This review probably makes a lot more sense if the reader is already familiar with White Wolf's other products.
In short, I think the game is usable as it is for light-hearted fun, and after a lot of work, for a real Asian game. This is not a balanced review; I concentrate mostly on the points that I found most problematic.
Introduction
The first chapter of the book has the traditional notes about Theme and Mood, Suggested Reading and things like that. Nitpickers might have fun with the Lexicon, but I'm not going to go there.
"Balance and imbalance are the themes of this book. The imbalance of the Kuei-jin reflects the imbalance within the Middle Kingdom and the larger imbalance between East and West. The axis between matter and spirit turns increasingly askew, the Kuei-jin courts bicker and fight among themselves, and the Wheel of Ages itself spins at an ever more rapid pace," says the book on page 13.
We are expected to take as given the idea of an imbalance between East and West, since it's not really explained. Although this pairing conjures indistinct ideas of conflict, upon closer examination I failed to understand what the imbalance was about. Economic imbalance? Cultural imbalance? Spiritual or religious imbalance? Military imbalance? There certainly exists an imbalance in the power levels of eastern and western vampires, but I don't think this was the idea behind the pronouncement above. The imablance in the Middle Kingdom is likewise left vague.
In the game, this theme of imbalance manifests most of all in rule mechanics. The kuei-jin are most divided of all White Wolf's creations. Their soul is divided into a good and a bad part and their body into Yin and Yang attributes. They have four different sorts of points they may spend (Yin, Yang, Demon Chi and Willpower). Naturally, every attribute may be raised with experience and has its own powers and uses.
"Permanent Yin and Yang serve as rough measures of a character's personality," says the book (page 88).
In addition to these, each character has four different states of being: normal, fire soul (frenzy), wave soul (panic) and shadow soul (where the bad soul takes over). I've found that in game play it's not conductive to roleplaying to have to continually roll for frenzy and shadow soul and whatever and to build the character's personality on how many points he has on different parts of his soul, rather than the kind of things human personality is usually composed of, like life experience.
"The mood of Kindred of the East is one of exoticism, of a detour into lands and cultures unknown to western Kindred." (page 13) One of the more annoying parts of the book is indeed the constant reference to Western Kindred, somewhat understandable considering that this is a Vampire supplement. Still, one of the basic assumptions of the book is that a lot of younger eastern vampires want to emulate the society and ways of the Western Kindred.
This is a curious trend. Eastern vampires wanting to emulate Western mortal culture would be easy to understand, since this would be based on a real-life phenomenon. Kindred culture, on the other hand, is in no way cool. The basic newly born kuei-jin is a lot more powerful than the average new Cainite. He can enter the spirit worlds and communicate freely with their residents, something that the Kindred are unable to do.
The book holds vague notions of Western vampire freedom as the carrots the kui-jin are after, but I fail to see how the Camarilla is less stratified than the Vampire Courts of Asia, to say nothing of the Sabbat with its military organization. Naturally, every example of an "official" or typical opinion among the kui-jin of the Kindred is along the lines of "Ants in the path of the coming flood." (page 71) The ideas of the fans of Western vampire society are left unexplained. Naturally, the most obvious explanation, that the Kuei-jin are victims of Camarilla and Sabbat propaganda, is left unexplored.
The officially set mood of exoticism is a problematic one. China may be exotic to me, but it certainly is not to my character who is a native. This makes the mood of exoticism paradoxical, for then it should exist only outside the in-game experience. (Of course, a Han vampire could feel very exotic in the crater fields of Cambodia, but I doubt that was what the designer had in mind.)
"Following World War II, however, Asian vampires permuted the term to 'Kuei-jin.' By grafting a Japanese suffix to a Chinese word, the Kuei-jin hope to foster the illusion of unity between the Middle Kingdom's two most powerful clusters of vampires," says the book at page 10.
I mean, is this stupid or what? It's bad enough that the name is inane, the explanation is even more so. The text clearly implies that somebody or some people are responsible for coming up with this thing. Perhaps the leaders of the great vampire community in Beijing? The venerable immortals conferring in the Forbidden City, dreaming of grafted suffixes?
Somehow I doubt we ever get to hear about how the Camarilla, concerned about Cainite unity, introduces Les Kindred as the new term for vampire.
Kindred of the East got extra points from my players for making the "Oriental" term for Torpor "Little Death" (=la pêtit morte), more commonly understood as a metaphor for orgasm.
The Suggested Resources -section of Kindred of the East is very revealing. In Books, it recommends several basic philosophical or religious texts (the Tao of Pooh; the Book of Five Rings; Zen Flesh, Zen Bones; the Illustrated World's Religions; the Analects of Confucius; the Dhammapada; the Art of War), some western prose set in ancient China, travel books and a couple of general texts on historical China and India.
This is it. Although the content has led me to believe otherwise, I hope that the book wasn't written solely based on this. Where are the reference works on modern Asia? How about something covering Thailand, Cambodia or Mongolia? Or even Japan? Perhaps even one book about Asian vampire myths? I've found that it's all well and good to read the basic texts, but they ain't worth nothing if the cultural context is unclear.
It's like giving someone who wants to understand America the Bible and Lonely Planet USA to start with.
The section continues to Movies. The first thing that strikes me as odd is that the movie list is twice as long as the book list. Visual reference is all well and good, but I've found that textbooks are generally more useful if I want to understand a foreign culture. Most of the obvious classics of Asia-related cinema are included, but there are a lot of rather pointless choices as well. It goes without saying that the selection seems to be built on what you might find in the average video rental. The amount of cheese on the list belies the question why are many of the actually good Asian movies omitted. What about Takeshi Kitano or Takashi Miike? Or any of the new wave Korean movies? Including movies like Shogun Assassin and excluding movies like these again raises suspicions about how deeply the authors of the game bothered to research.
The section Other Cool Stuff features a computer game and a single album, Peter Gabriel's Passion, presumably the only album evokative of Asia the authors could find.
Game mechanics
The game mechanics used in Kindred of the East are completely devoid of innovation. Systems featured in earlier WoD-games are recycled, and the mechanics build almost solely on earlier WW stuff, with only cosmetic flourishes to give the material an "eastern" feel.
The concept of Dharma is an amalgam of Vampire's Generation and Paths of Enlightenment with a flourish of Mage's Arete thrown in.
The individual Dharma paths seem to have equally flimsy origins:
The Howl of the Devil Tiger -Dharma preaches embracing one's dark side. It may be considered something of an innovation that although this kind of doctrine is featured in every WW game, KotE is the only one where it is a basic option for protagonists. Flashes of Sabbat, this is the violence is fun path.
The Way of the Resplendent Crane is unique among the Dharmas in that it seems to have some basis in actual Eastern thought, in this case Confucianism.
The Song of the Shadow is the mandatory bone thrown to the Goths. An amalgam of the Tzimisce and Cappadocians.
The Path of a Thousand Whispers has its followers continually creating and assuming new personalities and discarding the old. I have no idea where the roots of this one are. Among the concepts suggested for the Dharma are lunatic, wanderer and enigmatic stranger, all non-characters. I have trouble seeing what kind of people see this kind of lifestyle as the path to wholeness after being reborn, except for the insane.
The Dance of the Trashing Dragon is the obligatory sex-kitten Dharma. Hedonism, lust, impulse, hunger. Path of the Cathari, Cult of Ecstasy.
I would have thought that Eastern vampires would have dogmas based on eastern philosophical systems, but then again we wouldn't have had sexy Asian girls "go naked," "shameless, impulsive, lusty," voracious for fucking and human flesh.
Every Cathayan comes back from the dead as a mindless, ravenous beast called Chih-mei. This may indeed be one of the game's few original ideas, for I can't for the moment think of any other WW book in which this idea had already been used. The concept is obvious, but by now I've learned to be grateful for small things.
The Cathayans are organized in Sabbat packs, with the Vaulderie and everything. Only the pack is called Wu and the Vaulderie guanxi, which is Chinese and means connections and has strong connotations of graft and corruption. Wu means five, and every Wu has to have five members.
Another original idea is that the Cathayans, who ingest life energy from humans, may drink either yin (negative) or yang (positive) energy. Naturally, this is KotE's version of Blood Points / Gnosis / Quintessence / Pathos / Glamour.
Additional flavor is granted by the concept of Direction. Each character has one, and it supposedly determines his way in life. The funny thing is that direction is determined astrologically, i.e. randomly. Playing KotE, I tried determining the direction for each character randomly and then having the vampire society deal with them as if they indeed were like their direction. The undead society potrayed in KotE is painfully irrelevant in today's Asia, and this stressed it nicely.
Wus may have their own guardian spirits and rituals, like in Werewolf. They may store energy in talismans like Mages. The soul of the Cathayan is in two parts, a good and a bad, like in Wraith.
I could go on, but I hope the point is made.
Where Vampire pillages Anne Rice and the popular conceptions of vampires in Western Culture in general, Kindred of the East draws most of its concepts from other White Wolf games, with just enough eastern windowdressing to make it look like a game of eastern vampires to the uninterested eye.
Pictures
Of the 100 pictures in the book, only one has tits. I divided the rest into violence (33 images), posturing (the winner with 36 images) and other (with 30 images). Most of the pictures are well made. The book is good-looking and well-bound. The kind of exoticism (official mood, remember) presented by the illustrations suggests the kind of people who like Hong Kong action trash because it feels "exotic".
Standard White Wolf fare, all in all.
Regions
One of the most annoying things White Wolf has done was to officially make the whole of Russia the personal domain of Baba Yaga. A huge, immensely varied and interesting land was dealt with one old vampire who has hegemony over all. It's just boring. How would it feel if they had dealt with Europe the same way, saying that there's this old vampire guy who rules all and sees all and is inspired by a children's book.
The same attitude can be found in the KotE's attitude to Tibet, a region made officially unplayable and off-limits for no real reason except some high-handed motive of creating foreboding.
The nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki "tore apart the natural fabric of the island, poisoned the land's Chi" (page 163) and generally made life hard for Japanese vampires. Some questions are left unanswered. Why, for example, the nuclear testing of countries like USA, France, Russia or India has not created similar effects?
At times the text implies that a key factor was the immense amount of human deaths. The death toll of Japan's nuclear holocaust was, however, small bones compared to the casualties and suffering inflicted by the indiscriminate American bombing campaign on countries like Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam war. How about the death toll of Mao Zedong's various revolutionary moves, believed to have a total of something like 60 million?
There's death aplenty in Asia and singling out the A-bomb is just cheap.
Of special note is the section entitled "Silly Little Wars," on pages 164 and 165. It has this to say about Cambodian history: "Approximately two million people were killed by the regime, for "crimes" as simple as wearing glasses or speaking foreign languages. The killings continued for four years, while the rest of the world watched."
In reality, the Cambodian communist was a flimsy, understaffed creation led by twenty men. Objective sources attest that between one and two million Cambodians did indeed die after the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975, and the regime did indeed initiate untold horrors.
However, most of the people who died did so because of the mass starvation caused by the American mass bombing of the fields that deprived the peasants of food and drove them to the cities, where they subsisted on American aid trickling down until the revolution, after which the aid was cancelled. The deaths attributable to the Khmer Rouge number around 40,000.
Conclusion
Fun for the whole family. Standard White Wolf fare in that it boasts of style over substance -production values, cheap theatrics and downright racist treatment of its subject matter. Like many White Wolf games, it's weirdly playable, although I suggest investing in a wrist brace, considering the amount of psyche-related dice rolls one has to make during the game.
In playtest, I found the very absurdity of the game its greatest asset, for taken literally the game has a curious, almost Kafkaesque feel to it. Every aspect of the supernatural world is both arbitary and restricting, creating an atmosphere of immense, cosmic, mindless tradition going on long after being rendered pointless. A lot of Camarilla books have presented notions about how the elders are antiquated and irrelevant in a modern society, but Kindred of the East really brings these points close to home.
Go to forum!
(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)