The foreword was written by Janet Berliner. Her parents and grandparents fled Germany for South Africa to avoid the camps, and she herself was ultimately forced to flee to the USA due to her own outspoken criticism of Apartheid.
@@itwasidio1736 😂 Nations going to war is a lot different than the use of the first nuclear device. like the 12th century is right around When guns first started showing up.
Imagine being a 14th Century German merchant who got knifed on a trip to Auswintz/Oswentim and then 600 years later you are just there when everything else happens.
@@TheBurgerkrieg fair enough, after watching this video I felt compelled to read some Frankl. You hammer home that the scale of the events makes it so we can’t understand it, so the idea of trying to digest it thru RPG is new
@@Samm815 a video game that makes you wanna solve your own question about a people's who seem insane to you at least on my first playthrough I was actively rooting for the Russians to level their city
@Samm815 I mean, there *is* a board game, just good luck getting a copy in any language that isn't Russian Edit: Highly recommend Hbomberguy's video on the subject
I played a WWII RPG themed game and it wrecked me. The game was run by a WWII reenactor and they made sure to pack the game with an amount of realism I wasn't prepared for. It changed my opinion on war, the military, and gave me a new outlook in WWII as a whole.
@@johng8837 I was playing a Norwegian Commando who was paired up with someone from the SAS for a covert mission in Berlin. We ended up saving a couple of civilians who helped us learn about the city in return. We met their kids and even helped them make dinner. During another part of the game my character was separated from my partner and ended up meeting the resistance, who the civilians we saved earlier were apart of. They knew who we were from the start and wanted to help us with our mission. In fact, they had covertly helped us escape a building earlier in the campaign. My character was very grateful to have some allies and was very touched by the story the resistance told him, of the many children who had died since the regime change and how they wanted help smuggling innocents out of the country. They got my character to rest in a room while they tried to find his partner. My character was also superstitious and that was the only thing that saved him. Once alone, he began to perform a ritual to ward off bad luck and realized he had been trapped in the room. He hadn't just met with the resistance: he had been captured by counter intelligence, and the civilians had been working with them from the start. The civilians had even been spying on their neighbors and informing on them to the government. The story my character had been told about the dead children had been acts performed by some of the people in counter intelligence and other organizations they worked with. My character managed to escape with some proof of their plans. It turned out smuggling innocents out of the country was their cover story. They in fact wanted to smuggle supplies and tools for a weapon out of the country - and they were going to use our characters to help them set that up before killing them. Luckily, my character's partner was more experienced and paranoid than mine was. He went into hiding the minute they got separated and used his contacts to get us out of the country and back to Britain to deliver the plans my character stole. It was awful to think we had been in that man's house. Met their kids. Heard the whole awful tale of what happened to them and their neighbors. Helped them feed the same people they were spying on. That they had been doing it to protect their kids. Kids who were killed away when my character got away and the whole family died. My character never found that out. He was outraged that someone would even do such a thing. It was his partner who pointed out the situation they might have been in- that the two of them had been sloppy and that's why their cover was blown. That my character acting on instinct to save those civilians almost cost them their, and possibly thousands of other's lives. My character wondered what he would do, if his country demanded he turn on his fellow countrymen like that? It was hard not to be angry- at the country. At the people. My character's partner said the country had turned it's back on its people, whether they knew it or not, and they were doing what they must to survive. My character focused on his memory of that family's little boy. The tiny face that had smiled at him and asked him to help cut potatoes for dinner. The boy he gave piggy back rides to and heard giggle. He decided he had to think of him when he thought of this war and all it's horrors. Otherwise, his anger and pain would swallow him whole.
It’s really interesting that this book was so derided, because Maus went through this exact same problem. People largely derided it early on because it was a “comic” with that was trivializing the holocaust … until they actually read it. It turns out games, like comics, are art and have the capacity to tackle heavy subjects.
Maus is indescribably great. Sadly, a substitute teacher in my past derided Barefoot Gen as "inappropriate" because it is a comic about the author's life before and after Hiroshima was nuked. She didn't care that it was semi-autobiographical.
@@borderlands10 That's the great problem of our time, the overuse of "touchy subjects" as tools for shaming and forcing the death of any discourse (not just the ones that are inherently negative like r*cism in a positive light or that democracy should be destroyed, but also discussions on why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again, or on who were fully guilty of it happening and who were partially guilty)
Im excited for you to cover Orpheus and have to explain to people that you can play as something called an "Orphan-Grinder" and fight an entity called "Grandma".
Yknow I came into this video pretty shocked by the title. I didn't expect the book to actually be a respectful and nuanced portrayal. It does also have some interesting implications of having a sliding scale of wraith and spectre which I think would be cool to have in a normal wraith game.
Do you know wraith's actual rules? I've never played it but now i'm wondering what happens if someone switches from a wraith to a spectre in the middle of a chronicle. Does the other person who controlled that wraith's shadow now control the spectre's psyche so that they now need to undo the fuckup they did? Or do the roles stay the same but now the owner of that former wraith just control the (now smaller) psyche part of their character and the shadow of another guy while the guy who was controlling the shadow is now controlling that spectre as well as their own wraith?
@@bonogiamboni4830At least in the newest edition it works like this: The former Shadowguide turns into a Psycheguide, so that they remind the Spectre of all that is good in them. In contrast to Wraiths though, if the psyche ever dominates, the control always remains with the main player.
My problem with this book is that I think it’s probably unplayable; wraith already requires high trust between players because of the shadow but in order to play this you’d need to find at least 2 other people who are willing to 1) play this depressing ass game 2) you trust enough to play it with. Plus the sales pitch to potential players is “you want to play the Holocaust game?”
It was probably intended for people who already have an established group rather than using it to draw in new ones. It would be something you present to a group that you've already been playing with for a long time.
To be fair a lot of WoD books can act as less a game to play, but more as source books to use with other game lines for story ideas, I'd say this info could be pretty easily used in Werewolf or Mage, like Werewolves having to confront what the Get of Fenris did during the war in the form of meeting some of their victims who haven't been able to move on (and might have gone full Specter, have the players have to make the choice of "do we take the hard path and try to help these people our kind have wronged by redeeming them/turning them back in Wraiths and possibly even help them transcend, or do we take the easier/safer rode of trying to finish what our relatives started even if we know it was morally wrong"), or maybe Mages who would work with Wraiths from the Kingdom of Wire to hunt down escaped Nazi's, that last seems especially possible since I think certain traditions can trace their roots to the very ethnic and religious groups the Nazi's would target, so for some Mages they might be trying to hunt down people who personally hurt their family. Or maybe Mummies who were dead during the time of the WWII, and had revived themselves with the express goal of hunting down any remnants of the Third Reich.
As a Russian, thank you so much for mentioning Soviet POW’S. I can’t remember any other western source that remembers it, so you mentioning it brought a tear to my eye. Again, thank you so much. ❤
@@Alsemenorthat’s probably a combination of red scare era propoganda and the fact as said the “Holocaust” as it’s generally thought does not encompass the enormity of the Nazi’s killings and only applies, in most people’s minds, to the Jewish victims.
I think the fact that even the closest thing to good guys have soul forges, and basically annihilate the psyches of people just to make objects is an under-represented part about this part of the setting.
It's an under-spoken part, but by no means underutilized: the coins are made from soulsteel, most of the buildings are made from soulsteel, every legionnaire wields soulsteel weapons and armor that are supposed to groan and moan every now and then...If it doesn't appear in a chronicle, it's either a very concrete story that has the players away from the empire, or the ST is doing it wrong.
I still have a copy of this book on my shelf. I bought it with no intention on ever using it as a play supplement, simply as a hunch. It really is a well done book and contains a lot of historical information I've only found in bits and pieces over the years.
I only realized that you are German, when you pronounced 'Göhring' correctly. Also the higher voice pitch when you said 'Appell' gave you away. In all honesty, great video, did not expect it when I clicked on it. You know how sensitive this topic is in our county.
Your point about how all creative attempts to qualify the Holocaust do, in effect, trivialize it because nothing can come close to executing a 1:1 recreation of the phenomena/feelings of such a massive occurrence of evil is so spot on. If the research and seriousness is there, then a “game” about the Holocaust is truly no different from a historical fictional film or book about it.
I think a really good point you get at here is that WOD already let you explore supernatural beings who relate to or empathize with The Bad People, and this one forces players into the perspective of the victims of that ideology. It'd actually be weird to have nazi werewolves and not acknowledge the uh, other end of that werewolf's bs, imo.
In this day & age everyone's a damned victim in their own mind to the point that Naziism & islamic conquest & genocide of the world is now trivialized. In WOD, exploring the bad guys makes things more interesting as to see what happened to these people to make them so messed up - choice or circumstances & how much of both.
Something messed up is when the Allies rescued eveyone from the camps, the victims who were there for being LGBT were put back in jail to serve out sentences. Even though it was not illegal to be LGBT in Weimar Germany (the pre-Hitler Germany), it WAS STILL illegal in the US, UK, USSR etc. So therefore in both East and West Germany. If as an LGBT person you survived the war and were resued you were just locked up again by whoever rescued you.
If you were a murder or another kind of degenerate, the rules are the same. We've seen since the 80s what happens to society when lgbt is embraced: a genocidal pandemic that's still killing people around the world today. All of it over sexual degeneracy of which straight people also contributed, but homosexual men were the largest vector for transmission.
I was born an hour from Oswiecim. I see this book as a tribute to the people who died, to always remember, and never forget. Oh btw: Apel in Polish means like a muster or role call, or briefing. So yeah, the word is being used correctly in that sense.
I didn't know I could feel the genuine urge to vomit at a dry description of historical facts, but the way you described the way factional politics worked in the death camps did it.
i thought that it was deeply fascinating just for how horribly awful it was. burger really has a way with describing things that makes this usually somewhat cognitively dissonant history feel completely real to people.
Just a tiny little bit, because it bugs my mind ... iirc the Goering in Berlin is factually not THE Goering, but "just" delusional as a Malkavian that believes himself to be said one, while those that actually knew Goering highly doubt, that its actually him
I mean, Exalted was initially envisioned as a sort of pre-Sundering version of or prequel to the WoD, so the term overlap makes sense. The confusion only really becomes a thing after that initial idea was abandoned.
Oh yeah, one of the better supplements White Wolf put out, and arguably the best out of the Black Dog line because it was real mature content (heavy topics and not just gross-out stuff along with really bad rules, looking at YOU Freak Legion!) handled in a mature fashion. A refreshing change of pace at the time.
I binged all of your videos on the World of Darkness, and honestly it sounds like a significantly more entertaining system of play than most table top rpgs I’ve heard of
I couldn't imagine how awkward the conversation would be if you wanted to convince a group of players to join you in this as a storyteller. "You guys wanna play a game where you're ghosts and your goal is to cross over?" "That sounds like fun." "Cool, and uhhh, the setting will be the most horrific tragedy in human history."
@@starhalv2427 Yeah, genocides weren't invented back then, but (depending on numbers, which are hard to get right as burgerkrieg himself said) it might be the most extensive one in recorded history.
"To steal that gradient from people is bad because you rob the victims of their personality and their truth; and you turn perpetrators into an alien caricature that people cannot see themselves reflected in even though they should" ✍🔥
When I first read the title, my multilingual brain had a glitch and I interpreted "concentration" as "focus" and was really puzzled at the thought of a camp for focusing 🤡 I cannot describe the feeling of realizing my mistake and what the video was going to be about Great video. I have no personal ties to WWII, but for whatever it's worth it felt like a review that took the real world history the book references with the seriousness it deserves. A ttrpg is not a medium I'd ever considered for discussing the holocaust, but I love knowing that a good example of it exists
I would really like to have a lore video about the mummy books from the old WoD. I kinda liked them, even if they were sometimes broken as fuck and sometimes less clear in their rules. I especially liked the Wu T'ian and Capacocha from the Players Handbook and actually have both the Handbook and the Core Game. I hope Burger will do them in the future.
I'm fascinated by Pre-Paradox White Wolf's productions. It seems like they flipped a coin every time they made a book to see if they were going to be incredibly racist like the Traveller book, the Assamites and Ravnos, or writing an incredibly powerful piece of TTRPG books like Charnel House. Then they do something like saying an ongoing genocide is a vampire plot causing a diplomatic incident.
@@enriquejoseantequerasanche6180 If it isn't some vampire plot (either by the camarilla or sabbat), it's any one of mage conspiracies, Pentex, or assorted various nasty supernatural entities.
The first time someone explained what Mage was they mentioned entering the hollow earth and killing hitler with dinosaurs and now. Now I finally understand.
Just wanted to say I love your content! Your videos are well thought out and insightful and It's a delight to get the notification that you have posted a new Video. Keep on being awesome and much love and support from Tennessee!
Great video Burger! I think you do an incredible job covering dark subjects like this. It’s the respect and sincerity you give which make this such a great listen
holy crap, that was so damn good to watch, just in terms of actually talking about the real world things. I feel the Wraith created just enough abstraction from the real world history that it kinda made it easier to comprehend, without it being distorted beyond recognition.
Ive owned a copy of the book for a long time. Some friends ive shown it to cant get through it just from the art in the book, which is so gorgeous but deeply moving and painful to absorb.
I'm not gonna lie before watching the video I thought was this was gonna be a recipe for disaster, even moreso when you mentioned that it was a WoD splatbook. Good to know it's not a trainwreck.
"They worked hard, they stole, they donated to those in need, they broke hearts, they held their crying friends, they were highly educated, they had never read a book, they were vindictive, they were forgiving, they performed selfless acts, they did unforgivable things" is like a poem. 47:15
Absolutely exceptional video, Burger. I've been a big fan of yours for ages, and while I don't always agree with you, I can listen to you talk for hours. It's wonderful having an educated, intelligent, fair-minded individual that I can listen to now and again. I love when you cover World of Darkness stuff, I love when you cover real life stuff, this was a great synthesis of the two. (I like all your content, though.) Keep it up, man, thanks for the vid.
This was a surprise, but a very welcomed one. As much as this is a gravely dark topic (pun absolutely intentional), thank you so very much for bringing light to what WoD does well. Can't wait for the next video
How did you (and commenters) feel about playing out the death camp scenes in Wolfenstein New Order (or maybe it was Collusus, I powered through both one after another so have my memory of what was in what a bit blurred). An interesting take on those games was done by Jacob Geller which I highly recommend.
I'm guessing the title change was due to youtube reasons. Still, good video. I'm as surprised that you made this video as I am that the book exists in the first place.
Scrolling through ideas for a Vampire the Masquerade campaign, I found out that one of the childe of Tzimisce wanted to die and so was turned by Tzimisce into a ball of flesh incapable of dying. Depending on the version that ball of flesh is part of some vampire as a parasite, or an object that's just somewhere. Which means that you can make a game about a bunch of different vampires trying to get their hands on and diablerise that ball of flesh in order to achieve the great power of the 4th generation, and players find out about it at some point and decide to intervene- not knowing which ones among them want to prevent a rising of a new vampire demigod, and which ones might wants to eat the ball. Of course, that is a Methuselah Tzimisce, so he might just take over the body of the one who consumes him. If that were the case he might be like Sukuna's finger of the WoD universe. P.S: I was listening to this video while searching through the wiki, that's why I shared that idea in this comment section.
Any chance you plan on covering Promethean: The Created? I am interested in it a ton, and have been looking for someone to cover it more extensively before me and my wife try to start something up.
Two things are abundantly clear to me: 1: First 2: I will for sure be asleep for this premiere but I'm going to go absolutely ape-crap for this. Love your videos, and I hope this game isn't my immediate perception of it by reading it's name
Being a sucker for Wraith’s concepts of memory, moving on and a society of postmortem people making the most from a shite hand…I’ve come to write more than my fair share of the Restless Dead. As a result have I also had the DKofWire play a factor, as the conditions of its population and its environment by default are intensely uncomfortable and guaranteeing someone’s Catharsis if not a Harrowing. This had led me to, in my chronicles, write the population of the DKofWire to be intensely interconnected and prone to the forming of Redeemed Spectres, Helldivers, and Doomslayers as opposed to everyday wraiths. This is because of the aforementioned interconnected relationship between citizens within Wire, as well as the near constant threat of a Harrowing and of Catharsis. This also means that, despite being in their own circle of hell, the Dybbuks are gaining a foothold in the Shadowlands. At least, that’s how I write that section of the Underworld. Seeing as the threat of being consumed by Oblivion, of giving into your Shadow, or of the Tempest destroying you is so ever present, the idea that the DKofWire *wouldn’t* become the most hardy, the most determined and people-centric Dark Kingdom in the Underworld….doesn’t make any sense to me. There are *still* wraiths in the DKofWire, they had to have found something to fight against their Shadows and the Spectres, otherwise there wouldn’t *be* a DKofWire. And, what’s more, the idea of victims of tragedy overcoming the horror and trauma of their deaths, is inspiring in the gloomy picture that is the Shadowlands. Again, this is my personal preference for writing Wire, as I find its conditions so oppressive that it couldn’t survive for decades on end in the way it’s presented to us. If y’all find this idea dumb or something similar, lemme know.
Great video quite amazing as usual Would really love a orpheus video...or demon, or prometheos, or deviants, or beast...specially beast...it's hard for me to explain the game to my brother but you are always very clear and concise...a real pleasure to hear
A roleplaying game is a pretty engaging medium. I also like how it captures the cruelty and not only the trauma, but the unwillingness by a lot to deal with that. Which happened, took a while to work that up by annoying people bringing it up. Of course wrath are no better :( And the cruelty treating dead like that is :( sounds like a good book. And that like all kinds of people were in camps, so many :(
As a person who loves Wraith, I own this book and it's seriously the most depressing thing White Wolf ever wrote. The thing you gotta understand with Wraith is that it's probably the darkest of the World of Darkness games even without looking through this particular setting book. Wraith is about people who are already dead, and not all ways to die are nice and peaceful like in your sleep. I have lots of people whom I play all the other WOD games with, but who won't touch even plain vanilla Wraith, because it's too dark, I don't want to play a game where I've lost already, you're already dead what's the point? etc... etc... Wraiths only become wraiths because of some sort of unfinished business with the real world. And by the very nature of the Wraith setting, I'm not surprised that the writers of the game line thought about the questions... Oh, what about this tragic event in history? How did that play out in the Shadowlands? Certainly, an event like that would create a lot of wraiths. Keep in mind that the actual game stuff in Charnel Houses is more about the aftermath in the Shadowlands. The game stuff is about how Wraith society dealt with this particular point in history and how it affects the modern-day Wraith society. But in order to respect the story of the tragedy that occurred they did the smart thing and told the unvarnished truths about what happened and did their research. So it's part history book and part RP supplement, they don't try to tie any of the other supernaturals of the WoD into the history. They flat out say that the events were caused by plain old terrible human beings and while supernatural beings might have taken advantage of the situation, it was by human hands that things grew into the terrible tragedy that it was. It's very clear when you read the book, that this wasn't something made to be disrespectful, it was a way to tell compelling stories about hard truths. I'd say however that in order to use it, you'd have to have a very mindful group who would be able to take the subject matter seriously. And given the want for more escapist fare in our modern day, I'd say that would be a difficult ask for any group. I'm not sure I could muster a group that would be able to use it, but I'm glad that they told the story even if I never use it. Because the story of Wraith as a whole is about coming to grips with death and what lies beyond, and I think that by telling this story it's a reminder that there is a real darkness in our real world too and that we shouldn't forget that.
They are called the Ananasi, one of the Fera (the changing breeds). So basically werespiders. They serve Queen Ananasa and work to bring the Triat back to balance. I don't know why they are racist though.
A roleplaying game about the Holocaust, but its done tastefully and with respect while also being fun!? Didn't expect that from White Wolf, considering all I've heard about their past methods of handling their worldbuilding in the older fluff. Glad you made this video though, I don't know if I'm just not looking well enough or if I'm completely blind when searching but I haven't found a lot of the older modules/book settings explored online. Also, yeah, like you said, the older fluff is a bit clumsy. I didn't mind the book about the Ravnos that much, since it didn't seem to come from a place of disrespect but rather made up an in-universe reason as to why the Romani are discriminated against. Granted the whole "they're only discriminated against because they're straight up better versions of humans" thing is a bit weird in its own way but what I really disliked is the way they failed the Keui Jin, along with Asia as a whole. There's so many variants of Asian monsters and vampires they could have drawn inspiration from. Gimme a faction of stiff, bureaucratic hopping vampires ruling China as some sort of underworld shadow-Dynasty. Let one of the Asian clans have a battleform or transformation which is that cool undead many Asian cultures share which is straight up just a disembodied head with attached digestive tract that mauls its enemies while the rest of its body safely lies within its lair, the head just regenerating indefinitely and coming at you again and again until you kill the body. Even the Fox Spirits in folklore are prime ways to expand the Werewolf branch of the setting by making the Kitsune, the Kumiho and the Huli Jing their own local branches of the Garou tribes. The Yokai of Japanese mythology could have been another Legion of Wraiths or straight up just an entirely new Kingdom in the Shadowlands: the Kingdom of Jade already exists, so if creating something completely new wouldn't fit, that faction (which I believe is already led by a wraith named Yama) could just be fleshed out more. We could have even seen an expansion of the Demonic setting by having the entire pantheon of Hinduism just straight up be a bunch of Earthbound Demons. So much missed opportunity.
I think the Kuei-Jin are cool but they really dropped the ball with them. Like there's a lot of cool stuff in there but idk....there are some really good remakes in the STV done by fans though!
I forget the exact list of the other changing breeds, but if werefoxes (not garou, but genuine werefoxes) don't exist already, then the east Asian myths could be explained as a changing breed, predominantly found in east Asia (same way werehyenas only live in sub-saharan Africa).
@@generalgrievous2202 Knowing what I do now about the revised lore for Werewolf in its current editions, the chances of cultural representations of such faction in the World of Darkness is now all but impossible. Which is both sad and a bit dumb, since that's how the setting was crafted: mixed with IRL legends and myths taken from that region's native cultures.
I'm sorry...at 13:20 you revealed to me that there are NAZI WIZARDS IN THE HOLLOW EARTH, and I am now inspired to create an entirely morally justified Vampire Chronicle where a Coterie of Vamps turns that whole place into a Charnal House because NAZI WIZARDS os just too good of an enemy idea.
It's mostly the Society of Ether that is down there fighting them. As I understand it the inner world is not a great place for vampires because the "sun" is always up
@@TheBurgerkrieg Oh damn that sucks, you'd think a subterranean space would be ideal for Vampires but it makes sense withe the cosmology of Hollow Earth. Still, Nazi Wizards is almost as good as Nazi Zombies.
Holy shit, I guessed "Wraith lore vid" correctly! I'm so proud of myself. If only that pride was enough to counteract the . . . Atmosphere here in this video.
...I'm considering looking into this for Holocaust Remembrance, and see if I can do the research, and maybe do a version of this for my synogogue in the future. Bringing the lives of the dead to life, and remembering them...that is incredibly important in Judaism. In Judaism, a person is not truly dead until their name is no longer held in the heart of a living person. Familiar, huh?
I think this kind of content is really important precisely to remind us what an unspeakable atrocity the Holocaust was and why we should never, ever come close to that again, especially in our day and age when far-right populism is becoming more popular around the world and a common crutch they rely upon is that "we aren't fascists because we don't defend this very specific fascist point!". The Holocaust wasn't the responsibility of just a restricted clique of particularly radical Nazis, it was also the responsibility of "moderate" Nazis (as much of an oxymoron as that is) and other conservative nationalists in Germany who allowed legislation such as the Reichstag Fire Laws and the Enabling Act to pass because it benefitted them. This kind of historical knowledge is frustratingly obscured, and I will always stand by any attempt to make it more widespread. Genocides don't start out of the blue, they're always the culmination of decades in an unchecked crescendo of hatred. That being said, I really wish White Wolf had dedicated the same professionalism and seriousness to other subject matters. Alas, Shoah will always be a monument to what they could accomplish when they bothered with writing their works like proper professionals instead of edgy teens throwing whack ideas at a wall.
Deep time, deep history, these phrases all apply to timescales that are too large to comprehend but there are things we can encounter in this lifetime that are still too large to comprehend So new category Deep size The wealth of billionaires, the totality of the holocaust, the speed of light All of these things have things that are too large to process so they all have deep size You can’t just say they are deep because deep already has a meaning but you can say that the totality of the holocaust has deep size so the deaths become a statistic because the whole story can’t be understood
1:05:23 If it's any consolation to you, many Germans still misspell Auschwitz as _Ausschwitz._ Like in 'ausschwitzen', meaning 'to sweat out'. I am untröstlich to tell you, Mandy-Jacqueline, but a gas chamber is not a sauna🙄
I watched a video recently that suggested that WW and all the subsequent companies that worked with the WoD ip were, and always have been, scared sh*tless of working with their very own content. That its why the entire property seems to be cursed with failure in subsequent edition books, but especially video games. After watching this, _one could certainly see why that might be!_ Ironic, considering how much influence the game has had in its own industry and across other media. In a similar vein (ba dum, tiss...), have you heard about Heavy Metal magazine (the sci-fi/fantasy art mag) being cancelled? It had comparable content and influence, but that's also shot it in the foot, but also had the more recent curse of blatant corporate greed around to bleed it to death.
The book was supposed to be a history lesson wrapped within the context of a game and it was taken 100% seriously.
Advised by the family of a holocaust victim (I don't remember if they survived)
T55⁵//t/⁵
The foreword was written by Janet Berliner. Her parents and grandparents fled Germany for South Africa to avoid the camps, and she herself was ultimately forced to flee to the USA due to her own outspoken criticism of Apartheid.
Imagine being the ghost of a 12th century peasant and seeing nuclear detonations in the Shadowlands. 😮
by then you'd likely have adapted to the horrors of nations getting into senseless wars
@@itwasidio1736 😂 Nations going to war is a lot different than the use of the first nuclear device. like the 12th century is right around When guns first started showing up.
Imagine being a 14th Century German merchant who got knifed on a trip to Auswintz/Oswentim and then 600 years later you are just there when everything else happens.
Just another Tuesday
TBF, you would be sentient the entire time. You may have been born a peasant, but now you've been around for nearly a millenia.
the idea of playing the history of the holocaust through dark fantasy tropes of vampires and changelings is equal parts intriguing and horrifying
Oh hey stoney
tbf you are not specifically playing the holocaust but its aftermath in this one, but I reckon plenty WoD chronicles have happened during it.
@@cyborglion4179Hey there Cy
@@TheBurgerkrieg fair enough, after watching this video I felt compelled to read some Frankl. You hammer home that the scale of the events makes it so we can’t understand it, so the idea of trying to digest it thru RPG is new
@@cyborglion4179oh Hi Marrc
No, no I get it's like Pathologic. Pathologic is technically a game, but nobody plays Pathologic to have fun.
You play to watch your mind slowly melt from the ears
The video game or is there a tabletop game I'm unaware of?
@@Samm815 video game
@@Samm815 a video game that makes you wanna solve your own question about a people's who seem insane to you at least on my first playthrough I was actively rooting for the Russians to level their city
@Samm815 I mean, there *is* a board game, just good luck getting a copy in any language that isn't Russian
Edit: Highly recommend Hbomberguy's video on the subject
I played a WWII RPG themed game and it wrecked me. The game was run by a WWII reenactor and they made sure to pack the game with an amount of realism I wasn't prepared for. It changed my opinion on war, the military, and gave me a new outlook in WWII as a whole.
Please tell more!
@@johng8837 I was playing a Norwegian Commando who was paired up with someone from the SAS for a covert mission in Berlin. We ended up saving a couple of civilians who helped us learn about the city in return. We met their kids and even helped them make dinner.
During another part of the game my character was separated from my partner and ended up meeting the resistance, who the civilians we saved earlier were apart of. They knew who we were from the start and wanted to help us with our mission. In fact, they had covertly helped us escape a building earlier in the campaign. My character was very grateful to have some allies and was very touched by the story the resistance told him, of the many children who had died since the regime change and how they wanted help smuggling innocents out of the country. They got my character to rest in a room while they tried to find his partner.
My character was also superstitious and that was the only thing that saved him. Once alone, he began to perform a ritual to ward off bad luck and realized he had been trapped in the room. He hadn't just met with the resistance: he had been captured by counter intelligence, and the civilians had been working with them from the start. The civilians had even been spying on their neighbors and informing on them to the government. The story my character had been told about the dead children had been acts performed by some of the people in counter intelligence and other organizations they worked with.
My character managed to escape with some proof of their plans. It turned out smuggling innocents out of the country was their cover story. They in fact wanted to smuggle supplies and tools for a weapon out of the country - and they were going to use our characters to help them set that up before killing them.
Luckily, my character's partner was more experienced and paranoid than mine was. He went into hiding the minute they got separated and used his contacts to get us out of the country and back to Britain to deliver the plans my character stole.
It was awful to think we had been in that man's house. Met their kids. Heard the whole awful tale of what happened to them and their neighbors. Helped them feed the same people they were spying on. That they had been doing it to protect their kids. Kids who were killed away when my character got away and the whole family died. My character never found that out. He was outraged that someone would even do such a thing. It was his partner who pointed out the situation they might have been in- that the two of them had been sloppy and that's why their cover was blown.
That my character acting on instinct to save those civilians almost cost them their, and possibly thousands of other's lives.
My character wondered what he would do, if his country demanded he turn on his fellow countrymen like that?
It was hard not to be angry- at the country. At the people. My character's partner said the country had turned it's back on its people, whether they knew it or not, and they were doing what they must to survive.
My character focused on his memory of that family's little boy. The tiny face that had smiled at him and asked him to help cut potatoes for dinner. The boy he gave piggy back rides to and heard giggle. He decided he had to think of him when he thought of this war and all it's horrors. Otherwise, his anger and pain would swallow him whole.
I'd second loving to hear more but I'm also very happy to have read what you've already said. that sounds incredible.
I'd like to hear more about that too
Me too, if you'd be willing to share
It’s really interesting that this book was so derided, because Maus went through this exact same problem. People largely derided it early on because it was a “comic” with that was trivializing the holocaust … until they actually read it. It turns out games, like comics, are art and have the capacity to tackle heavy subjects.
Maus is indescribably great.
Sadly, a substitute teacher in my past derided Barefoot Gen as "inappropriate" because it is a comic about the author's life before and after Hiroshima was nuked.
She didn't care that it was semi-autobiographical.
It's mostly an ideological knee jerk reaction, made by people who use such events as political beating sticks.
@@borderlands10 That's the great problem of our time, the overuse of "touchy subjects" as tools for shaming and forcing the death of any discourse (not just the ones that are inherently negative like r*cism in a positive light or that democracy should be destroyed, but also discussions on why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again, or on who were fully guilty of it happening and who were partially guilty)
Wraith: _depression_
Shoah: *incomprehensible.*
I love that this was supposed to be an overview of a game book and ended up being a history lesson
Im excited for you to cover Orpheus and have to explain to people that you can play as something called an "Orphan-Grinder" and fight an entity called "Grandma".
Yknow I came into this video pretty shocked by the title. I didn't expect the book to actually be a respectful and nuanced portrayal. It does also have some interesting implications of having a sliding scale of wraith and spectre which I think would be cool to have in a normal wraith game.
Do you know wraith's actual rules? I've never played it but now i'm wondering what happens if someone switches from a wraith to a spectre in the middle of a chronicle. Does the other person who controlled that wraith's shadow now control the spectre's psyche so that they now need to undo the fuckup they did? Or do the roles stay the same but now the owner of that former wraith just control the (now smaller) psyche part of their character and the shadow of another guy while the guy who was controlling the shadow is now controlling that spectre as well as their own wraith?
@@bonogiamboni4830At least in the newest edition it works like this: The former Shadowguide turns into a Psycheguide, so that they remind the Spectre of all that is good in them.
In contrast to Wraiths though, if the psyche ever dominates, the control always remains with the main player.
My problem with this book is that I think it’s probably unplayable; wraith already requires high trust between players because of the shadow but in order to play this you’d need to find at least 2 other people who are willing to 1) play this depressing ass game 2) you trust enough to play it with. Plus the sales pitch to potential players is “you want to play the Holocaust game?”
It was probably intended for people who already have an established group rather than using it to draw in new ones. It would be something you present to a group that you've already been playing with for a long time.
To be fair a lot of WoD books can act as less a game to play, but more as source books to use with other game lines for story ideas, I'd say this info could be pretty easily used in Werewolf or Mage, like Werewolves having to confront what the Get of Fenris did during the war in the form of meeting some of their victims who haven't been able to move on (and might have gone full Specter, have the players have to make the choice of "do we take the hard path and try to help these people our kind have wronged by redeeming them/turning them back in Wraiths and possibly even help them transcend, or do we take the easier/safer rode of trying to finish what our relatives started even if we know it was morally wrong"), or maybe Mages who would work with Wraiths from the Kingdom of Wire to hunt down escaped Nazi's, that last seems especially possible since I think certain traditions can trace their roots to the very ethnic and religious groups the Nazi's would target, so for some Mages they might be trying to hunt down people who personally hurt their family. Or maybe Mummies who were dead during the time of the WWII, and had revived themselves with the express goal of hunting down any remnants of the Third Reich.
And the kind of people who might say 'yes' to that last question might not be the sort you want anywhere near you
FINALLY. So many ppl try to justify this book and im like.... dont compare it to maus. Games give ppl agency. Games let people play a fantasy.
This was a very good approach to a serious theme. White Wolf did it right this time.
I'd like to see Wraith: The Great War next
As a Russian, thank you so much for mentioning Soviet POW’S. I can’t remember any other western source that remembers it, so you mentioning it brought a tear to my eye. Again, thank you so much. ❤
Sadly, Soviet POWs are frequently forgotten in the West. As are slavs murdered by Nazis in general.
@@Alsemenorthat’s probably a combination of red scare era propoganda and the fact as said the “Holocaust” as it’s generally thought does not encompass the enormity of the Nazi’s killings and only applies, in most people’s minds, to the Jewish victims.
I think the fact that even the closest thing to good guys have soul forges, and basically annihilate the psyches of people just to make objects is an under-represented part about this part of the setting.
Annihilation of self is what most Wraiths believe soul forging does. Then there is the... other option.
😂
It's an under-spoken part, but by no means underutilized: the coins are made from soulsteel, most of the buildings are made from soulsteel, every legionnaire wields soulsteel weapons and armor that are supposed to groan and moan every now and then...If it doesn't appear in a chronicle, it's either a very concrete story that has the players away from the empire, or the ST is doing it wrong.
@@enriquejoseantequerasanche6180 I think op meant in the fandom which usually focuses on shadows and the like
I still have a copy of this book on my shelf. I bought it with no intention on ever using it as a play supplement, simply as a hunch. It really is a well done book and contains a lot of historical information I've only found in bits and pieces over the years.
I only realized that you are German, when you pronounced 'Göhring' correctly. Also the higher voice pitch when you said 'Appell' gave you away. In all honesty, great video, did not expect it when I clicked on it. You know how sensitive this topic is in our county.
Your point about how all creative attempts to qualify the Holocaust do, in effect, trivialize it because nothing can come close to executing a 1:1 recreation of the phenomena/feelings of such a massive occurrence of evil is so spot on. If the research and seriousness is there, then a “game” about the Holocaust is truly no different from a historical fictional film or book about it.
I think a really good point you get at here is that WOD already let you explore supernatural beings who relate to or empathize with The Bad People, and this one forces players into the perspective of the victims of that ideology. It'd actually be weird to have nazi werewolves and not acknowledge the uh, other end of that werewolf's bs, imo.
In this day & age everyone's a damned victim in their own mind to the point that Naziism & islamic conquest & genocide of the world is now trivialized.
In WOD, exploring the bad guys makes things more interesting as to see what happened to these people to make them so messed up - choice or circumstances & how much of both.
I think you're a good narrator of the dark topics. Consider covering more.
youtube don't like that
@@SeetorSEETOR!!!!!
Something messed up is when the Allies rescued eveyone from the camps, the victims who were there for being LGBT were put back in jail to serve out sentences. Even though it was not illegal to be LGBT in Weimar Germany (the pre-Hitler Germany), it WAS STILL illegal in the US, UK, USSR etc. So therefore in both East and West Germany. If as an LGBT person you survived the war and were resued you were just locked up again by whoever rescued you.
If you were a murder or another kind of degenerate, the rules are the same.
We've seen since the 80s what happens to society when lgbt is embraced: a genocidal pandemic that's still killing people around the world today.
All of it over sexual degeneracy of which straight people also contributed, but homosexual men were the largest vector for transmission.
I was born an hour from Oswiecim. I see this book as a tribute to the people who died, to always remember, and never forget.
Oh btw: Apel in Polish means like a muster or role call, or briefing. So yeah, the word is being used correctly in that sense.
"Racist spider people in Australia"
So, regular Australians? XD
I wish I had friends to play these games with . I love your lectures on the lore .
I didn't know I could feel the genuine urge to vomit at a dry description of historical facts, but the way you described the way factional politics worked in the death camps did it.
i thought that it was deeply fascinating just for how horribly awful it was. burger really has a way with describing things that makes this usually somewhat cognitively dissonant history feel completely real to people.
Just a tiny little bit, because it bugs my mind ... iirc the Goering in Berlin is factually not THE Goering, but "just" delusional as a Malkavian that believes himself to be said one, while those that actually knew Goering highly doubt, that its actually him
My Exalted loving ass can never hear terms like "Neverborn" or "Malfean" and not think of Creation instead of WoD.
I mean, Exalted was initially envisioned as a sort of pre-Sundering version of or prequel to the WoD, so the term overlap makes sense. The confusion only really becomes a thing after that initial idea was abandoned.
According to Ends of Empire, Stygia is pretty much gone, but the Dark Kingdom of Wire remains
Oh yeah, one of the better supplements White Wolf put out, and arguably the best out of the Black Dog line because it was real mature content (heavy topics and not just gross-out stuff along with really bad rules, looking at YOU Freak Legion!) handled in a mature fashion. A refreshing change of pace at the time.
I binged all of your videos on the World of Darkness, and honestly it sounds like a significantly more entertaining system of play than most table top rpgs I’ve heard of
From my own experience it is. Alfabusa has a video on the setting as well, its quite good
I couldn't imagine how awkward the conversation would be if you wanted to convince a group of players to join you in this as a storyteller.
"You guys wanna play a game where you're ghosts and your goal is to cross over?"
"That sounds like fun."
"Cool, and uhhh, the setting will be the most horrific tragedy in human history."
Conquest of america was worst
Kinda misleading to pitch it as the "most horrific tragedy in human history", there have been far worse.
@@borderlands10
Far worse? No.
Worse? Arguable.
@@starhalv2427 Yeah, genocides weren't invented back then, but (depending on numbers, which are hard to get right as burgerkrieg himself said) it might be the most extensive one in recorded history.
@@enriquejoseantequerasanche6180
I don't determine that stuff with numbers
"To steal that gradient from people is bad because you rob the victims of their personality and their truth; and you turn perpetrators into an alien caricature that people cannot see themselves reflected in even though they should" ✍🔥
When I first read the title, my multilingual brain had a glitch and I interpreted "concentration" as "focus" and was really puzzled at the thought of a camp for focusing 🤡
I cannot describe the feeling of realizing my mistake and what the video was going to be about
Great video. I have no personal ties to WWII, but for whatever it's worth it felt like a review that took the real world history the book references with the seriousness it deserves. A ttrpg is not a medium I'd ever considered for discussing the holocaust, but I love knowing that a good example of it exists
Your hair has reached a good length now, you’re past the awkward in between length. Congrats🎉 looks great.
I would really like to have a lore video about the mummy books from the old WoD. I kinda liked them, even if they were sometimes broken as fuck and sometimes less clear in their rules. I especially liked the Wu T'ian and Capacocha from the Players Handbook and actually have both the Handbook and the Core Game. I hope Burger will do them in the future.
This sounds like a wholesome family game.
man will talk about anything but werewolf
Really enjoy the covering of the extra/side books of already covered settings. We all know that before Werewolf is done there must now be Crab.
I'm fascinated by Pre-Paradox White Wolf's productions.
It seems like they flipped a coin every time they made a book to see if they were going to be incredibly racist like the Traveller book, the Assamites and Ravnos, or writing an incredibly powerful piece of TTRPG books like Charnel House.
Then they do something like saying an ongoing genocide is a vampire plot causing a diplomatic incident.
I mean, in a world where monsters lurk in the darkness, isn't it implied every atrocity has at least some supernatural plot behind?
@@enriquejoseantequerasanche6180 If it isn't some vampire plot (either by the camarilla or sabbat), it's any one of mage conspiracies, Pentex, or assorted various nasty supernatural entities.
@enriquejoseantequerasanche6180
Involvement? Sure. But there is a difference between being involved and being the mastermind.
The youtube algorithm is going to hate this, but thank you for covering it
I feel like there's no way you could have had a discussion of Wraith in Europe and not mention this subject.
The first time someone explained what Mage was they mentioned entering the hollow earth and killing hitler with dinosaurs and now. Now I finally understand.
That title gave me psychic damage.
James, I genuinely never expected to see you here but it's cool seeing you under a Burger Video.
Just wanted to say I love your content! Your videos are well thought out and insightful and It's a delight to get the notification that you have posted a new Video. Keep on being awesome and much love and support from Tennessee!
Shalom Burgerkrieg. Keep up the good work.
Great video Burger! I think you do an incredible job covering dark subjects like this. It’s the respect and sincerity you give which make this such a great listen
You have to understand that he can't cover Werewolf right now.
It's not april yet.
Well, that comment is weirdly prescient
holy crap, that was so damn good to watch, just in terms of actually talking about the real world things. I feel the Wraith created just enough abstraction from the real world history that it kinda made it easier to comprehend, without it being distorted beyond recognition.
Seeing the title to the video and then the author's name ending in "krieg" is a trip, I gotta tell you.
Ive owned a copy of the book for a long time. Some friends ive shown it to cant get through it just from the art in the book, which is so gorgeous but deeply moving and painful to absorb.
I'm not gonna lie before watching the video I thought was this was gonna be a recipe for disaster, even moreso when you mentioned that it was a WoD splatbook. Good to know it's not a trainwreck.
"They worked hard, they stole, they donated to those in need, they broke hearts, they held their crying friends, they were highly educated, they had never read a book, they were vindictive, they were forgiving, they performed selfless acts, they did unforgivable things"
is like a poem. 47:15
Ah, so Mengele became a Daemon Prince.
A Nurgle one at that, if the infectious diseases thing is any indication.
slanesh...perfection was his thing....the man behind the sun? nurgle
You are one hell of an orator, I must say.
Absolutely exceptional video, Burger. I've been a big fan of yours for ages, and while I don't always agree with you, I can listen to you talk for hours. It's wonderful having an educated, intelligent, fair-minded individual that I can listen to now and again. I love when you cover World of Darkness stuff, I love when you cover real life stuff, this was a great synthesis of the two. (I like all your content, though.) Keep it up, man, thanks for the vid.
Possibly one of your best videos so far. Thank you so much Burger!
This was a surprise, but a very welcomed one. As much as this is a gravely dark topic (pun absolutely intentional), thank you so very much for bringing light to what WoD does well.
Can't wait for the next video
How did you (and commenters) feel about playing out the death camp scenes in Wolfenstein New Order (or maybe it was Collusus, I powered through both one after another so have my memory of what was in what a bit blurred). An interesting take on those games was done by Jacob Geller which I highly recommend.
I'm guessing the title change was due to youtube reasons. Still, good video. I'm as surprised that you made this video as I am that the book exists in the first place.
Scrolling through ideas for a Vampire the Masquerade campaign, I found out that one of the childe of Tzimisce wanted to die and so was turned by Tzimisce into a ball of flesh incapable of dying. Depending on the version that ball of flesh is part of some vampire as a parasite, or an object that's just somewhere.
Which means that you can make a game about a bunch of different vampires trying to get their hands on and diablerise that ball of flesh in order to achieve the great power of the 4th generation, and players find out about it at some point and decide to intervene- not knowing which ones among them want to prevent a rising of a new vampire demigod, and which ones might wants to eat the ball.
Of course, that is a Methuselah Tzimisce, so he might just take over the body of the one who consumes him. If that were the case he might be like Sukuna's finger of the WoD universe.
P.S: I was listening to this video while searching through the wiki, that's why I shared that idea in this comment section.
with some early kaido from one piece
@@raipe125
I'm not sure why you mentioned Kaido?
@@starhalv2427 kaido want to die...is in his introduccion like a character. he jump of skypea...the dont dig in that idea in wano
Any chance you plan on covering Promethean: The Created? I am interested in it a ton, and have been looking for someone to cover it more extensively before me and my wife try to start something up.
Two things are abundantly clear to me:
1: First
2: I will for sure be asleep for this premiere but I'm going to go absolutely ape-crap for this. Love your videos, and I hope this game isn't my immediate perception of it by reading it's name
Wow, you really are doing EVERYTHING ELSE, except for Werewolf: the Apocalypse.😅🤣
yep
We patreons egg him on too
Being a sucker for Wraith’s concepts of memory, moving on and a society of postmortem people making the most from a shite hand…I’ve come to write more than my fair share of the Restless Dead. As a result have I also had the DKofWire play a factor, as the conditions of its population and its environment by default are intensely uncomfortable and guaranteeing someone’s Catharsis if not a Harrowing.
This had led me to, in my chronicles, write the population of the DKofWire to be intensely interconnected and prone to the forming of Redeemed Spectres, Helldivers, and Doomslayers as opposed to everyday wraiths. This is because of the aforementioned interconnected relationship between citizens within Wire, as well as the near constant threat of a Harrowing and of Catharsis. This also means that, despite being in their own circle of hell, the Dybbuks are gaining a foothold in the Shadowlands.
At least, that’s how I write that section of the Underworld. Seeing as the threat of being consumed by Oblivion, of giving into your Shadow, or of the Tempest destroying you is so ever present, the idea that the DKofWire *wouldn’t* become the most hardy, the most determined and people-centric Dark Kingdom in the Underworld….doesn’t make any sense to me. There are *still* wraiths in the DKofWire, they had to have found something to fight against their Shadows and the Spectres, otherwise there wouldn’t *be* a DKofWire. And, what’s more, the idea of victims of tragedy overcoming the horror and trauma of their deaths, is inspiring in the gloomy picture that is the Shadowlands.
Again, this is my personal preference for writing Wire, as I find its conditions so oppressive that it couldn’t survive for decades on end in the way it’s presented to us. If y’all find this idea dumb or something similar, lemme know.
Great video quite amazing as usual
Would really love a orpheus video...or demon, or prometheos, or deviants, or beast...specially beast...it's hard for me to explain the game to my brother but you are always very clear and concise...a real pleasure to hear
Thanks for covering this!
The Army of Fire is such a cool name.
Oh damn I want to see Hunka's face when he croak when he sees a dybbuk in Dark Kingdom of Wire
Not at all what I expected from the title. I'm interested in reading this book for myself, even though I haven't played Wraith yet
A roleplaying game is a pretty engaging medium.
I also like how it captures the cruelty and not only the trauma, but the unwillingness by a lot to deal with that. Which happened, took a while to work that up by annoying people bringing it up. Of course wrath are no better :(
And the cruelty treating dead like that is :( sounds like a good book.
And that like all kinds of people were in camps, so many :(
As a person who loves Wraith, I own this book and it's seriously the most depressing thing White Wolf ever wrote.
The thing you gotta understand with Wraith is that it's probably the darkest of the World of Darkness games even without looking through this particular setting book. Wraith is about people who are already dead, and not all ways to die are nice and peaceful like in your sleep.
I have lots of people whom I play all the other WOD games with, but who won't touch even plain vanilla Wraith, because it's too dark, I don't want to play a game where I've lost already, you're already dead what's the point? etc... etc...
Wraiths only become wraiths because of some sort of unfinished business with the real world.
And by the very nature of the Wraith setting, I'm not surprised that the writers of the game line thought about the questions... Oh, what about this tragic event in history? How did that play out in the Shadowlands? Certainly, an event like that would create a lot of wraiths.
Keep in mind that the actual game stuff in Charnel Houses is more about the aftermath in the Shadowlands. The game stuff is about how Wraith society dealt with this particular point in history and how it affects the modern-day Wraith society. But in order to respect the story of the tragedy that occurred they did the smart thing and told the unvarnished truths about what happened and did their research.
So it's part history book and part RP supplement, they don't try to tie any of the other supernaturals of the WoD into the history. They flat out say that the events were caused by plain old terrible human beings and while supernatural beings might have taken advantage of the situation, it was by human hands that things grew into the terrible tragedy that it was.
It's very clear when you read the book, that this wasn't something made to be disrespectful, it was a way to tell compelling stories about hard truths. I'd say however that in order to use it, you'd have to have a very mindful group who would be able to take the subject matter seriously. And given the want for more escapist fare in our modern day, I'd say that would be a difficult ask for any group.
I'm not sure I could muster a group that would be able to use it, but I'm glad that they told the story even if I never use it.
Because the story of Wraith as a whole is about coming to grips with death and what lies beyond, and I think that by telling this story it's a reminder that there is a real darkness in our real world too and that we shouldn't forget that.
Chess is an NTR harem war where you capture the other king's harem and the Queens are basically amazon warriors.
I hate it but you're right
As usual, awesome video, hope we get Demon next, but ypu gotta compare and contrast the Damned and the Descent
time for mental fortitude training
Who wants to see the Crab book?
Please, someone tell me about the spider people in Australia.
They are called the Ananasi, one of the Fera (the changing breeds). So basically werespiders. They serve Queen Ananasa and work to bring the Triat back to balance.
I don't know why they are racist though.
im so happy to find this channel hell yes i am here both for the hot lore and also for the even hotter takes 💜
Hold on, CRAB BOOK?! You can't just wave over that.
A roleplaying game about the Holocaust, but its done tastefully and with respect while also being fun!? Didn't expect that from White Wolf, considering all I've heard about their past methods of handling their worldbuilding in the older fluff. Glad you made this video though, I don't know if I'm just not looking well enough or if I'm completely blind when searching but I haven't found a lot of the older modules/book settings explored online.
Also, yeah, like you said, the older fluff is a bit clumsy. I didn't mind the book about the Ravnos that much, since it didn't seem to come from a place of disrespect but rather made up an in-universe reason as to why the Romani are discriminated against. Granted the whole "they're only discriminated against because they're straight up better versions of humans" thing is a bit weird in its own way but what I really disliked is the way they failed the Keui Jin, along with Asia as a whole.
There's so many variants of Asian monsters and vampires they could have drawn inspiration from. Gimme a faction of stiff, bureaucratic hopping vampires ruling China as some sort of underworld shadow-Dynasty. Let one of the Asian clans have a battleform or transformation which is that cool undead many Asian cultures share which is straight up just a disembodied head with attached digestive tract that mauls its enemies while the rest of its body safely lies within its lair, the head just regenerating indefinitely and coming at you again and again until you kill the body.
Even the Fox Spirits in folklore are prime ways to expand the Werewolf branch of the setting by making the Kitsune, the Kumiho and the Huli Jing their own local branches of the Garou tribes. The Yokai of Japanese mythology could have been another Legion of Wraiths or straight up just an entirely new Kingdom in the Shadowlands: the Kingdom of Jade already exists, so if creating something completely new wouldn't fit, that faction (which I believe is already led by a wraith named Yama) could just be fleshed out more. We could have even seen an expansion of the Demonic setting by having the entire pantheon of Hinduism just straight up be a bunch of Earthbound Demons. So much missed opportunity.
I think the Kuei-Jin are cool but they really dropped the ball with them. Like there's a lot of cool stuff in there but idk....there are some really good remakes in the STV done by fans though!
I forget the exact list of the other changing breeds, but if werefoxes (not garou, but genuine werefoxes) don't exist already, then the east Asian myths could be explained as a changing breed, predominantly found in east Asia (same way werehyenas only live in sub-saharan Africa).
@@generalgrievous2202 Knowing what I do now about the revised lore for Werewolf in its current editions, the chances of cultural representations of such faction in the World of Darkness is now all but impossible. Which is both sad and a bit dumb, since that's how the setting was crafted: mixed with IRL legends and myths taken from that region's native cultures.
@@picklefathernurgle2719 I actually checked the wiki and the exact idea I described is already in the lore for werewolf btw
I'm sorry...at 13:20 you revealed to me that there are NAZI WIZARDS IN THE HOLLOW EARTH, and I am now inspired to create an entirely morally justified Vampire Chronicle where a Coterie of Vamps turns that whole place into a Charnal House because NAZI WIZARDS os just too good of an enemy idea.
It's mostly the Society of Ether that is down there fighting them. As I understand it the inner world is not a great place for vampires because the "sun" is always up
@@TheBurgerkrieg Oh damn that sucks, you'd think a subterranean space would be ideal for Vampires but it makes sense withe the cosmology of Hollow Earth.
Still, Nazi Wizards is almost as good as Nazi Zombies.
The one time White Wolf got politically sensitive content right -- and oh how right they got it. Shoah is brilliant.
13:46
I fucking love it they’ve got Nazis in the hollow earth
Now all they need is The Nell and Nazis in Antarctica space bases
Boy do I have news for you
Bro promised, and bro delivered
Honestly i wanna see an alt-history Wraith game where WWIII happened.
Holy shit, I guessed "Wraith lore vid" correctly! I'm so proud of myself. If only that pride was enough to counteract the . . . Atmosphere here in this video.
amazing video, as always is a pleasure to listen to you
18:50 ah, yes... "Death of a Thousand Cuts" via the Yellow Scare...
Only ten minutes in, and I can already tell it’s gonna be a good one. Thanks, Burger!
Wonderful video, and very brave to do. It's an excellent book, if not for everyone.
Excellent video. Thank you.
incredible. i have no words
This is wild.
...I'm considering looking into this for Holocaust Remembrance, and see if I can do the research, and maybe do a version of this for my synogogue in the future. Bringing the lives of the dead to life, and remembering them...that is incredibly important in Judaism.
In Judaism, a person is not truly dead until their name is no longer held in the heart of a living person. Familiar, huh?
I think this kind of content is really important precisely to remind us what an unspeakable atrocity the Holocaust was and why we should never, ever come close to that again, especially in our day and age when far-right populism is becoming more popular around the world and a common crutch they rely upon is that "we aren't fascists because we don't defend this very specific fascist point!". The Holocaust wasn't the responsibility of just a restricted clique of particularly radical Nazis, it was also the responsibility of "moderate" Nazis (as much of an oxymoron as that is) and other conservative nationalists in Germany who allowed legislation such as the Reichstag Fire Laws and the Enabling Act to pass because it benefitted them. This kind of historical knowledge is frustratingly obscured, and I will always stand by any attempt to make it more widespread. Genocides don't start out of the blue, they're always the culmination of decades in an unchecked crescendo of hatred.
That being said, I really wish White Wolf had dedicated the same professionalism and seriousness to other subject matters. Alas, Shoah will always be a monument to what they could accomplish when they bothered with writing their works like proper professionals instead of edgy teens throwing whack ideas at a wall.
Deep time, deep history, these phrases all apply to timescales that are too large to comprehend but there are things we can encounter in this lifetime that are still too large to comprehend
So new category
Deep size
The wealth of billionaires, the totality of the holocaust, the speed of light
All of these things have things that are too large to process so they all have deep size
You can’t just say they are deep because deep already has a meaning but you can say that the totality of the holocaust has deep size so the deaths become a statistic because the whole story can’t be understood
You know shit gets real when he isnt holding the mic.
How did he know I was going to exclaim the title aloud before watching?
1:05:23 If it's any consolation to you, many Germans still misspell Auschwitz as _Ausschwitz._
Like in 'ausschwitzen', meaning 'to sweat out'.
I am untröstlich to tell you, Mandy-Jacqueline, but a gas chamber is not a sauna🙄
I watched a video recently that suggested that WW and all the subsequent companies that worked with the WoD ip were, and always have been, scared sh*tless of working with their very own content. That its why the entire property seems to be cursed with failure in subsequent edition books, but especially video games. After watching this, _one could certainly see why that might be!_ Ironic, considering how much influence the game has had in its own industry and across other media.
In a similar vein (ba dum, tiss...), have you heard about Heavy Metal magazine (the sci-fi/fantasy art mag) being cancelled? It had comparable content and influence, but that's also shot it in the foot, but also had the more recent curse of blatant corporate greed around to bleed it to death.
UA-cam will love this one