Kindred of the East

First, thanks to all who’ve responded! It was great to see so many views and comments in such a short space of time.


Shockwave, thanks for your four points in particular. I’ll try and answer them below, with apologies in advance for my longwindedness (which, I hope, shows that I've thought long and hard about my responses, and may demonstrate the hand-wringing that went into much of the pre-design work here). Before I go into all that, though, I agree that Kindred of the East was met with a mixed response upon its release. Beyond the notions of the uniquely Asian Underworld that you raised, it also faced the challenge - I think - of cramming the best bits of too many game systems, too much mythology - into a single concept. Vampire: the Masquerade took several vampire 'models' and added a unifying layer - clans, and the story of Cain(e) - that both explained and supported the differences between the various takes of vampireness. Looking back, the simplicity of that design looks bafflingly easy, but MRH and crew should be patting themselves on their collective backs for that. White Wolf added a lot to it later on, naturally, but even the more exotic bloodlines and Disciplines, Gehenna cults, Tal'mahe'Ra etc that spiral away from that key notion still retain the strength of that original concept.
Kindred of the East, however, was boldly (bravely? foolishly?) grappling with more from the outset, trying to synergise wildly disparate cultural traditions and tried to build its own unifying concept out of this patchwork mythology - many of which weren't familiar to the typical Western reader. Layer on top of that a more 'mature' World of Darkness (populated by more supernatural species) and the end result was a mad polyglot creation that had fantastic ideas sitting cheek-by-jowl with the sadly lacklustre. I think KOTE, at its best, beats V:tM, but you need to sift the wheat from the chaff.

Anyhow, onto those points of yours

1. Nested keywords: as you can see, the Kuei-Jin crypt cards have the Sterile keyword added to their text-box. Your reasoning is spot-on; it may decrease the available space, but it’s worth it for transparency and ease of play.

2. Sect and anarch-ness: correct, under the current texts there is nothing to stop Kuei-Jin from becoming anarch (provided they don’t have a title, naturally). There is some precedent for this in the source material, as the Courts of the East are beset by a revolutionary sub-sect who seek to bring down the tyranny of the elders. A later ‘expansion’ for KOTE was going to introduce these so-called Bamboo Children, giving Kuei-Jin anarchs their own sub-set of effects to play with (seeing as they don’t have access to the three-way disciplines, as currently written).

3. Dharma versus Clan: Dharma does have some card-effects (still to come!) that differentiate it slightly from Clan, so it might be useful to keep them distinct. But I do think your suggestion is entirely reasonable and I’m not averse to making the change. The current seperation may be a legacy of earlier design, where Kuei-Jin were their own ‘minion type’, distinct from Vampire. I must say, though, I was also cautious of the inevitable question ‘if I Clan Impersonate Vampire-X to a Devil-Tiger, can I now use Kuei-Jin cards?’ (the answer being no, the keyword doesn’t come automatically, but I still wanted to avoid the question in the first place!)[*]

4. Disciplines. To be completely honest here, I’ve got to agree that, yes, there are probably too many Disciplines in the set as written. It was a nearly-inescapable part of the design, and one which Mike and I spent a lot of time grappling with. There are a range of options available;

a. convert all Kuei-Jin Disciplines into Cainite analogs (i.e., Flesh Shintai cards become ‘Kuei-Jin only’ Vicissitude effects, to use your example). This works quite well for a few Kuei-Jin Disciplines, but the exoticism of the Kindred of the East suffers somewhat, and the comparisons aren’t always particularly clear. Kiai becomes Melpominee, Tapestry becomes Thaumaturgy, Beast Shintai could become Animalism or Spiritus, Feng Shui becomes Auspex or Thaumaturgy... but Blood Shintai is as Vicissitude-y as Flesh Shintai, and combining them together could weaken both.

b. convert _some_ Kuei-Jin Disciplines into existing Disciplines, and make new ones where appropriate. A fence-sitting approach makes slightly more sense in some ways, as it allows us to minimise the introduction of new Disciplines without sacrificing too much of the theme or mood. For the sake of argument, if we said that Flesh Shintai and Blood Shintai were too distinct from one another to combine them into Vicissitude, we could still convert a Thrashing Dragon’s clan disciplines to Celerity [Yang Prana] + Fortitude [Iron Mountain] + Thaumaturgy [Tapestry] + Flesh Shintai – that is, only the most exotic Disciplines feature as their own entities. This approach certainly has some merit to it, but I felt a ‘half-new’ approach could be as confusing as something that was all new. Something to consider, though.

c. Ignore swathes of the source material. A tempting option, admittedly, and one which there is precedent for. As some readers may be aware, several Serpentis, Quietus and Vicissitude cards in VTES represent effects from Setite-, Assamite- or Tzimisce-centered paths of ‘sorcery’ (that is, Thaumaturgy). 'Starvation of Marena' is no more a Vicissitude effect in the RPG than it is Auspex or Animalism, but there’s little point creating a new Koldunic Sorcery discipline just for it. However, this gets us onto a slippery slope. If we were to ignore the source material, which bits? In the end we felt it better to throw everything into the mix to begin with and then cut it down from there.


Once Mike and I found ourselves on the path of accepting a broad range of Disciplines, that then threw up new options;

* Create combined Cainite/Kuei-Jin discipline cards: a card might require Fortitude or Iron Mountain, say, so it’s not a wasted slot if you’re looking to build a mixed-crypt deck. The cards in this first release were already pretty wordy, though, so we stayed away from this for the first round of releases.

* Create multi-discipline / three-way cards. This doesn’t necessarily solve the ‘Kuei-Jin Disciplines are too different’ concern, but means that fewer card slots need to be spent to achieve a certain strategy. This could also be combined with the above point (perhaps a Blood Shintai/Flesh Shintai/Vicissitude card?). Again, we felt that the first release should probably concentrate on the heart of each Discipline rather than muddying the waters.

* Make Kuei-Jin Disciplines easier to gain. Making ‘skill cards’ into trifles, for example, could encourage different deckbuilding archetypes. In the end, we felt this might be better for the rarer Disciplines (such as Kiai), but doing it for all Disciplines could lead to unforseen problems.

* Make Kuei-Jin Disciplines easier to use: there are a range of effects that make Kuei-Jin cards cheaper, or temporarily upgrade a minion from inferior to superior levels. We felt this might be a good way of approaching the problem from a different angle, although of course it’s card-intensive in its own way.

* Make non-Discipline effects drive deck design: by adding a comparatively high number of Kuei-Jin-only and Dharma-based cards into the mix, a deck could be designed around those rather than Disciplines.


Downsides to KJ Disciplines, as written:
* As the notes above indicate, I’m acutely aware that there are some weaknesses to having an ‘all-in’ approach to Kuei-Jin Disciplines. Beyond the obvious downside of having fewer ‘Happy Family’ discipline spreads between clans, we also had to grapple with facing the card slots in an expansion. Core sets typically have around ten cards per Discipline, from memory, but with more Disciplines in the mix we had to settle for single figures. It was tempting to increase the emphasis on Disciplines by decreasing the number of non-Discipline cards, but it was difficult to get that balance right between Discipline-centred decks and the Kuei-Jin-only / Dharma-based strategies mentioned above.

* Having so many new Disciplines is that players may struggle to find the ‘key’ cards. The classic +1/+2 template (Enhanced Senses, Skin of Rock, Lost in Crowds, Undead Strength) is pretty much absent here, or at least has been diluted by adding ‘toolbox’ effects. Going for 4a or 4b above could limit that a little, but the nature of the source material will always create some difficulties here.

cheers, and thanks for reading. Whoever you are, you deserve a beer.

Disco Stu
Prince of Melbourne, Australia

[*] = all good deck concepts begin with Clan Impersonate, after all...

Disco_Stu wrote:

b. convert _some_ Kuei-Jin Disciplines into existing Disciplines, and make new ones where appropriate. A fence-sitting approach makes slightly more sense in some ways, as it allows us to minimise the introduction of new Disciplines without sacrificing too much of the theme or mood. For the sake of argument, if we said that Flesh Shintai and Blood Shintai were too distinct from one another to combine them into Vicissitude, we could still convert a Thrashing Dragon’s clan disciplines to Celerity [Yang Prana] + Fortitude [Iron Mountain] + Thaumaturgy [Tapestry] + Flesh Shintai – that is, only the most exotic Disciplines feature as their own entities. This approach certainly has some merit to it, but I felt a ‘half-new’ approach could be as confusing as something that was all new. Something to consider, though.

Quick answer, but this is the approach I'd advocate. For example, it worked for Abombwe to integrate the Akunanse into the game, because it had something unique to them, whilst still taking advantage of all the ANI and FOR cards in the game, drastically increasing their playability to any existing player. If they were say, like the Samedi, and each had four 'in Clan' Disciplines, and then their unique one, that'd work fine. Leveraging existing card stock, especially as we can't print new ones right now is a sure-fire way to get your additions accepted than a whole new set of cards. It also makes that Anarch Kuei-Jin much more viable, which surely makes sense if you remember V:tM things like the New Promise Mandarinate.

With regards to the Clan/Dharma debate, as long as you keep the Kuei-Jin trait seperate, I think it's all fine. Bear in mind you already have Vidal Jarbeaux potentially doing something as a Kuei-Jin, so there's one concern to think of, and I'm sure Mata Hari would probably find a way to abuse some cards, but are creative uses like this really a bad thing? (I think not, personally) And once again, if Wah-Yun Chen manages to Clan Impersonate a Devil-Tiger as a Brujah Antitribu, is that a bad thing either? How about Qadir ul-Ghani?

Aside from that, I can see there's a lot of thought gone into this, and whilst it's way too early for this to be anything more than a fan-expansion, I think it's grounded enough in sense to be worth looking at.

Amazing work! Good job
And yes my only thoughts are you should add few new disciplines and rest would reuse the old ones. There is already a lot to take for a new player and whole new set would be too much. Start smallish and you would get a bigger success since there is already many cards which could be combined with them.

This is a great effort, and is to be encouraged - in the long run this is the kind of thing that's needed to keep the game alive. I would heartily encourage VEKN to work with the authors so that if/when a fan produced set is released, it is accepted for at least some formats of competitive play.

For Stu, a few comments and suggestions :

• Many players didn't really take to Legacies / Ebony Kingdom because there was nothing in it for a player who wasn't interested in bloodlines or the new African clans. In comparison, I think HttB was attractive to players even if they weren't using the bloodlines because of generally useful cards like Wider View, and it also improved some of the bloodlines enough that more players decided to try them out. So, I think it's worth thinking about having some vampires and/or library cards that you could feasibly use in a conventional Cainite deck. Could still be stuff that captures a flavor of the East, of course.
• There are some cards that are going for stupid prices that should be easy to get - I'm thinking of things like Villein, Eyes of Argus, Freak Drive. It'd be great to get some alternate print-at-home versions that are functionally equivalent. (yes, I sell VtES on the web, and yes, I'd lose some sales if some of these cards were devalued in this way; but I'm more concerned about the game having trouble recruiting more fans because too many of the "must have" cards are too expensive)
• I'm not a lawyer, but I do know enough copyright law to give some advice; pm me if you want to talk more about it, and you do need some advice there.

Cool. Looks good. I guess you need to decide how similar Kue-jin and Vampires are to be.
Is this set designed to only be Kue-jin vs Kue-jin games? Or be played in standard VTES environment?
Would you possibly create a crypt with some Vampires and some Kue-jin?