You could quite literally do a better job just by ignoring the books entirely and trying to run Vampire: the Masquerade in a homebrew Victorian setting based off of J.
WHITE WOLF VAMPIRE DARK AGES ROAD OF SIN BOOK FULL
We will go into the full depths of laziness, but the thing to take away from this is that Victorian Age Vampire added nothing to the game. And I am including Werewolf: the Wild West, Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade, Wraith: the Great War, all of the Dark Ages books, and the fucking one-shot article in White Wolf Quarterly that let your vampires play in a cyberpunk campaign. Victorian Age Vampire was the laziest fucking setting port for any White Wolf game ever. The Victorian Age as a Disney theme park ride rather than an actual thing. Vampire players are actually looking for Agatha Heterodyne, but with more black.īasically Anna Valerious from Van Helsing. There's certainly Victorian inspiration here, and I'm not complaining, but it would be pretty scandalous if worn during the actual time period. Like Pride Prejudice & Zombies more than Pride & Prejudice.Īctual Victorian Era clothing was pretty stifling. Vampire players certainly asked for the Victorian Era, like all the fucking time, but what they really wanted was Girl Genius or Van Helsing – a bunch of Victorian tropes and themes plastered over modern Gothic sensibilities. Goth men wear top hats unironically, but Goth womenfolk don't bonnet themselves (well, Gothic Lolita people do, but it's a different bonnet). It's important to remember that while goths often describe their aesthetic as “Victorian,” it is actually “Neo-Victorian.” Goth ladies wear corsets, but they don't wear corsets made out of whale bone. People want to play Dracula-like characters in the time period that the actual Dracula book was set. So it's no surprise that when it came to people requesting that White Wolf make an extra campaign setting period, that the Victorian Age was the most requested. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the Georgian Era, but Dracula is still the fucking trope namer when it comes to Dracula like characters, and that happened in the Victorian Era. And even more importantly, it's the period where Bram Stoker's fucking Dracula comes from. The Victorian era is not a time of high minded elegance, it's a time when people were just starting to realize that they shouldn't put opiates into baby milk.īut very importantly, the Victorian Age is the period where most Gothic Fiction come from. And pretty much everything in it is crude proto-culture that is embarrassing and retro even by the most hipsterish standards. The Victorian Era in reality is either the beginning of modernity or the last age that isn't modern, depending on how you look at it. The air of sophistication looming over the entire period like lugubrious verbiage in a White Wolf book. See the profound subtlety and nuanced viewpoints being shown.