As a kind of author’s note, I’m cross-posting this piece I wrote on RPGnet this morning, in response to the question of resemblance between the World of Darkness (of Vampire and Changeling) and the real world. Read on after the jump.

The secret monsters of the World of Darkness are still the fault of humankind. If humans were more vigilant (uh… Hunter), they wouldn’t get away with it. It’s ultimately our fault that the world has gone to shit because we aren’t solving the crimes, we aren’t cleaning up the bad areas, we aren’t admitting how bad things are, gargoyles or not. That’s part of the central metaphor, and it’s why Morality is a key trait for normal people.

I see the World of Darkness as the real world with the contrast dialed up. I think Damnation City shows this—the bleak areas are more bleak and the nicer areas are more isolated, more obtuse, more willing to ignore what’s wrong. In the nice part of town, it’s Panic Room, where things are cleaner but the crimes are just as bloody. In the rest of town, it’s as much like The Crow or Se7en as you like. (Rag on it if you want, but the design work behind The Crow: City of Angels is fucking brilliant.) Ultimately, as a toolbox setting, you can dial the game world as far toward Sin City (high contrast) as you want. I, personally, leave it a lot closer to Se7en, where your home is a refuge but the industrial callousness of the outside world makes the dishes tremble as it rattles by.

I, personally, don’t think fictional evil necessarily trivializes real world crime. It can have a profound dramatic impact as metaphor or allusion, and it can enable us to talk about things that we otherwise might not. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, what do we talk about when we talk about vampires feeding and changelings fleeing? At first, this stuff begins wholly imaginary, maybe even silly in its Blade-like escapism with high action and melodrama. But, every now and again, it can lead to serious consideration of the issues these games represent.

As I’ve said before, Vampire‘s horror manifests, in my experience, more on the ride home after a game than it does during the game. I think that vital reflection is key to understanding how the World of Darkness works. The Morality and Humanity mechanics are designed to provoke that reflection (which is why I generally do a Morality survey at the end of a session rather than during, with necessary exceptions to prove the rule).

The conversation you have that reveals the potential relevance of issues brought up in the World of Darkness might be with yourself, it might be with your gaming group, it might be here, but the game is capable of provoking that, and that’s pretty remarkable when you consider why we tend to play.

So the World of Darkness might be, to quote Belloq, a shadowy reflection of us, but I do think it is cosmetically, graphically worse than the real world. Or, and this is essential, it is worse than the real world as we, the game players, so often experience it. The real world can spike into the fearful symmetry of the World of Darkness (which is not only plagued by fearful symbolism but is fearfully symmetrical to our own world, while symbolizing it) and the inexplicable, near-supernatural horror that comes from not understanding our surroundings, but the characters in the World of Darkness face it more often.

To go back to Wilde, though, what do we talk about when we talk about the real world? My real world is lifetimes different than the real world in Somalia, Myanmar, or Iraq.

An elemental part of the horror of the World of Darkness is that our world can inspire its kind of stories. Its meant to be different enough to lure us into thinking its escapism, but real enough that we discover we’re brushing up against real issues like kidnapping and abuse, rape and murder. But the key is that the moral dilemmas… are the same.