Taken by Madness Divine

Daffy Duck does not a Malkavian Make.

by Christopher Lee Simmons (Vampire: The Masquerade | The Chronicles of Nod | Columns)

So there we were, having a staff meeting, trying to hammer down any last minute details on all the new features coming. "What," I asked, "should we call the Vampire column?" After a few minutes of debate, we settled on Chronicles of Nod. all right. Cool, that's out of the way, now we only had to find a writer for it.

"Hey, why don't you write it," they asked. The gauntlet was dropped, I then had to come up with a decent idea for the first column.

I've been playing Vampire: The Masquerade since the first edition hit my gaming store. I've got around two hundred books from White Wolf. I've got all the Clan books, except Malkavian. Don't get me wrong, I've owned it, but it was one of the many books that have been stolen from me in the last three years or so. I've even found it used, for two bucks. Two dollars American, and I didn't re-buy it, not even just so I would have all the Clan books again.

I have a love-hate relationship with Malkavians that borders on neurotic. I hate the teddy-bear-toting-with-automatic-weapons-little-child-Malkavians. It's time to make this clear. Paranoia does not make you Daffy Duck or a childlike jester. I've seen grown men and women regressing to the mental age of around six, it's not a pretty picture. There is nothing cute or amusing about it. Most of you, I'm sure, share my pain and probably wish I would stop spouting the obvious truth. But it needs to be said.

There is a house rule in my games that, to play a Malkavian, you have to make up a back up character. If the Malkavian is silly or cute, it dies. I know this sounds like an asshole-ish thing to do, but there have been times it was either the character, or the player.

Too often, I have been handed character sheets with Paranoia or some other innocuous derangement that would allow the character to be operative in society and not even particularly off-kilter, only to be accosted by Binky the wonder-pup when the game started. By way of example, a player decided that he was paranoid and didn't trust anyone. The game started wonderfully, when suddenly it was his hand that didn't trust anyone and had a personality of its own that he argued with incessantly. In another game, someone chose to play a template in the back of the clan book (Monster, I believe) that looked like Robert Smith and quoted twisted nursery rhymes while murdering children. The concept was one of the few in that book that I agreed with, and he turned it into Krusty the Clown!

Looking at the Clan book nauseates me, with its childish art and playful layout. This book has more in common with the Teletubbies than it does with the twisted psychosis of a madman. Until Vampire Revised, there was nothing to support anything but happy-go-lucky pranksters. The entire idea of "Pranking" has always annoyed me, I much prefer the more recent idea of madness giving them some divine insight that someone thinking normally would never receive.

To be useful, I'm going to try and give examples of a few psychosis and an example of a someone that fits the bill:

• Obsessive/Compulsive: A neat freak who wears gloves so that he doesn't get dirty, the strange man who rearranges all the books in the store to match his home collection. Charlie Chaplin's mother suffered from this illness. Crumbling bread and hiding food in her purse so that they would never take her children away again, even after Charlie bought her a grand house in California. The film Chaplin shows the pain this caused him, as well as the more unsettling aspects of this illness.
• Multiple Personalities: This is possibly one of the most maligned and misunderstood derangements out there. Yes, the sufferer does adopt different personas due to stress and trauma. No, they don't talk to each other, and they aren't aware of each other. Each thinks it is the only persona in the body. Sibyl was possibly the most intense case in recent history, with upwards of thirty documented personalities, you really never knew who you were talking to.
• Schizophrenia: Schizophrenia is not Multiple Personalities. However, if your dog tells you that he's Satan and that you should kill people, you're a good candidate. Schizophrenia manifests itself in delusions related to the trauma that spawned it. Robin William's character in The Fisher King is a prime example of this derangement. A teacher with a fascination for the Holy Grail, he watched his wife get gunned down in a restaurant, and was so traumatized that he began seeing fae and a Red Knight, pushing him and his other knights to reclaim the Holy Grail from a castle outside of Central Park.
• Paranoia: Just because you're paranoid... Fox Mulder from the X-Files, or his friends the Lone Gunmen, are a good example of the kind of conspiracy theorists that suffer from this derangement. Everything is done to cause you harm, specifically, everyone is out to get you, even though you try your best to be nice to them. The Government, or the Illuminati, or maybe just the neighbors, all plan against you, plotting in their back rooms to destroy you slowly.

Malkavians can function in normal society, as the Malkavian Dr. Netchurch illustrates in Time of Thin Blood. Obsessions can be as inconspicuous as having to search for the Book of Nod, Compulsions don't have to be obvious, unless you're very observant. I probably suffer from a compulsive need to collect knickknacks and White Wolf merchandise. I'm sure White Wolf wouldn't mind if I never got clear of my little derangement. Next time you're at a neat freak's house, test them. Move something ever so slightly. If they can't leave it alone, they're probably suffering from a mild obsessive/compulsive disorder.

I'm going to leave you with this quote from Vampire Revised, page 72: "There's no way to tell a Malkavian apart from the "sane" members of other clans...The Malkavians possess a dark intellect that is often - and increasingly - set to frightening purposes."

Until next month...
Shadowmancer