So, ladies and gentlemen, after my silence, today I have a topic that prickles my panties. It's something I'm sure every Vampire player has had to endure, and today I'm addressing it. Now, let me state my premise, which I'm sure is going to make some people rather unhappy. Malkavians are, in my opinion, both the worst thought out and worst played clan in Vampire: The Masquerade.
So, now that the glove has been thrown down hard enough to break concrete, allow me to hastily backpedal a little. I love the concept of madness, and I even like the concept of infectious madness. Malkavians however, just don't capture this for me. When Vampire: The Requiem introduced Malkavia as a kind of blood-borne infectious curse that any vampire could catch, inflicting its host with a derangement and dementation, I thought the concept was fantastic, a much needed do-over. Malkavians were not respected, they were not brought into the Invictus and certainly not recognized as one of the main clans. Vampires treated them like you would treat anyone who was both crazy and had the potential to make you crazy, like fucking lepers. These things were quarantined at best and hunted down and murdered at worst. This is exactly the sort of thing I thought was good for a horror game, great power at a great cost, and another dark secret to hide. So, without further ado, let's run down the reasons Malkavians suck, both thematically, and almost always as player characters.
Malkavians don't fit in the Camarilla
This is sort of excusable, given that they were in the Cam in the first edition, and they needed a class for all the cookie, campaign derailing loonies to play, but come on, guys. Malkavians add NOTHING to the Camarilla. They contribute NOTHING. Even all their vague 'prophecy' powers and crazy 'insights' pale in comparison to how huge a potential liability they are. Obfuscate and stealth operations can be provided just as well (and far more reliably) by the Nosferatu (or any vampire that decides to get off his lazy undead ass and learn the necessary power). Auspex and forensics are provided by Toreador and Tremere. Dementation is just the stupider lovechild of Presence and Dominate, and serves no purpose beyond causing chaos. There is no plausible reason why the Camarilla have not wholesale exterminated, or at very least refused membership to this entire clan from its inception. Malkavians are potentially even greater walking Masquerade breaches than the Nosferatu, and on top of that are completely unpredictable and unreliable. There's no reason a power structure as efficient and draconian as the Camarilla would ever permit a bunch of unstable loonies to operate.
Now, my opinion on this is that from its inception, Malkavians should have been a Sabbat clan. Think about it. The ethos of vampiric equality makes a lot more sense applying to the Malkavians, and the Sabbat are willing to tolerate weird eccentricities from its members because it's not that concerned with secrecy. Malkavians fit right in with the Tzimisce, the Lasombra, the Blood Brothers and Panders and all the other freaky ne'er do wells that make up the Sabbat and get the Cam's knickers in a twist. Malkavians are an aberration, a genetic dead end in the undead line, and they should be a threat to polite vampiric society.
Malkavians aren't funny
There are a million blog posts detailing how to correctly play Malkavians, so I'm going to jump on the bandwagon. I have seen VERY, VERY few Malkavians played well, and I'll admit that I have fucked them up as much as any other beginning GM or player. The main problem here is that Malkavians attract nerds by being 'misunderstood' or 'crazy' but secretly possess great knowledge that all the other square clans would feel so very silly for ignoring when catastrophe comes. This sort of perspective is perpetuated in the clanbooks, the corebooks and even the video game (though I can excuse Bloodlines, because it goes on to portray the Malkavians, the Voerman sisters and Grout, very well). Malkavians are not misunderstood. People understand perfectly. They are not crazy in the sense that they are quirky or eccentric. These people are fucking sick. Think of a serial killer, or a pedophile. Now imagine those people with self control issues, a supernatural predator inside them, and carte blanche to do whatever they want to humans, provided they cover their tracks. Malkavians make some of the darkest characters possible, and for every Malk that tells jokes in court or does a bad Joker impression, there are a hundred others watching little girls in their rooms, collecting the teeth of the homeless, or torturing people to death in their basements.
When playing a Malkavian, or interacting with one, you have to remember, that no one trusts these people, and for bloody good reason. Crazy people, are by their very definition.....crazy, and you'd have to be an idiot to put careful plans in the hands of a person who might betray you because a voice in his head told him to do so. Consider a Malkavian's disciplines. Obfuscate, so you never know where they are. Auspex, so they can hear your thoughts, and know exactly what you might think of them. Dementation, so you never know what you're doing or seeing is really happening. Now give that monster a thirst for blood and an incurable derangement and you have a very, very sick fucking character to deal with. Would you willingly associate with someone like that? Would you trust someone like that to look after your affairs? Trust them with your secrets? I didn't think so. Even the most open minded coterie or pack should be freaked the fuck out by Malkavians, and treat them with all the respect and courtesy of an escaped mental patient, who's also a telepath and can turn invisible.
Finally, the whole prophecy thing, if it is real, is still as unreliable as everything else about these monsters. Consider a Malkavian who has delusions and sees things. Imagine he sees a legitimate vision of the future. How on earth is he supposed to separate the real from the imaginary? Malkavians may be right once in a while, but then, so might any idiot who can make random guesses, and coincidentally happens upon the truth. The Madness Network is tainted, as always, by the same unreliability that Malkavia inherently inflicts, and really, makes them no more special than any other crazy person.
Madness is personal
Malkavians annoy the shit out of me because they have a monopoly on being 'crazy.' Look at every vampire clan, and tell me that most of the clan weaknesses can't be categorized as one for of insanity or another. Ventrue and Toreador are obsessive compulsive, Nosferatu and Tremere almost universally have some kind of Stockholm syndrome, and Brujah literally have psychotic tendencies. Malkavians just get a blanket crazyness, which seems dishearteningly generic for what could otherwise be an awesome concept. Consider every Malkavian character. Almost all of them would work just as well in another clan with a derangement. The whole incurable thing is even sillier, considering that most vampires don't have any kind of psychiatric help to turn to anyway. Making madness the main 'hat' of the clan also takes the personality away from insanity, and implies that it's something that can exist without a good character to stem from, and that simply isn't true. At least you know a Malkavian is crazy and can avoid them. What about the crazed Toreador serial killer? The schizophrenic Brujah who blacks out and wakes up with blood on his hands? The control freak Ventrue who has burned the minds out of all his human servants? All of these concepts are more interesting and scary than just the 'Malkavian' with some poorly defined craziness and the same disciplines as any other Malkavian.
I also have a gripe with the lore behind the clan. So Malkav was insane, sure, but why did his blood carry the taint of every possible madness? Was he some kind of neurotic cesspool that accumulated every mental illness known to man before he embraced anyone? How would a being like that even function without taking a suntan out of despair? How could a being like that even unify its clan in the supposed and much vaunted 'hive mind' of the Madness Network? Malkavians may be linked, mentally, to their founder and each other, but every one of them is just as unreliable and loony as each other, so this hive mind is going to become very disorganized very quickly, despite the best efforts of everyone involved.
In conclusion, I think Malkavians are a poorly thought out mess, and I know the (maybe three) people who read my blog are going to be rather angry at me taking potshots at everyone's favorite clan. I swear guys, Malks used to be my favorite clan until I thought about it more and realized how conceptually broken they are. It gives me no pleasure to point out problems in one of my favorite roleplaying games of all time, but every time I see Malkavia fanboys extolling the values of the clan, and the supposed omniscience that madness grants a person makes me wish I could give them a genuine mental illness for a day and see what 'revelations' they come up with.
To close off this article, here are some neat examples I think can inspire campaigns that deal with madness realistically.
American Psycho (the book): Yes, I'm aware I've referenced this one before, but Bret Easton Ellis' novel portrays what I consider to be one of the best insane characters I've ever seen. Bateman perfectly shows the internal monologue of a person who is seriously out of touch with reality, and the idea of him having vampiric powers is downright terrifying. As far as I consider a 'perfect' Malkavian character, I would consider Bateman to be my favorite, however I could easily see him as a batshit crazy Toreador or Ventrue, and still think he works well. Madness is not his defining quality, but something that grows from the rest of his qualities being taken to insane extremes.
A Clockwork Orange: Do you want to see what a genuine Malkavian would probably act like? Look no further than Alex DeLarge. Is he the sort of person you would associate with, let alone allow to manage important court responsibilities? Alex is chaotic, he works according to his own rules, and does whatever he feels like, whenever he feels like. He is a danger to himself and everyone in the same city as him, and no one trusts him without having the equivalent of a gun pressed squarely against his temple. This is exactly how society would treat a person who advertises themselves as crazy, and doesn't try to hide it.
Outlast: A fantastic video game set in a mental asylum, and showing exactly how scary truly crazy people are. Every enemy, from the naked twins with machetes who chase you while discussing in very verbose terms how they'd like to eat your liver, to the mountain of muscle that rips your head off while breathing heavily and muttering to himself about 'whores', could be Malkavian, or would fit just as easily in another clan, like Gangrel or Brujah.
Indigo Prophecy: Another batshit crazy game with an even crazier plot where you can never tell what's real and what's another one of your protagonists hallucinations. It makes me think that the best Malkavian characters wouldn't even know what they're derangement is, and would be exactly the sort of normal people who would come to their senses one day in a bathroom with a dead body and blood on their hands and no recollection of the past three hours.
- Kephn
