#bahari

I think it's funny that people still make fun of Phil Brucato for including character options for vagina dentata in Freak Legion back in the 90s, but V5 somehow gets a pass for the Loresheet that lets you get special powers for drinking period blood. This came up when I was looking into Loresheets for V5 since everyone tells me they're the best thing about V5. So I looked into the Bahari one, since I love playing a Lilin, and there's powers for drinking period blood and diablerizing your own childe. The second one is way more egregious since the tragedy of Lilith's murdered children is one of the central ideas of the Bahari faith in game. The idea that diablerizing your own childe would be a fitting sacrifice to Lilith is ludicrous. This goes back to a post I made a while ago about the difference between Grimdark and Gothic Punk. While the Bahari content pre-V5 wasn't always amazing, there was consistency in the belief system. Followers of the Path of Lilith were not supposed to kill for any reason unless necessary, because Lilith is a goddess of life not death, and the murder of her children is central to her mythos. Bahari could still be scary as hell though since many saw torture as an act of faith, and while they wouldn't kill you, the scariest Bahari would torment you until you were no longer you, in an imitation of Lilith tormenting Caine until he accepted his curse and became changed. This makes sense based on the internal logic of Lilith's mythos and what the vampires who worship her believe. Diablerizing your own childe as a sacrifice to Lilith does not make sense, and feels like it came from the writers of Cults of the Blood Gods and Children of the Blood taking a cursory look at the Path of Lilith and Revelations of the Dark Mother and not really understanding how an actual practitioner of that faith might act. It feels like the writers went "Wow the Bahari worship a goddess whose children were killed so they probably kill their own children to sacrifice them to her. This is a Grimdark setting and that's grim af so it makes sense!" It'd be like if there was a Loresheet for playing a Christian vampire and they gave you a special power for crucifying someone. Because in a Grimdark world something being grim and edgy is usually considered more important than it being consistent. But the original portrayal of the Bahari fit much more with the Gothic Punk ethos of Vampire, where the Bahari follow a moral code that, while dark and alien by human standards, is still internally consistent and based in a challenging practice, i.e. not killing anyone because Lilith learned and taught through pain but still saw death as a tragedy. The Bahari belief system is a microcosm of the Gothic Punk setting of Vampire, where the followers accept that they can't escape pain so they try to find meaning in it and a way to overcome everything going against them. Oh and since I promised to say something nice about V5, I don't actually mind there being a power for drinking period blood. The WoD is at its best when it's being aggressively weird and experimental, and that Loresheet is actually consistent with some real world occult practices (Looking at you Aleister Crowley).