The Last Straw

That's a fairly dramatic blog post title, I'll admit, but today I'm talking about the recently released Vampire: the Masquerade 5th edition pre-alpha open playtest packet scenario "The Last Night."  Yeah, that was a mouthful.

Up until this morning, I was focused on the rules portion of the open playtest.  Then I stumbled upon +Erik Tenkar's blog post here.

Besides being really long and Vampire: the Masquerade meets Zero Dark Thirty, it includes some pretty awful stuff.  Hey, this is Venger you're talking to.  I get it.  I'm all for edgy and pushing boundaries, but I personally find this objectionable in a way that just makes me not want to play.

There's a woman with a baby, a pregnant woman, dead teenagers, and a whole building full of refugee orphans.  All of them provided with notes for vampires to feed upon.

One of the pre-generated characters loves to feed off of and have sex with "the young," meaning young vampires.  Followed by, "Ventrue feeding restrictions: you only feed off children and very young teenagers."  Yeah, those are instructions on how to run the player-character, not just some debased NPC villain.

Wow, gross!  And this is an introductory playtest scenario... WTF?!?  Where do they go from here?  The PCs are expected to run a child sex trafficking operation in order to fund terrorism?  Dear God!

As Tenkar asserted, this might appeal to pedophiles and fucked up individuals who have no issues whatsoever with child endangerment and infanticide, but I'm definitely out.

This means that going forward, my vampire RPG design will have nothing to do with White Wolf, Vampire: the Masquerade, Vampire: the Requiem, and any and all World of Darkness products.  I want to differentiate what I'm doing with what they're doing in the strongest possible terms.

I currently have a couple items still on my plate, but come August I should have something to show you guys.

Venger As'Nas Satanis
High Priest of Kort'thalis Publishing