role of the late 90s/early 00s rpg scene's Orientalism in the construction of Exalted has so far been conspicuous in its absence. It's a way of thinking highly of myself by assuming you all think so highly of me that you are capable of being disappointed by this lapse in intellectual rigor.

Truthfully, though, I'm worried about writing that post, because there's no way to get through it without deeply implicating myself. It's not like Al Qadim or the OA books, where I try to be gentle because I can acknowledge a genuine past interest in the material. The Complete Ninja's Handbook was one of teen-John's prized possessions, and so I don't want to roast it too harshly, but I also feel no need to defend it or apologize for it. I can write it off as an artifact of a less sensitive time, perhaps instrumental in my personal development, but fairly consigned to the naughty part of the library.

I can't do that with Exalted. I love Exalted. It is part of my identity, not even kidding. I can acknowledge (some of) its flaws and rue its obvious missteps, I can even suggest that it be scrubbed to the bone and rebuilt from the skeleton up, but I can never disclaim it. And I can never not be defensive when a non-fan expresses their distaste. 

Now, the relevance of all that to The 1000 Hells (and I normally cut off author citations at four credited authors because at that point the responsibility becomes too dilute and also it takes up a lot of space, but I'm going to make an exception here because of a very pertinent piece of data: Kraig Blackwelder, Tim Clancy, Geoffry C. Grabowski, and Lindsay Woodcock, with Jack Norris and Richard E. Dansky) is that, for reasons that are obvious in retrospect (I didn't look at the author list until just now), this book bears an intermittent but unmistakable resemblance to some of the more outré parts of Exalted.

(I bolded the name of Exalted 1st Edition's line developer, for those in my audience who did not immediately gasp in recognition at the list).

I actually noticed something like this in the Kindred of the East core book. One of the kuei-jin disciplines has a technique called "Flow Like Blood," which is sort of an iconic keystone to Dodge-based builds in every edition of Exalted. Then there's things like the use of the term "The Second Breath." In Kindred of the East, it refers to the damned soul returning to the body after escaping from hell, but in Exalted it refers to the moment of exaltation. Two important figures from the backstory of both games are The Ebon Dragon and the Scarlet Queen/Empress, but they have very different roles. Little stuff like that.

And The 1000 Hells could be dismissed in a similar way. Like, the fact that both games feature "Akuma" - people who sold their souls and surrendered their free will to the lords of hell in exchange for awesome powers - could just be a recycling of terminology. And the similarity between Yama Kings of Yomi (KotE's ultimate demonic figures) and the Yozis (their Exalted counterparts) might be something of a stretch ("Yomi" is a real piece of religious terminology, for one). And the fact that the last, forbidden tome of demonic lore, written about the inevitable triumph of evil in an age of darkness to come is called "The Broken Winged Crane" in both games is probably just an easter egg.

But it's not just these recurring "coincidences." As of The 1000 Hells, but maybe even foreshadowed in the Kindred of the East Companion, the two games . . . kind of have a similar vibe. In my last post, I complained about Dharmas being a poor replacement for Vampire: the Masquerade's clans, explicitly because they were set up in a way that the ideal party has one of each, but what if they weren't a replacement for clans? What if they were a prototype for Exalted's castes?

I open one of these books and see an art piece in the unmistakable style of Melissa Uran, I read about borderline-magical martial arts or an explicit distinction between infernalism (pledging your loyalty to demonic powers) and diabolism (using sorcery to compel demonic servitude), I'm inspired to imagine the epic feats of enlightened elders, who somehow mix virtue, corruption, and power into one unimaginable moral and spiritual dilemma and I think . . . "oh, no, I could be persuaded to love Kindred of the East."

The potential is there. Which is going to make the forthright discussion of Orientalism in Exalted even harder to avoid.

Though perhaps we can avoid it for now, because while The 1000 Hells does have some prototype Exalted vibes, it's probably not going to be the book that sells you on Kindred of the East.

I think the issue here is that the book's content is accurately reflected by its title. It's about hell, with all the grotesquerie that implies. I can't be sure of its religious accuracy (I suspect it owes more to Big Trouble in Little China than the traditional Chinese Diyu, though my main piece of evidence is that it has locations called "The Hell of Being Skinned Alive" and "The Hell of Upside Down Sinners" which are evocative lines from the movie but not reflected in the wikipedia article on this subject), but I can say that it fits into an ongoing rpg tradition of "alternate planes that will probably kill you but where you definitely don't want to go even if you could survive." So you know, if you were really clamoring for a White Wolf Baator sourcebook in the late 90s, The 1000 Hells delivers.

But on the off chance that's not something you're interested in, this book doesn't have a lot to offer. There's a mini-monster manual where we get stats for more than a half-dozen demonic creatures, and that's absolutely something you could use to spice up Earth-bound campaigns. And the various agendas and personalities of the Yama Kings ("king" is gender neutral in this usage, though "Yama queen" explicitly is not) could add some much-needed conflict to the setting's otherwise staid politics. But you're probably not going to want to add "field trip to hell" as a regular part of Kindred of the East's adventure repertoire. 

(Ach! I'm thinking about a campaign here - opposing the machinations of demonic forces in the looming shadow of a coming age of darkness, learning progressively more powerful magic and martial arts until you have the strength to take the fight to hell itself, where the grand champions of the demon princes, raised up from your contemporaries and arrayed with corrupt powers, bestowed by their inhuman patrons, stand ready to test your abilities to their utmost - and, like, yeah, that's an Exalted game).

Aside from the hell stuff, which you're either on board with or you're not, the main flaw of The 1000 Hells is that it continues to be extremely weird that "Asia of Darkness" is a self-contained subsetting. Here's a couple of interesting facts for you:

The Yama Kings "found that none of the realms of the spirits of the western lands was accessible to them" and "they could not affect the western world in any way."

But also, if you're a kuei-jin in the market to sell your soul, you should be aware that "the entities that the Nephandi of the West consort with are considerably different from the Yama Kings of the East."

Now, just as a reminder, the Nephandi worship powers that exist beyond the Horizon, the mystical barrier roughly coterminous with the solar system's asteroid belt, that separates the knowable parts of the Umbra (and already "knowable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting) from the primordial chaos of the Deep Umbra. Great Old Ones, basically. So the implication is somehow that these beings of the outer darkness, for whom the Earth is naught but a pale blue dot, can distinguish, with their baleful gaze that hates and envies all light and life, between the parts of the globe that are Asia and the parts that are not.

Or perhaps just as bad, that the Celestial Bureaucracy, which governs all matters under heaven, just sort of gives up when it reaches the nebulous borders of "Asia." The Yama Kings can definitely affect spirits in India, but if we go west from there, where's the line? Pakistan? (Actually pretty unlikely, because we will find in the Year of the Reckoning that the kuei-jin can be very active in Bangladesh). Afghanistan? Iran? Probably no farther west than that. And going north, the central Asian republics are kind of iffy, though they've been effectively forgotten by both Asia of Darkness and the rest of the line. But then you start getting to Russia and that definitely feels out-of-bounds. Are there Siberian kuei-jin? What border do I have to cross to exit the Yama Kings' jurisdiction?

I once described the late-90s approach to Asian-inspired fantasy as "a mental forcefield," and that actually seems pretty apt here. What Kindred of the East is doing is "Asia as genre," basically. Despite myself, or perhaps because I recognize that my favorite game is at least a little (and potentially very) guilty of doing the same thing, I think there's a possibility that a standalone Kindred of the East, which extends its cosmology to the whole world and lets heaven rule everything under heaven, could actually work. Maybe "Asia as genre" isn't so bad if you're doing it in rural Arizona, circa 1999, and the vibe is "Hong Kong cinema makes an awesomely inaccurate western." But to do it in the existing World of Darkness? Where you're now forced to racially segregate the demons of hell?

I think that is, genuinely, offensive.

Ukss Contribution: But probably not directly offensive enough to trigger my temporarily strict standards for what qualifies for exclusion from Ukss. 

And I'll admit to a conflict of interest here, because this book has a subsetting that I think could legitimately be spun-off from Asia of Darkness the same way Asia of Darkness should have been spun-off from the WoD. It's called "The Wicked City" and it's the best kind of Mad-libs-style rpg gibberish. Here's the pitch:

Cyberpunk. Demon. Ninja. Afterlife.

They should have sent a fucking poet. Chief among the torments of hell is economic precarity. Literally.

"Those victims who show the capacity to return to the same dull position they held in life - textbook salesman, telemarketer, burger-flipper, export agent - do so, day after day and week after week, with no hope of improving their lot. Such prisoners are give enough salary to barely cover rent, so they can almost support themselves while enduring the agonies of hell . . ."

And then, in the streets, shadowed by the looming high-rises, there are gangs of outcast demons and damned souls who have blasphemous cybernetic implants and serve to advance the Yama King's grand design of immiserating the poor, even as they ostensibly rebel from his rule.

Someone needs to make this rpg. Like, yesterday.

I'm far too busy to do it myself, but I think the least I can do is tweak the presentation of Ukss' infernal courts to make it fit.

(GURPS: Transhuman Space) Orbital Decay

 Sometimes, people really don't think things through. Would Orbital Decay (Patrick Sweeney) be a better adventure and better introduction to the Transhuman Space setting if it leaned into its potential to be a comedy of errors? Maybe, maybe not, but there's a strong argument to be made that there is less of a bright line between sci-fi horror and farce than one might otherwise expect.

Oops. Our biotech corporation did a teensy-weensy bit of unethical genetic engineering in our second-hand space station, far away from the legal oversight of Earthbound authorities. And oops. A tiny little mistake in our super-soldier virus led to it being contagious through biting. And gosh darn it, wouldn't you know, that's the same transmission vector as our (still work-in-progress, remember) depression-causing crowd control virus that unfortunately makes people fly into a berserk rage instead of its intended effect. And you're never going to believe it, but both viruses, along with our flesh-eating nanovirus, somehow managed to escape containment. Why, if you were to model this scenario with some sort of generic universal roleplaying system, you could probably just use the stats for supernatural fantasy zombies for the affected personnel. Funny how that works out.

Oh well, there's obviously only one thing to do - send a group of mercenaries up to investigate the out-of-contact space station. Then, naturally, we'll double-cross the mercenaries by sending a ruthless spy disguised as a company representative. And of course, we'll double-cross the spy by secretly installing a puppet implant that allows her body to be controlled by an AI program. And, should some series of implausible events happen where the shuttle pilot crashes the transport rocket into the station in a misguided attempt to stop the viruses from spreading (I guess she thinks that they'll burn up in the atmosphere rather than partially survive in air pockets in the coolest part of the wreckage and subsequently infect terrestrial investigators), I should think it goes without saying that we'll betray the AI by refusing to send a rescue vessel. It's the perfect plan. The only thing that could possibly thwart us is if terrorists from Mars show up at the last minute, lured by the rocket pilot's quarantine broadcast, under the inexplicable assumption that a space station where at least one deadly bioweapon escaped containment is the perfect place to find an easily weaponizable virus. But surely, they would not risk their lives and health on the long-shot bet that we, like, had some extra viruses that were still in containment. Why, if that happened, the surviving mercenaries could activate the station's self-destruct system and fly away on the terrorists' spaceship, potentially exposing our perfidy to the world at large. . . eh, fuck it. Worst comes to worst, we'll give 'em like $5000 or something. It'll be fine.

Okay, so I committed to the bit longer than was entirely wise, but really, Orbital Decay is a perfectly serviceable adventure. Maybe sometimes people who fail to entirely think things through are the source of horror. You never get eaten by biopunk zombies when things are going well. I'd say it's only real flaw is that, as a GURPS: Transhuman Space adventure, it doesn't do all that much with transhumanism. I guess the puppet implant and the supersoldier count in that regard, but it's kind of detail on background. With the company spy, the PCs may defeat her too early or too late and her implant never comes up. And it's an open question whether the PCs are going to want to do the detective work to find out about the virus' backstory while they're actively being attacked by zombies. I mean, biotech horror in space is plenty interesting on its own, but it barely scratches the surface of what Trannshuman Space can do. 

Maybe you could rework things a bit. The PCs are brought in by the Martian police, to help solve the theft of an infomorph ghost from long-term storage. The lead suspects are Negative Growth (the anti-terraforming terrorists who conveniently show up in the third act to give the PCs a way off the station), who may have been interested in this particular intelligence because it was the most recent back-up of a scientist who was rumored to be working on experimental bioweapons. But it wasn't actually a theft, it was a defection, because the infomorph was remotely activated by the scientist, who could think of no other way to evade the Terrel-Dieskau corporation's communications blockade than to commit suicide and then the terrorists, the corporate agents, and the PCs all converge on this derelict station that has been taken over by biopunk zombies . . . 

I don't know. It needs some work, I'll admit. I guess it speaks well for the adventure that there is enough of a base to build off of. In true GURPS fashion, there are some sidebars talking about how to adapt Orbital Decay for other genres and settings, so I can't be entirely mad at it for not being hyper-specific. Specificity is kind of the antithesis to the GURPS ethos.

Overall, I'd say "sure, okay." I think a more comic, satirical interpretation of the adventure's events would do better for a cyberpunk story, and that's probably the most interesting way to run the adventure, but GURPS: Transhuman Space is explicitly "cyberpunk without the punk," so there's no great harm in running it completely straight.

Ukss Contribution: My favorite thing about this adventure is the Terrel-Dieskau corporation's baroquely layered treachery. There's just this long ladder of people who are absolutely shocked that the people on the next rung found them expendable. It's almost enough to take the sting out of the PCs getting betrayed (I'd actually put them at the second rung, and they really should have been expecting it, considering their mission is transparently aimed at betraying the scientists and technicians aboard the space station).

But is that a setting element? Is it a trait you can give to an organization or a location? Would it not feel extremely goofy in practice? I guess we'll just have to find out.

Kindred of the East Companion

It is perhaps poetic that Kindred of the East's greatest flaws all seem to stem from its original sin. As I read Kindred of the East Companion and I was struck by how utterly disconnected it all was from anything I'd previously given a shit about, by the shallowness of its politics and philosophy, by the overall unpleasantness of the Kindred (kin-jin) vs Kuei-jin (Cathayan) narrative.

I can't help but think this is all happening because Asia of Darkness is supposed to be "exotic." We can't go in knowing anything about what to expect, so everything has to be rebuilt from scratch, meaning the unfamiliar new factions and conflicts have approximately half a book of development behind them. And because White Wolf can't do rules or setting updates without metaplot explanations, it's all justified in-setting by the Eternal Vampire Race War.

But I think maybe the creators of Kindred of the East might have succumbed to their own Orientalist branding. Call it a hunch, but some parts of this book feel like the writers were trying to create something that felt exotic to themselves. It's the only explanation I can think of for why, when tasked with making a parallel knockoff of their popular game, Vampire: the Masquerade, they got the fundamental building blocks entirely wrong.

See, Vampire: the Masquerade had a gameplay loop embedded directly into the structure of the setting. The politics of the setting revolve around a conflict between two incompatible sects with mutually opposed goals - the status-quo-preserving Camarilla and the recklessly millenarian Sabbat - and each were credibly global threats. You could set a game in the biggest Camarilla stronghold in the world and "some Sabbat assholes show up to cause trouble" is a viable plot. But also, the sectarian conflict could generate internal conflicts - like, someone who wants to become powerful within the Sabbat vs someone who wants to make the Sabbat as a whole more powerful vs characters who are only part of the Sabbat because they were victims of its power.

And then, at a narrower taxonomic level, you got the clans. Which are like character classes that are not strictly voluntary. So there's clan vs clan conflict, advancement in the clan conflict, clan vs sect conflict, clan advancement in the sect conflict, and players can never entirely escape these jokers for the same reason it can be so difficult to escape your family - they made you what you are, and you were never in a position to consent to the act until long after the fact. 

Finally, the narrowest level - city politics. All of the above is reified through the expedient of some dude and his cronies. That's the scope and scale of politics. Somebody is talking shit about you at Elysium and it can be a proxy for sect or clan issues, but it's also entirely possible that you just don't like each other.

Vampire: the Masquerade may not be my favorite game, but there's no denying it has an airtight formula for stirring up rpg-type shit at the gaming table. This is catnip for theater kids. So it's unclear why Kindred of the East takes the formula and tosses it out the fucking window.

It's got a sort of "splat and local government" dynamic, but the only source of conflict seems to come from mortal nationalism.

At the highest level of kuei-jin organization is the Court and a court is like . . . a local culture. Like, you set the game in Changan and that's Jade Court territory and it's just . . . a scholarly vibe. It's somehow allied with the rest of the Five August Courts of the Quincunx, so there's no real court vs court conflict, but it also means that its culture feels like a specialist function of an ill-defined larger organization (the Quincunx, presumably, though I assume that it's only called that because its an alliance of five courts) that . . . devotes itself to conservative Chinese imperialism?

There are non-Quincunx courts, and it's clear that the Quincunx doesn't like or respect them (and that the feeling is mutual), but it's unclear what they would even fight over. The Blood Court is in Beijing and the Golden Court is in a grab-bag of Southeast Asian countries, and never the twain shall meet ("No other court can approach the Golden Courts' range of cultures and it's questionable whether the Chinese Courts would even want to").

It's not that there's nothing to do. There are plots here - continuing to fight WW2 decades after the fact, endlessly relitigate the Meiji Restoration, become a fashion pervert for God, over the dead bodies of those who would try to stop you - but those are incidental to the Court structure, rather than an intrinsic part of it.

And somehow, the character splats are even worse. The dharmas are like character classes that are voluntary (so voluntary, in fact, that people can and do change dharma canonically and there's even a high-tier power that forces someone to do so) and the ideal party composition is exactly one of each. So I think there's an argument that it might be kind of fun to play a Devil Tiger or Thousand Whisper (et al) and have their distinct aesthetics/philosophies inform your character, but each one is a personal path. I can imagine a clash of personalities between characters of different dharmas, but I can't foresee any situation where a dharma would lead to divided loyalties. They are explicitly supposed to complement each other and make the unit stronger from diversity. The closest WoD counterpart is Werewolf: the Apocalypse's auspices (moon phase divisions).

Actually, that's a pretty good analogy. Kindred of the East is like Werewolf: the Apocalypse without the Tribes and without the ongoing futile war against the Wyrm. It's unclear who it's even for . . .

Oh, wait, I think the Kindred of the East Companion might have provided a helpful picture:

Though, now that I put it that way, there may be more overlap between me and the average Kindred of the East fan than it's comfortable to admit.

Ukss Contribution: So there is a certain degree of racial chauvinism in this book, but I can't quite pin down its motives or origin, because it mostly takes the form of an absolute conviction that the Kuei-jin totally outclass the Kindred. Is this an in-character bias or the opinion of the authors? I can't tell.

And because I can't tell, and because I wouldn't know what to make of it even if I could, I'm going to include Kindred of the East Companion in Ukss. However, I'm going with something abstract.

The Japanese and Chinese vampires in Shanghai continue to fight each other and it's explicitly due to lingering bad blood (and if you think that's a pun, you're wrong, Kuei-jin don't drink blood, they consume chi) over WW2. In real world terms, it's kind of grim to think about, but it is a genuinely interesting idea in vampire fiction - vampires continuing a war from their mortal days, one that is entirely unrelated to vampire nonsense, even after the living belligerents have been at peace for decades.

I think Ukss could have a conflict like that.

(Star Wars Saga Edition) Scavenger's Guide to Droids

 For once, the Star Wars Expanded Universe's signature move - taking the sole on-screen personality trait or behavior of a minor character and making it the defining characteristic of their whole existence/planetary civilization - actually works pretty well. Scavenger's Guide to Droids (Rodney Thomson, Sterling Hershey, Patrick Stutzman, Robert Wieland) is about machines that were deliberately manufactured for a particular purpose, and so it makes sense that the weird eyeball thing that came out of the wall at Jabba's palace to greet R2-D2 and C-3PO was, in fact, a TT-8L Gatekeeper Droid. It would be very strange worldbuilding indeed if that thing was bespoke. Or if it was part of a line of "eyeball-on-a-stalk" sentient machines and it just happened to choose to work in organized crime, as a first line of security vetting potential intruders.  I never, not for a moment, believed that the Bothans were characteristically spies or that Greedo, the bounty hunter shot by Han Solo (first, obviously) was part of a species that placed a high cultural value on hunting, but I definitely believe that the weird eyeball thing was built for gatekeeping.

Which I guess means that Scavenger's Guide to Droids is the least cringe SWSE supplement I've ever read. The lore generally boils down to "this machine was built to do the thing we saw it do," repeated close to 50 times, but since there's a lot of Star Wars media I've never seen, I actually found it generally pretty interesting. There's a fancy-pants fencing instructor droid. A droid built exclusively to work at banks. The weird animatronic from Disney's Star Tours ride canonically exists and is a pilot/tour guide bot that's notoriously prone to exactly the sort of malfunction that appeared in the ride's plot. There's a secretary droid that has a creepy skeletal face like something dredged from the depths of nightmare. There's enough here to distract from the fact that every battledroid has the exact same backstory.

The biggest flaw with Scavenger's Guide to Droids as a book is that each droid entry is accompanied by 1-3 "modification" suggestions that are universally among the dullest shit I've read for the blog thus far. Like, sometimes they have little tidbits of lore, and on the balance it's interesting to know that people in the Star Wars universe are hacking the hell out of their tech, but each one is something you could change the droid into and the bulk of the text is devoted to things like alternate feat suggestions or the DC of the skill check necessary to take out one part and swap it with another.

Did you know, if you start with a GY-1 Information Analysis Droid, reprogram its operating system, and remove its arms and legs, you can turn it into a navigation-assisting astromech droid like what R2-D2 does for Luke's X-wing? It's true. And if you put a spinning blade on its head, you could make it a food processor too. 

So, anyway, reading 100+ of those barely-justified reskins was kind of a drag. But it wasn't quite enough to ruin what was, essentially, a monster book. And the adventure hooks, narrated by one of four specific commentator NPCs, that accompanied each entry, were a welcome addition to the format. The titular scavengers never quite popped as individual characters, but I think, if they were given a little bit more room to develop (say, by getting rid of some superfluous, repetitive text somewhere else in the book), they could have.

Which brings us at last to an issue I'm not quite sure how to address. But address it I must, because it takes up a significant minority of the book's lore. . . droids are kind of enslaved. 

"Droids can be more than just equipment. They can be individuals."

"They are machines that feel."

And yet, so much of the book is about the routine practice of wiping their memories to prevent them from developing too much of an individual personality. Of fitting them with restraining bolts so they don't run away. Which they will do, if their owners mistreat them.

The book talks about a droid general strike that brings a planet to its knees. A casino clerk bot known as "The Saint of Droids" because it ensures that droids wagered by desperate gamblers gain responsible new owners. A black market merchant that helps abused droids escape their owners and disappear in the wider galaxy. A secret droid organization that believes the time for peaceful resistance has passed and has taken up armed direct action against the practice of droid ownership.

It's not subtle. 

And it puts me in a terrible spot. Because I find the philosophical speculation about how to determine whether a machine qualifies as "intelligent" or "conscious" to be absolutely fascinating (and I have definite opinions on this subject, some of which may shock you), but in the context of a lighthearted action-adventure yarn, to have characters which blur the line between "person" and "property" strikes me as . . . somewhat irresponsible.

Like how am I supposed to deal with the fact that this book depicts a situation clearly modeled on the Underground Railroad? I feel dirty even bringing it up, because the real Underground Railroad was one of history's bravest resistance movements, risking life and limb to liberate the innocent from a tyranny as total and degrading as any humanity has ever known and the Star Wars droid freedom pipeline is just getting that stupid, inexplicably be-legged GONK-GONK power droid away from the incorrectly-programmed EV-series Supervisor Droid ("the motivators originally planned for the EV-series were accidentally swapped with ones meant to be installed in torture droids") that hung out in Jabba's basement. And I'm not sure whether I'm meant to react to the goofiness of Star Wars' kid-friendly robot slavery with a shrug and a chuckle, or if I'm meant to ramp up the drama here and tell a sweeping sci-fi epic about the endemic abuse of these clearly sentient beings.

Either option is uncomfortable in very different ways.

Overall, though, I enjoyed Scavenger's Guide to Droids. It's maybe not a sterling recommendation that the book gave me a whole lot to deliberately not think about, but I like droids. They're cute. They're funny. They're transparently toy-selling mascot characters. And Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without them.

Ukss Contribution: As much as I rag on the Extended Universe for being cheesy, it can be legitimately funny and awesome at times. I don't know for sure whether the following idea was borrowed from some novel or comic book or whether it was specifically invented for Scavenger's Guide to Droids, but the more I think about it, the more it delights me.

One of the suggested modifications for the FLTCH-Series Battle Droid would make it into a Mercenary Rental Unit. A simple enough concept, but the deeper you get into the weeds of this idea, the more wildly satirical this thing has to be. Just off the bat, if the rental period runs out mid-battle, you've got to give it more money, at surge-pricing rates, no less. But also, they make you pay a damage deposit before they let you rent one. 

And . . . h-how? What?! You're charging a damage deposit on a piece of technology whose entire purpose is to get shot at by lasers. The economics of this transaction make no sense whatsoever.

But don't mistake the nature of my discourse here. It may seem like I'm poking holes in the concept, but there's a difference between a plot hole you complain about and a complaint you build a plot around. Imagine my incredulity directed not towards the authors of the book, but towards the manager of the Mercenary Droid Rental business.

In that context, this is another thing that makes me go, "Sigh . . . Capitalism." And I'll admit, I'm a sucker for it every time.

Kindred of the East

In our modern, woke rpg landscape, Kindred of the East has a reputation for just being the worst kind of sloppy cultural appropriation. A total whiff when it comes to representing East Asian folklore in an urban fantasy setting, a polyglot mess that demonstrates a colonizer's arrogance in its indifference to authentic details. And lest it seem like I'm reading White Wolf for filth right now, let me clarify - that's not my opinion. That's the opinion I feel like I should have, based on the work done by people like the Asians Represent podcast. I went into this book with my memory of having read it 20 years ago, a vague emotional ambivalence about collecting the whole series (I don't know what to say about this, except that there was a period where I was addicted to buying whole sets, and this one was really easy to collect. All of them except the Dhampir book and Demon Hunter X are going to be new to me), and the knowledge that it made some critics I really respect really angry.

However, in the interest of full disclosure, I didn't notice all that much wrong with it. Don't get me wrong, I picked up on some things that were totally out of pocket. I cringed with my whole body when the book referred to its titular vampires as "the inscrutable Cathayan." And I could fill a post just with the Orientalist tropes that I, John Frazer, personally recognized (the most obvious of which is just the repeated use of the word "Oriental,") but all of those observations would be general observations. Things that would be racist even if the book was super faithful to the source material. Even I know you can't say shit like: "Westerners have often spoken of Asia's exoticism, its alien ways and rules. In the World of Darkness, they are correct. . ."

But that thing about "Kuei-jin" being an artless polyglot portmanteau that would sound conspicuously strange, to the point of unintelligibility, to speakers of both source languages . . . that's something I only know by reputation. To me, it's just a nonsense sound that refers exclusively to this particular group of weird guys. And I'm sure that this is not an isolated phenomenon. I came into this with basically no prior knowledge of the ostensible subject matter - Asian vampire mythology - and so I have no way of distinguishing between "they got this laughably, insultingly wrong" and "oh, actually I have to give them credit for this."

So I'm not even going to try. Like, I'm pretty sure the bit about the "Yin world" and "Yang world" is nonsense, but only because these are transparently just new, Asian-sounding names for the Shadowlands and the Umbra. But that seems like sort of an edge case in cultural appropriation to me. If you've already got a weird, janky metaphysics that was entirely invented for your game, and you've hitherto applied it willy-nilly to the entire world, with no more than token attempts to integrate it with any real-world folklore, then is it really such a crime to completely mangle the myths of a new region to get it to fit in? White Wolf's spirit world can't possibly be any less faithful to Buddhism than it is to Christianity, so maybe it's just putting the "fantasy" into "urban fantasy?"

I really don't know. Same goes for its unflattering depictions of Shanghai and Bangkok. There's a reason I call this "The World of Darkness problem." I imagine there would be something vaguely insulting about looking your hometown up in the gloomy, pessimistic horror-movie world and discovering that they made it an exception to the overall vibe. It's like no, damnit! I want to be afraid of the shadowed alleys because people routinely go missing and the police are indifferent to their fate. If the creature that ate me isn't getting away with it because of endemic societal violence and the institutional corruption of those who claim to protect me, then what game are we even playing?

That said, it's weird that they refer to sex trafficking as "white slavery." Twice. I can't quite wrap my head around it. Maybe it's some sort of 90s aspirational color-blindness? Why, the good post-racial folks at White Wolf are cosmopolitan citizens of the world who believe white slavery can happen to anyone, regardless of skin color. It certain feels to me like a term that was used to convey a feeling, divorced from its etymology, but in this case the etymology is, like, super gross. This particular combination of words only exists to distinguish slavery that happens to white people from the broader phenomenon of slavery. It was created and used by people who would shrug at slavery and get outraged by white slavery. To repurpose the word to refer to specifically sex slavery, regardless of the race of the victims . . . it really seems like an outgrowth of the pathological sexual anxiety that accompanies white supremacy. Just don't do it, people.

All-in-all, I'm kind of in a weird place, regarding Kindred of the East. I can see that it is Orientalist in its very conception, and my knowledge of the broader context of the World of Darkness and the compromises it makes to fit in the same world as Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, and Changeling make it more problematic, rather than less. (I mean, is it just me or are the words "shen," referring collectively to all supernatural creatures in Asia, and "hsien," referring specifically to Asian changelings," just alternate romanizations for the same word?) But if I ignore all that and just contemplate it as a standalone fantasy rpg about hellbound sinners returned to a parody of life to immiserate the living, as an alternative, rather than a supplement to Vampire: the Masquerade . . . I'm stymied by my own incalculable ignorance.

See, as a game, Kindred of the East is both too much and not enough. It's overloaded with systems. You've got basically three different types of magic points, all tied to a different personality mechanic, and each used to power a different category of special power, but with just enough wiggle room that the resource-juggling minigame could potentially be strategically interesting . . . assuming it didn't get bogged down in play. And that complex mechanical chassis, it's too much for a game about charismatic sinners talking to each other.

Superheroes with fangs, however . . . Well, it's not enough for that. To run those sorts of games, the book needs a lot more - weird locations, wild powers, strange creatures, and other forms of cool shit to see. 

And this is where my knowledge fails me. Because what we're talking about is genre and White Wolf is just completely mushy about it. Within just a couple of pages, the Storyteller chapter claims "Kuei-jin don't give a damn about all that overwrought angst-ridden bullshit" and caution us "It's your game, but hopefully you won't cheapen it with super-powered blood brawls."

Got it? Not angst-driven personal horror or spectacle-driven action horror, but some secret third thing that threads the needle without doing anything 1998 White Wolf was too cool and jaded to respect. And when I contemplate the mystery of what that third thing can be, my reaction is "wait, does China have its own storytelling tradition of fantasy horror, with its own characteristic tropes and themes? Probably. Someone should base an rpg on that."

I know in my heart, that that's the answer. Chinese horror is the lens through which Kindred of the East should be judged. And I'm woefully unqualified to do it. My gut tells me the game misses its mark, because the genre trappings I do recognize are just White Wolf's usual brand of nonsense, done more racistly than usual, but that's just a supposition. 

I will give White Wolf this one sliver of credit, though. A lot of the discourse around cultural appropriation focuses on "respectful depictions," and in a camp-driven genre like horror, I think that misses the mark. Representation can (in my opinion) take the form of an . . . invitation to participate. "Look at us, having the time of our lives rolling around in this trash pile! C'mon, grab your garbage and get in here!"

So when it comes to moving beyond a eurocentric World of Darkness, I think people can forget that you're not aiming for a good depiction, you're aiming for trash. And here is where, out of an abundance of caution, I have to stop giving White Wolf credit (though I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate me "defending" them in this manner, regardless). Since the goal is to create something trashy, everything you choose to include becomes trashy by association. Even when working in your native culture, this is a line you have to walk carefully. Like, there are certain ideas that can survive being trashy (for example - the myriad depictions of sinister or unseemly angels in genre fiction) and certain ideas where people will never forgive you for fucking around (for example, almost none of the aforementioned genre fiction dares to muss up the spotless reputation of Jesus Christ). 

So how much more difficult must this line be to walk in a foreign culture? How much extra care must you take?

I may not specifically know which aspects of Kindred of the East were the gross kind of objectification and which aspects were the hot kind of objectification, but I know White Wolf well enough to know that they absolutely did not take the extra care to make that distinction on my behalf.

Ukss Contribution: Ooh, this is a tough one. In all this talk of cultural appropriation and load-bearing Orientalism, let's not forget one very important, salient detail - I own a complete collection of Kindred of the East. Nowadays, I know enough about racial politics to find this deeply embarrassing, but in the early 2000s, I thought it was . . . kind of cool, if not exactly my thing. And, as recently as 2020, I was buying these books without any thought to the broader political implications.

So I'm not prepared to get high and mighty here. I am elbow deep in the shit. Whatever is wrong with these books, I'm at least a little bit complicit.

In the case of the Kindred of the East core, I think its greatest sin can be summed up with the line:

"The mood of Kindred of the East is one of exoticism."

Now, that's a textbook no-no, so I'm not going to claim that the book is entirely non-evil (or even non-evil on balance), but the particular crime here is an enthusiasm that is reckless in its expression. It's not hatred, not contempt. The book does imply that Asians have a different variety of soul than Europeans, but I'm pretty sure it's not meant to be better or worse, so much as it's meant to play into the newly conceived personality-resource mechanics. So that's where I'm going to draw the line, for the rest of the series going forward. If a book merely indulges in exoticism, I'm going to include it in Ukss, but if I get even a whiff of an implication that it's saying Europeans are superior, it's out. 

With that in mind, my choice is pretty abstract. It's said that Kuei-jin care deeply about the appointment and condition of their graves, which I think is a pretty charming trait for undead to have. Maybe the Ukss version is a bit cozier than the World of Darkness version, but it's still going to be a whole thing.