Apparently there’s a plot point that involves Gaia creating the Ratkin to eradicate humanity’s “surplus population” through disease, which has some very uncomfortable implications, especially in the light of the gross indifference to human life that the ruling class has exhibited in the wake of Covid-19.
I realize this is hinged on a lot of assumptions (that this information is accurate in-universe and that Gaia, as the personification of the Earth, serves as a mouthpiece for the creators’ environmentalist views), which is why I’m asking.
oWoD had a ton of problematic shit like this, we’re talking about a universe were an entire vampire clan is one giant antiziganist stereotype. I can’t say much about any edition of Werewolf, but Vampire was bad in this regard. The “white” in White Wolf can be extremely prominent at times and i’m absolutely, with 100% certainty, expecting the older Werewolf stuff to have ecofash “humanity is cancer” moments in it. It’s a purposefully edgy game from the 90s, it’s a given it hasn’t always aged well.
With WoD in general, it’s in the nature of the game that you absolutely should do a Session Zero where you set boundaries for the content. It’s a horror game, in the case of Werewolf it’s about turning into an unstoppable, instinct-driven death machine with anger issues, it will get intense at times when your group gets deeply enough into it and that only works when you establish ways to deal with players being overwhelmed and set hard limits beforehand. And that includes politics, ethics and how to deal with topics that have problematic implications. It can mean leaving certain aspects out of the game, or changing them, or making a certain attitude towards them part of your chronicle tenets.
Does this count? Apparently it’s from Book of the Weaver:
CW: Eugenics
“Millions of people also can only survive through the intervention of modern medicine and its attendant technology; people who, even a mere century ago, would not have lived past early childhood are now living to ripe old ages. From the human point of view, of course, all this is for the best. After all, very few people wish to see their children or other loved ones die of conditions that are, in the modern age, preventable or curable, Darwin be damned. On the other hand, genetic problems that would otherwise be weeded out are instead propagated throughout the human population, weakening the species in general and making humans even more dependent on science and technology for their continued survival […] your wolf side should tell you how wrong this feels.”
I always avoided World of Darkness because I got uncomfortable fashy vibes from it, and the deeper I look, the more I find not to like.
Yeah, that’s about what i would’ve expected. I’m also expecting this to have gotten better in 5th edition, at least this goes for VtM. I haven’t looked into the new edition of WtA yet, but the sales blurb reads like this:
Honestly, i’d absolutely play a game of “angry working class puppygirls blow up a pipeline in the Rust Belt” with my friends, the question is how easy it is to play it like that instead of “having antibiotics is weakening the gene pool.”
Personally I loved how they butchered eastern mythologies.
Oh, yeah, I’ve heard they have some very, uh, interesting portrayals of nonwhite people (mostly in the “magical minority” vein).
In some cases, it’s a lot worse than that, clan Ravnos was made up mostly of Sinti and Roma people and their clan weakness was literally “you compulsively commit crime”. They axed that part in 5th edition, which is at least aware of a lot of the criticism around the old stuff, but the new version of the clan isn’t exactly stellar for other reasons.