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<youtube>B7r5C2f_I1E?si=X9OVBi4TodrHnmZE</youtube> | = Part 1: ''Welcome to Gehenna 2.0'' = | ||
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<youtube>B7r5C2f_I1E?si=X9OVBi4TodrHnmZE</youtube> | |||
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== Related threads == | |||
[https://www.reddit.com/r/vtm/comments/1l6idmm/gehenna_20_reframing_gehenna_as_digital_apocalypse/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button Discuss this post on Reddit] | |||
== Quick Synopsis == | |||
''It's a talking head video about a possible future gehenna interpretation. Think about a point in time where a possible cyberpunk universe will meet with the kindred's curse. Check it out while it's still relevant. Tomorrow this will old news, judging by how rapidly technology progresses. I had to get the message out quick and dirty.'' | |||
== Behind the Scenes == | |||
To me, it is painfully clear that this is the direction where VtM is going to head in the future. World of darkness must resonate with people. This is the way. The other option is that VtM will get stuck in the 90s, like a period piece. At that time Masquarade was still attainable and maybe neccessary. Good times (best times really), but times be changing! | |||
Oh, I also did a 12-min jam session as background music out of pocket. | |||
Please send them bats my way in the video's comment section if you liked it. 🦇🦇🦇🦇 | |||
Thanks! | |||
== Transcript == | |||
''Full transcript of the video follows:'' | |||
Chapter I — A little history behind these stories | |||
To start off: | |||
Both Vampire The Masquerade which was created in 1991 and Cyberpunk 2020 created in 1988 emerged in a late Cold War/postmodern world. Let’s face it. The Cold War Ends but nothing feels resolved. When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, people expected peace, prosperity, and clarity. Instead, the 1990s brought us global capitalism in overdrive without shared morality. Colossal cultural fragmentation, lacking grand narrative. A technological acceleration, but also disconnection. Surveillance, corporatism, social decay ANYTHING but freedom. | |||
This triggered what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called “the death of the Real.” | |||
“We didn’t defeat the enemy—we absorbed them. Now there were no villains… and no heroes either.” | |||
The 2020 didn’t become better either. COVID brought us measurable social decay, there is horrifying savage low-high tech war going on not even 600 miles (ca. 1000 km) regardless where you live on this planet. And of course there rise of the self-improving savant machines, doing their distributed matrix operations on an absurd scale. | |||
Another French phylosopher -Jean-François Lyotard- said postmodernism is defined by the end of “meta-narratives”—big stories that give life meaning (God, nation, progress, ideology). | |||
Obviously humans can’t handle the truth on a large scale. The alienation of meaning needs art! To illustrate, look no further no than your local warzone regardless how big or small, actual or figurative! We required new myths to keep our humanity alive. | |||
Thus, here we are: As we looked inward we found monsters and machines, Vampire the Masquarade became the Bible with it’s cathedrals, blood rites and aristocracy whereas Cyberpunk became the prophecy of data, prosthetics and megcities. They both meet in the present - in a dark alley lit by neon, haunted by memories. | |||
The soul became the battlefield, and neither a vampire nor netrunner can go back to who they were. | |||
It’s a deeply post-human melancholic ballad. | |||
In Vampire, the soul betrays. | |||
In cyberpunk, the body betrays. | |||
I am very glad you’re still here as have reached a common ground. | |||
Chapter II — The perfect storm of the digital gehenna & the nature of gods | |||
The gehenna, the end of all things. A prophecy with many interpretations in the Vampire the Maquarade universe. Some suspect it’s a ruse. A mere conspiration. Others believe it to the teeth. A literal red star appear on the dark skies, and anicent kindred gods -Antedeluvians aka founding fathers of the vampire clans- return… or maybe thin-bloods -the dilution or bloodline entropy -will take over putting an end to their curse. | |||
To be honest I don’t give a damn about lore approval and canon politics! I came to ask you this: | |||
What’s if all those above became irrelevant once the Kindred’s curse meets the machine’s mirror. The mirror which was called upon by humanity. The masqurade frays not with fire, but with metadata. The soul (or blood resonance) becomes measurable, editable. The Kiss can be reversed, studied, replicated. Diablerie could be digitized. Anonymity, a key cornerstone for keeping the narrative under control is getting ever so elusive — to the point of absurdity… And so does the mystique of being a vampire. | |||
There is a tipping-point where it all makes sense. Just around at the edge of humanity’s escape velocity towards the technological singularity. A convergence point where the biological, spiritual, and digital collapse into one system. A singular technological revolution that sounds the alarms. A breakthrough allows scanning, storing, and modifying subjective human experience—memories, emotions and spiritual states. Hereby I present you: | |||
“Soul Mapping via Neural Interface” — Your grandpa now can run on a single google collab instance. The soul, once sacred, now streams at 60 frames per second. | |||
The kindred of course are not blind. They saw this coming, but just like Brooklyn Bridge is being eaten away slowly by rust, their politics, grudges, and myths kept them distracted long enough. They watched humanity erode until they forgot that they once golden age is about give out with a corroding snap. The news instil general uneasiness in the zeitgeist. Regardless if they action, just the psychic pressure alone is enough rustle their ancestors awake. | |||
The nature of these ancient gods, just like any entity outside the edge of our knowledge is ambiguous at best. Closest analogy might be a 4 dimensional being. We can’t comprehend their powers, just speculate. They manifest as aberration in our reality. Often as supernatural phenomenas and system glitches. They embody the sins of vampire existence: hunger, ambition, betrayal, parasitism. Their return isn’t vengeance. Instead, it’s the inevitable consequence of everything the Kindred have ever done. When they wake, they don’t say, “I’m here to destroy you.” | |||
They say: | |||
“You made me. You carried me in your blood. You fed on mortals like cattle, called it power, called it need. You are me. Now face it." | |||
Case on point: They didn’t asked to be awakened, but just like a sleeper smelling smoke, they didn’t had a choice. | |||
This reframes Gehenna’s true purpose as a last ditch effort. A hostile recolonisation by originators of blood. Technology destroys mysticism. The Antediluvians wake because they must reassert myth as reality before it vanishes into code. The machine doesn’t care about stories. It records, quantifies, controls. | |||
“Gehenna was never about death. Gehenna was the moment the story no longer needed us to tell it.” | |||
Chapter III - PROFIT | |||
But corps don’t fear vampires or old gods. Their main concern is loss of control. Or losing their customer base. | |||
As a matter of fact, whatever we fear as humans on an existential scale, for them it’s just a single row on a shoddy risk-register excel-sheet as part of their ISO-9001 framework. Does this sound wierdly specific? Well that’s because I give you my word as veteran corpo rat it’s fucking truth. Been there, done that. Each risk item is simple as Eliminate, Mitigate, Transfer, do jack shit OR… Exploit for opportunities. So let me hit you with this one: | |||
Profit survives. Even if gods wake up, someone will try to IPO them. | |||
Yeah, LAUGH! Fucking laugh. Laugh as much as you want! Now corps can issue immortal contracts for Masquarade maintenece with full package PR cleaning, digital camouflage, and blood supply logistics. As a side benefit, they get endless R&D subjects as they create something which they call “exciting new market opportunities”. Oh! And should the client threaten the market stablility, they might trigger their “Gehenna insurance clause” if things get too mythic | |||
Boy oh boy. Climbing the corporate ladder just became so much fun. Your client never dies, your boss at best lives on, which seems like eons, but don’t bother to ask what happened to the poor sales rep Jeanatte. It was cheaper to let her to be drained and cough the insurance or lawsuit money, than to face the customer’s wrath - or possible termination of their contract with the company. We can’t lose that client. | |||
And of course big corp will come around next quarter with a huge smile saying that employee attrition is nominal, revenue is up. Company values and all that happy times bullcrap. | |||
Come on don’t gasp. Cheer up! They might even throw in a little gofundme for her funeral. You know the type. Co-workers with trembling hands veemo out 10s to 100s, but the account operations manager has to drop 100,000 because the donors list is public, and he let the situation escalate… For a reason. Only hushed whispers from HR tell the true story, but a swift conigitve dissonance takes over as soon as they check their bank account. Upon seeing from where their paycheck is coming from, they are gently reminded to serve the company, NEVER the employee. | |||
RIP Jeanatte. They are psychos. All of them. Nice work on the customer engagement though. | |||
Latest revision as of 14:57, 23 June 2025
Part 1: Welcome to Gehenna 2.0
Related threads
Quick Synopsis
It's a talking head video about a possible future gehenna interpretation. Think about a point in time where a possible cyberpunk universe will meet with the kindred's curse. Check it out while it's still relevant. Tomorrow this will old news, judging by how rapidly technology progresses. I had to get the message out quick and dirty.
Behind the Scenes
To me, it is painfully clear that this is the direction where VtM is going to head in the future. World of darkness must resonate with people. This is the way. The other option is that VtM will get stuck in the 90s, like a period piece. At that time Masquarade was still attainable and maybe neccessary. Good times (best times really), but times be changing!
Oh, I also did a 12-min jam session as background music out of pocket. Please send them bats my way in the video's comment section if you liked it. 🦇🦇🦇🦇 Thanks!
Transcript
Full transcript of the video follows:
Chapter I — A little history behind these stories To start off: Both Vampire The Masquerade which was created in 1991 and Cyberpunk 2020 created in 1988 emerged in a late Cold War/postmodern world. Let’s face it. The Cold War Ends but nothing feels resolved. When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, people expected peace, prosperity, and clarity. Instead, the 1990s brought us global capitalism in overdrive without shared morality. Colossal cultural fragmentation, lacking grand narrative. A technological acceleration, but also disconnection. Surveillance, corporatism, social decay ANYTHING but freedom.
This triggered what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called “the death of the Real.”
“We didn’t defeat the enemy—we absorbed them. Now there were no villains… and no heroes either.”
The 2020 didn’t become better either. COVID brought us measurable social decay, there is horrifying savage low-high tech war going on not even 600 miles (ca. 1000 km) regardless where you live on this planet. And of course there rise of the self-improving savant machines, doing their distributed matrix operations on an absurd scale.
Another French phylosopher -Jean-François Lyotard- said postmodernism is defined by the end of “meta-narratives”—big stories that give life meaning (God, nation, progress, ideology).
Obviously humans can’t handle the truth on a large scale. The alienation of meaning needs art! To illustrate, look no further no than your local warzone regardless how big or small, actual or figurative! We required new myths to keep our humanity alive.
Thus, here we are: As we looked inward we found monsters and machines, Vampire the Masquarade became the Bible with it’s cathedrals, blood rites and aristocracy whereas Cyberpunk became the prophecy of data, prosthetics and megcities. They both meet in the present - in a dark alley lit by neon, haunted by memories. The soul became the battlefield, and neither a vampire nor netrunner can go back to who they were.
It’s a deeply post-human melancholic ballad.
In Vampire, the soul betrays. In cyberpunk, the body betrays. I am very glad you’re still here as have reached a common ground.
Chapter II — The perfect storm of the digital gehenna & the nature of gods The gehenna, the end of all things. A prophecy with many interpretations in the Vampire the Maquarade universe. Some suspect it’s a ruse. A mere conspiration. Others believe it to the teeth. A literal red star appear on the dark skies, and anicent kindred gods -Antedeluvians aka founding fathers of the vampire clans- return… or maybe thin-bloods -the dilution or bloodline entropy -will take over putting an end to their curse.
To be honest I don’t give a damn about lore approval and canon politics! I came to ask you this:
What’s if all those above became irrelevant once the Kindred’s curse meets the machine’s mirror. The mirror which was called upon by humanity. The masqurade frays not with fire, but with metadata. The soul (or blood resonance) becomes measurable, editable. The Kiss can be reversed, studied, replicated. Diablerie could be digitized. Anonymity, a key cornerstone for keeping the narrative under control is getting ever so elusive — to the point of absurdity… And so does the mystique of being a vampire.
There is a tipping-point where it all makes sense. Just around at the edge of humanity’s escape velocity towards the technological singularity. A convergence point where the biological, spiritual, and digital collapse into one system. A singular technological revolution that sounds the alarms. A breakthrough allows scanning, storing, and modifying subjective human experience—memories, emotions and spiritual states. Hereby I present you:
“Soul Mapping via Neural Interface” — Your grandpa now can run on a single google collab instance. The soul, once sacred, now streams at 60 frames per second.
The kindred of course are not blind. They saw this coming, but just like Brooklyn Bridge is being eaten away slowly by rust, their politics, grudges, and myths kept them distracted long enough. They watched humanity erode until they forgot that they once golden age is about give out with a corroding snap. The news instil general uneasiness in the zeitgeist. Regardless if they action, just the psychic pressure alone is enough rustle their ancestors awake.
The nature of these ancient gods, just like any entity outside the edge of our knowledge is ambiguous at best. Closest analogy might be a 4 dimensional being. We can’t comprehend their powers, just speculate. They manifest as aberration in our reality. Often as supernatural phenomenas and system glitches. They embody the sins of vampire existence: hunger, ambition, betrayal, parasitism. Their return isn’t vengeance. Instead, it’s the inevitable consequence of everything the Kindred have ever done. When they wake, they don’t say, “I’m here to destroy you.”
They say: “You made me. You carried me in your blood. You fed on mortals like cattle, called it power, called it need. You are me. Now face it."
Case on point: They didn’t asked to be awakened, but just like a sleeper smelling smoke, they didn’t had a choice.
This reframes Gehenna’s true purpose as a last ditch effort. A hostile recolonisation by originators of blood. Technology destroys mysticism. The Antediluvians wake because they must reassert myth as reality before it vanishes into code. The machine doesn’t care about stories. It records, quantifies, controls.
“Gehenna was never about death. Gehenna was the moment the story no longer needed us to tell it.”
Chapter III - PROFIT But corps don’t fear vampires or old gods. Their main concern is loss of control. Or losing their customer base.
As a matter of fact, whatever we fear as humans on an existential scale, for them it’s just a single row on a shoddy risk-register excel-sheet as part of their ISO-9001 framework. Does this sound wierdly specific? Well that’s because I give you my word as veteran corpo rat it’s fucking truth. Been there, done that. Each risk item is simple as Eliminate, Mitigate, Transfer, do jack shit OR… Exploit for opportunities. So let me hit you with this one:
Profit survives. Even if gods wake up, someone will try to IPO them.
Yeah, LAUGH! Fucking laugh. Laugh as much as you want! Now corps can issue immortal contracts for Masquarade maintenece with full package PR cleaning, digital camouflage, and blood supply logistics. As a side benefit, they get endless R&D subjects as they create something which they call “exciting new market opportunities”. Oh! And should the client threaten the market stablility, they might trigger their “Gehenna insurance clause” if things get too mythic
Boy oh boy. Climbing the corporate ladder just became so much fun. Your client never dies, your boss at best lives on, which seems like eons, but don’t bother to ask what happened to the poor sales rep Jeanatte. It was cheaper to let her to be drained and cough the insurance or lawsuit money, than to face the customer’s wrath - or possible termination of their contract with the company. We can’t lose that client.
And of course big corp will come around next quarter with a huge smile saying that employee attrition is nominal, revenue is up. Company values and all that happy times bullcrap.
Come on don’t gasp. Cheer up! They might even throw in a little gofundme for her funeral. You know the type. Co-workers with trembling hands veemo out 10s to 100s, but the account operations manager has to drop 100,000 because the donors list is public, and he let the situation escalate… For a reason. Only hushed whispers from HR tell the true story, but a swift conigitve dissonance takes over as soon as they check their bank account. Upon seeing from where their paycheck is coming from, they are gently reminded to serve the company, NEVER the employee.
RIP Jeanatte. They are psychos. All of them. Nice work on the customer engagement though.