u/Lampdarker

For those who aren't on the internet enough and are asking to know what the fuck that is:

>What is this really all about? It’s about trauma. It’s about suffering and damage. It’s about abuse both systemic and deeply personal. It’s about being used and abandoned. These are stories of breaking. It’s about the pain, and what comes after it.

>We’ve found empowerment in the reclamation of our dehumanization, in the acceptance and celebration of our place as Other. Sure, we’ll never be people, but even so, maybe we can manage to build a home for ourselves here, in the Empty Spaces between.

There's a lot of painfully purple prose also attached to this genre but that's about the size of it. I don't think I have to explain how this ties into the setting do I? The splats could be summed up as some abandonment of what it means to be human but still being forced to live in a world centered on humans.

You may have used to be human, you may be able to appear human, you may have specific human traits but you're not a human and you can never actually be a human. It's sad as shit and all but there's a certain allure to embracing your sad sad life in order to do cool stuff.

Empty Spaces is about exploring what happens when we question personhood in its most commonly accepted assumptions and embracing being an entity with internal experiences that are alien to most other people.

And it's also about a certain moral nihilism that understands that the only reason murder is bad because people have certain feelings about people being killed in certain ways in the context of normalcy but if you're a vampire then eating someone alive until they stop moving ceases to actually be immoral because it exists with separate feelings in a separate context.

Same with Garou, people can wring their hands about what the Red Talons or Galestalkers do but that's just their opinion it just might be backed up by powerful forces but it's still a subjective judgment of a different group of people.

The Litany is written with Gaia in mind, not humanity just as Pentex has its own opinions on what "good" and "bad" means.

The only "right way" that can exist is what anyone has the means to implement with enough degree and certainty that it subsumes what people agree is real.

And for everyone else, they have to occupy an unoccupied region, an empty space get it?

Between Garou tearing through Pentex facilities with all the subtlety of grizzly bears.

Black Spiral Dancers doing similar feats.

Pentex doing everything bad multinational corporations usually do except with literal divine aid and way more bloodlust.

The Sabbat having entire holidays and religious commands geared towards mass murdering and torturing mortals.

The Camarilla secretly controlling basically every United States institution where you get to carry a gun or baton or fire a missile/pilot a drone.

Specters and whatnot being mainly serial killers and bigots and warmongerers.

Nephandi and even less evil Mages being willing to use large amounts of blood and vital organs as fuel.

Technocrats sending out Men in Black (if not literal Terminators) to do their bidding even if it means burning down a witchcraft bookstore with everyone in it.

It's safe to say that their world has a much higher rate of violent death per capita in much of the world than ours even if it's being actively covered up by the mainstream media and other factors like Delirium or Disciplines and also might disproprtionately be inflicted on homeless people.

As the ST you could choose to decide how much actual murdering happens outside of the locations the PCs are focused on.

But I think it's interesting to question about "butterfly effects" their timeline has compared to ours, even excluding the Week of Nightmares or the Sixth Maelstrom and whatever.

In the real world 1980s-1990s many people have a rose tinted view of it being the end of the Cold War. Not that there weren't a bunch of truly truly violent stuff being ignored by mainstream media both inside and outside the West but not quite on what the World of Darkness must be experiencing on a day to day basis.

Even if we assume the factions are all excellent at "cleaning up after themselves" they can't exactly clean up all the parents whose children abruptly stopped calling them and were never found nor can they clean up the fact that eating at McDonalds turns you into an asshole.

Aside from a vague "everything sucks so bad" how do you portray it in your chronicles?