Banu Haqim, Ministry and Cultural/Religious Representation
A Note
As Storytellers, the V:tM IP and setting holds a very important place in our hearts. The universe, and lore, is expansive, and does a wonderful job of incorporating the world we live in, and all it’s history, into a supernatural world.
The gritty nature of the setting, along with the focus on moral quandaries facilitate a unique play experience when it comes to exploring meaningful themes.
We hope to create a game that encompasses this, and allows for rewarding interpersonal experiences, whilst also ensuring that the community we hope to foster remains loving, respectful and safe.
It is worth speaking to the elephant(s) in the room, and we feel as if we would be doing our players a disservice if we didn’t. It is no small secret amongst the tabletop, and live-action scenes, that Vampire the Masquerade has a storied history when it comes to dealing with sensitive issues in an altogether damaging manner, that has often perpetuated harmful and appropriative world views in the setting.
It has always been an unacceptable facet of the game, and the most recent edition, V5, has done a lot of the heavy lifting for us when it comes to making the game much more acceptable. We are aware of the ways the writing can, and has, impacted various marginalised and oppressed communities. This isn’t to say it was a deliberate decision in previous editions - but ignorance in this regard is just as damaging.
As such, we have taken the decision to alter some of the source material at our game, in order to rectify these problems, in keeping with our stance on these matters (as outlined in our EDI statement).
In particular order, the following are a list of ways we hope to actively remove the possibility for harmful representation in our game going forward.
Roleplaying Advice
In previous iterations of V:tM, the representation of Non-Christian faiths left a lot to be desired. It would be an understatement to say that in the cases of the Banu Haqim and Ministry (previously followers of Set) the source material carried with it a large amount of harmful stereotypes. The difficulty in incorporating religions that have been historically demonised into a game centred on moral exploration, and inhumane characters, is that it becomes incredibly easy to misunderstand a complex faith in which we have no lived experience, and portray it in a problematic manner.
In the case of the Banu Haqim, their clan were depicted as predominantly Muslim, and designed with a weakness that led their skin to grow continuously darker as they aged. Furthermore, they were depicted as having an insatiable hunger for the blood of other vampires. Not only did this easily play into themes surrounding islamophobia in game, but it also led to a harmful representation of Islam as a religion in play.
In the case of the The Ministry, they were depicted as hedonists devoted to debauchery, revering the Egyptian deity Set. They often played the roles of tempting influences, corrupters, gamblers and so forth in-lore and in play, whilst also being depicted as being characters that originated in the middle-east, or Northern Africa. Again, it is easy to see how these themes, when applied to V:tM and being aligned to a specific group of cultural practices and ethnicities, could (and did) become problematic.