Review Review: Class Review: Gorinich's Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood

 

Still from Dracula (1931) featuring Frances Dade as Lucy Westenra and Count Dracula as himself

Fulfilling my own prompt, reviewing another's blogpost, for Glaugust 2026. I actually found it difficult to find the right sort of post to respond to, since there's many great posts in the glog scene that I just have unvarnished appreciation for, and so there's little engaging in my review of it. Vivanter's December 2024 review of a class by Zmia Garina, the Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood, is actually interesting in itself, and certainly worthy of comment, even at a remove of over a year. 

It takes a certain amount of bravery to turn a legitimate analytical lens to someone else's blogpost. This is someone you know in the remote-yet-personal way of being fellow netizens of a discord server. You might play games with them or chew the fat, and any criticism seen as being negative feels way more personal than reviewing a movie by some famous director you'll never meet.

And yet even the most casual blogpost engaging with the hobby can be engaged as art or as rhetoric, and there's something satisfying in taking an engaging OSR post and "taking it seriously," laying out how you think it works and what it has to say. This is what Vivanter's review is taking up, which is all the more impressive because unlike his other class reviews he is grappling with the topic of playing "a girl who by her very nature (biological and mystical) attracts the violence of male strangers", and fair enough. If I was writing such a review, I would definitely be nervous that if I didn't write it perfectly, my acquaintance would think I was calling them an abuse apologist or something.

Is Vivanter's review written perfectly? I don't know, it's well-considered and well-written, but the achievement isn't in making it impossible to be misunderstood but trusting that if you write carefully and with good intentions, people you care about will take it in its intended spirit. In this wild world, that trust is never guaranteed to be fulfilled. A dragon is something which is hard to kill, and yet you must try.

Notably, the acquaintance of the reviewer and the reviewed here facilitates the author to respond. If you follow the link to Zmia Garina's original review, you'll see that a sentence has been crossed out and a note added accepting one of the main points of Vivanter's review. This isn't the sort of thing that we typically consider when we think about critical review. The artifact being analyzed doesn't usually textually change as a result of review. Yet in the world of DIY RPGs of the OSR, it's NBD to not only incorporate suggestions and points of contentions in later posts, but to edit the original piece.

With preliminary discussion of the context around the review covered, I move now to reviewing the review itself.

Vivanter's immediate consideration with the Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood is a very sensible one. He notes that the class, with abilities like "Object of Desire" and "Can I Fix Him?" is engaging directly with the fraught tropes and attitudes around girlhood, toxic romance, and essentially the sexual horror/horrific sexualism of the vampire story. His review does not preclude the suitability for such themes at the table, but observes that such themes might be a surprise to the incautious DM. The class is written with a light-hearted tone and makes jocular references to tumblr memes, and while it has a couple warning notes about keeping things comfortable for the table, Vivanter says that you "should have a plan for working through these themes with your table that exceeds a simple safety conversation".

This is such a reasonable suggestion and it is based in such a reasonable concern that I surprise myself a little bit by reflexively disagreeing. The extent to which these themes would benefit from extra discussion above and beyond the basic will obviously vary group to group, so the first thing I imagine is adding this class to a game with the people I usually play with and expecting no issues. I would definitely want to establish a consensus about where our lines are for themes of abuse, interpersonal dynamics, and blood-letting, but isn't that sort of the simple safety conversation-- coming to consensus on subject matter?

On the face of it, I would say yes. But discussions of subject matter are sort of bald without discussion of tone and genre, and it's in those determinations that I think a lot of the tension of Vivanter's review lies. The difference between a relationship that's "fascinatingly complex" and one that's "concerningly abusive" often lies in questions of genre.

The way Vivanter writes his review, I would say he is totally aware of the significance of this distinction, but I would have wanted to see the topic treated more broadly and more explicitly. He mentions that Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl can be "usefully applied" alongside sources like Twilight, but mixing your condiments in this way is what I would caution people to think twice about and discuss with their table above and beyond normal conversational aids. There's a stance towards "fucked up" romances popular among the same tumblr set that produced the memes which inspired this class that claims some agency for the Completely Normal Girl. 

 What does it mean to say "i could make him worse"? It's a term I only hear used for fictional characters, whose bad traits can be safely enjoyed from the remove of being totally outside the context of their existence. The speaker can ignore or disengage in the medium the character exists in, or personally rewrite it. Suffering caused by a "toxic" character can be romanticized, limited, and controlled-- the paramour can be abusive, but can't abuse the reader or the author. To say "i could make him worse" is to put oneself in the role of the Completely Normal Girl, but maintaining some of that authorial stance which affords the invulnerability of framing, which allows the player of the Completely Normal Girl whatever they get out of participating in a story about dating a devoted yet bloodthirsty vampire without the potential for real-life harm. It's a view of fictional abuse that allows it to be problematic (and we all love to grapple with interesting fictional problems) without itself being a problem, such as would necessitate the end of the relationship dynamic.

 This complexity, through which the same relationship trope is either light-hearted or deeply challenging depending on tone and genre, is why I think Vivanter says Zmia Garina "leads the class with a note that it 'touches on themes of romance and sexuality,' but the text doesn't directly contain mechanisms for either, so we must conclude that the rest of the class takes this relationship dynamic as subtext." And since that subtext may drastically differ depending on the background familiarity and buy-in of the players, I have talked myself into agreeing with Vivanter's point about the need to go over things with the players extra-well before introducing the class to the average game. I just wish he had spoken more to this point, so I could see if we were thinking along the same lines or if my reasoning is totally alternate to his.

At least half of the review covers this interesting thematic topic in this extensive way, to the point where the review of the actual mechanics the class uses feels like a secondary matter. I am falling into the same pattern. His description of Vitae, the defining resource of the class, skips over a couple of points that I think bear mentioning. The amount of Vitae a Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood generates is actually quite a lot, and managing it is likely to be a big deal for the first two levels, when it's going to fill (one supposes) 3d6 inventory slots per day if not quickly spent. The most potent ability the class gets is at the C template, when Vitae no longer fills inventory slots. There's something to be said also about the idea that this is a class where advancement largely comes from a succession of realizations about oneself, as opposed to improvement to become worthy, a classic gendered storytelling distinction.

Vivanter's advice about the potential upside of more guidance on the introduction of vampires is a straightforward good point. I think there's something really neat in how the class imagines a progression of randomly encountered monsters being converted into hirelings and then retainers. The procedure feels like it would slot satisfyingly into a standard dungeon adventure game, and yet I feel like if I ran this I would make a simple generator for romance-ready gothic monsters just so I have something to go off of when designing what would eventually become dozens of potential suitors. 

The review has a few more thoughts about the class features, but I don't feel the need to comment on those comments individually. They're well-considered, and where I might disagree nevertheless I'm glad to read them and try them on. It's a rare compliment to see someone thinks about your glog class with this degree of care, and I appreciate that Vivanter's review embraces the concerns and considerations useful to playing a glog class off of someone's blog. Ultimately, while I'm not a partisan for constantly reviewing everything and making the blogosphere a more "serious" realm for "critique," where it appears I wouldn't object if it held as a goal Vivanter's approach.

 

The Laws of Man

Quick premise on da boss's orders: 

Shrewfield-On-Avon, a rustic village whose particular location has swamped it with glaziers and pane-mongers after a longstanding window excises has ended. Home to a hydraulics inventor/weapons tycoon who has whipped up a great mechanical manor, all pumps and engines and mills and floor-to-ceiling glass. 

Recently people of the village have been losing time, sometimes coming to with some half-formed machine they were seemingly in the middle of building. As the amnesiac tinkering continues, some start to drown themselves and no one knows why. Everyone blames the tycoon, but can see everything that goes on in his glass mansion except for his automatic water closet and his daughter’s boudoir, both of which are walled with stone.

Turns out, all the tycoon’s piping has awoken a chthonic spirit of some kind— you might call her a cave fairy or cobold or  echo. She’s fascinated with using newfangle hydraulic power to increase her own abilities and suborn the surface world into her own ambitions for underdark politics, so she’s been belching cave gas up from ponds and streams. When someone breathes enough of the gas, she can control them for a while. Other than these duped and temporary bodies, she has only one ally— the daughter of the tycoon, whom she has seduced. With the spirit’s instructions, the daughter has begun convincing her father to invite a loose cannon admiral to court her— a deadly acquisition for the spirit!

 

Long Fool's-Errand to the Grave (Location)

Battle Scene, by Samuel Johnson Woolf

 Written in the words of A.E. Housman, at the request of Ms. Screwhead, for Glaugust 2026.

Encounters
1. lads, in love with the grave.
2. new young men/ The sergeant he must see
3. Harnessed angels, hand on sword
4. Leaden Lover, one for women to admire/ in his finery of fire
5. master, right or wrong; make you dance as they desire/ With jail and gallows and hell-fire
6. the dead call the dying/And finger at the doors.


Areas
1. The sergeant
Monster: The sergeant. "'Young man, a soldier will you be, for thirteen pence a day?' He will lie. The desire of his heart? "Her strong enchantments failing. For things will all be over then, between the Queen and me."
Treasure: the sweetheart he chose

2. The Inn of Night
Contains: soldiers from the wars returning, bridles hang in stall. A charger remarks "We for a certainty are not the first have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled heir hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed whatever brute and blackguard made the world."
Treasure: lockbox. Guarded by proud and angry dust (save negates)

3. Pool and Brook
Treasure: flowers among the morning dews— bells, flower of a heart whose troubles must have been worse than mine, a herb of healing (1d6).

4. the desire of his heart
Trick: Oh dark is the chamber and lonely, and lights and companions depart (save negates)
Search: reveals treasure. The heart of maid/ and man together (casts charm, 2 charges)

5. Underground
Treasure: the Pole-Star. He wears the turning globe. Can be placed in a headpiece clever (+1 wisdom)
Searching: beyond a shadow not of night, the eternal masonry of the gates of hell.

6. The Highway Marches
Passes through all the Lovely Lands of Earth
Where clover whitens the dead man's knoll you pass: buried, my sword that will not save. (-1, cursed)

7. Taken Town
Contains: signs of all that croaks for war. Carrion cheap to marketplace and people. Idol to Saturn or Mercury (prayer gives flight 1/day, but echoes list to silence now where gods told lies of old)

8. Beneath the Hawthorn
Monster: the lover and his lass have heard the soldiers pass, and both are sighing.
Clue: from over hill, fife and drum (area 9)

9. Mattress of Loam
Monster: The lancer squadron is riding. "Who would not sleep with the brave?" In love with the grave. They drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.

10. Her Towers of Fear in Wreck
Obstacle: the house is fallen in the slimepit and the mire.
Monster: Her strong enchantments failing, The Queen of air and darkness begins to shrill and cry, 'To-morrow you shall die.' (stats as banshee)
Treasure: Limbeck, dried poison

(Do Not Distribute) RPG discourse terms 2027-2032

 These are the terms we’ll be having people pick up starting in early 2027 and ongoing through the following five fiscal years, to accommodate the need for rhetorical conflict and animus in the RPG scene.

Friendplay: long-form RPG play in which PC-NPC relationships are a focus of play, either through roleplayed scenes which accrue “Finity Points” or a procedure that partially elides actual interactions. Born of an unholy alliance of character-forward 5e players and grognards who decided that it was unbalanced for players to call on friends and allies without diligently maintaining those connections. There will be broad disagreement about whether you’re a better person for liking friendplay or hating it.

Exodus: term describing the work or play culture of the influencers and designers (and their fans) who stopped playing WotC D&D after it was revealed in 2028 that Hasbro has been paying off-duty FBI agents to discourage people writing fantasy heartbreakers. Play culture for this loud-but-small group largely coalesces around Fireburn, a close clone of 5e, but with a core catperson ethnicity and the Critical Role classes more closely integrated.

Boardguys: fighter classes which are neither knights nor evocative of naked women with big swords.

Lowife/Hiwife (LW/HW): variations on the newly ascendant “wandering midwives” campaigns style, either one that ramps up the potential horror inherent in the genre or totally excises it. Lowife play will have a small core of fierce advocates that call mainstream midwife RPGs silly, while Hiwife players will mostly be reduced to convincing the DM of their dungeon game to include a Witch-Sister class. Almost everyone will agree that arguing about points of taste here is folly, but everyone with a bluesky or blog will be forced to have annoying arguments about it anyway.

Stray Dog: an indie RPG publisher or developer, but not one of the “big” ones. A claim to authenticity as being True Indie.

Illiterature: pejorative for material deemed too interested in readability and ease of use.

GSR: “Good Sword Roleplaying”. Another term for being OSR but not bad. After tepid adoption by a few folks on bluesky, it becomes the hobbyhorse term of abuse on villain blogs no one reads.

Frithic Underworld/Watershipcrawl: dungeoneering or other forms of classic D&D play, but with no procedure for the PCs to use violence. Originally an attempt to deproblematize D&D, the early attempts accidentally found a form of play fun on its own merits, inspiring creative works in various RPG genres.

Fedder: pejorative for people who “still” play WotC D&D, imputing that they must like how Hasbro hired those FBI agents. Most fedders have never heard the term.

Alto: style of play born from a well-written but at points vague or facetious blogpost, allegedly one in which inventory management and timekeeping are emphasized. Unclear to many how this differs from “normal OSR” play, its advocates will give ephemeral or mysterious answers. It won’t even be a grotty grognard thing, but the production of cool people who go to parties and know how to cook good food. The modules they publish won’t seem irregular, though they will be artfully done. Sometimes a blogger will publish an adventure they’ve been working on and a stranger will just comment “sooo alto :~)”.

Toxico: self-label for those who don’t like safety tools/conversational tools, the idea that there are games with different ways to divvy up DM/player responsibilities, or explicit norms about “respecting others” in discussion forums, and feel that their preferences are called “toxic” too much, leading to them performatively claiming to loooove being toxic and enjoying toxic things. With only a hazy mental model of their enemies, they’ll say things like “I love this game because I’m so toxico” about seemingly random works.

DNR: “Do not review”. Initially an instruction by some game publishers that only certain kinds of people are “allowed” to publicly discuss the game, in analogy to DNI lists on social media sites like tumblr. Later a term adopted by those who polemically believe it’s impossible to critically review an RPG rulebook or adventure “even if you’ve run it many times.”

Jamboree: a discord PRG layout and forum, and thereafter a term for the hallmarks of their style: sidebars and wide margins, opposition to “representational images of monsters that fix them in the GM’s mind”, and frequent asides with advise on how to run situations to a GM. Despised by a small clique on social media.

Session Three:  the practice of a DM checking in with their players after the third session of play to see if tweaks should be made to subject matter, PC builds/party composition, or campaign structure. Debate fails to conclude whether this is sensitive and obligatory or infantilizing and forbidden.

Terra Somnia/TS/Som: OSR/GSR decolonization theodicy in which rather than a mythic underworld or monstrous frontier, dungeoneering occurs in a shared dreamworld shaped by the collective unconscious. It is hoped that by reducing orcs to mental figments reflective of the PCs and making the adventure spaces truly insubstantial, the common D&D parallels to the wild west and imperialism are lessened.

Angax: an attempt to excise Gygax from D&D, reconstructing the early game but eschewing components that can be traced to Gary Gygax specifically. Initially a thought experiment, first played by anti-Gygax types, and by 2030 unironically enjoyed as a different yet familiar “retrocousin”.

SWORDREAM: It’s back!

Aftermath poster: pejorative term for people who publicly explain social dramas or lay out sensitive histories of social scenes. Successfully stigmatized to the point that old arguments are frequently reheated out of a newcomer’s ignorance.

Bonneted: angry about or disturbed by drama, instead of coldly matter-of-fact. Pejorative

Hannalike: imitating the style of blogger Hannalogue Hacka, who emerges in 2028 with creative dungeons and adventures all shared in photographs of handwritten work on lined paper. Hanna never uses a word processor, instead using prolific pictures of handwritten notes. Quickly growing her fanbase despite an odious personal habit of being very insulting to everyone she interacts with and expecting it to be taken as charming, her downfall comes in late 2031 for one of the usual reasons.

Sorkerer: out-of-nowhere pejorative for people who play sorcerers. They’re now imagined as having bad politics and interrupting others.

Brainhead: out-of-nowhere pejorative for people who play classless fantasy games. They’re now imagined as thinking they’re smarter and edgier than everyone else and talking for too long at a time.

Bowler: finally, we’ll do an out-of-nowhere pejorative for people who play solo RPGs. They’re now imagined as “invading actual RPG spaces” and being picky eaters.

On Dracula

 Writing on the theme of "Dracula!!!" at the request of Purplecthulhu, for Glaugust 2026.

Like the One Ring, the character of Dracula is so well-executed and so effective in many ways that he is an instructive example in adventure narratives and games. I want to focus on the threat Dracula poses in the original novel, specifically after arriving in Britain. There's many features of the character worth mentioning, but I will specify:

- He is an "out of context problem" for the people of London. Everyday Romanians and the odd Dutch professor knows his weaknesses and abilities, but no average person understands what kind of threat he poses.
- The modern world is an out of context problem for him. He entraps and imprisons a realtor to help him get paperwork filed, and doesn't understand modern technology or society.
- He has a dynamic, well-considered, but simple plan.
- He acts boldly, in his own person, as well as having accomplices and allies.
- Though elusive, there's evidence of his plan all over the "normal" world. Asylums groan from his psychic influence, lawyers have conducted business with him, and coffins are getting shipped all over town.

Sometimes PCs will have chance encounters with major figures, NPCs who ought to have some weighty goal they're enacting. These features of Dracula might be useful to consider when fleshing out that goal and its effects. For example:

The Dragon
Domineering and cruel, the dragon is at home at the bottom of a dungeon, not engaged in mortal politics. She blunders through conversations like an adventurer at an intersection with a strange humanoid. Her pull is in gold, and in power. The dragon has a human form she can assume, even if it's eye-catching and strange, and to authorities seems more weird than wyrm. Approaching the manse she's bought up and started renovating is dangerous, because the party will start making encounter checks before they even see it. When they get there, they'll find the mythic underworld, with doors slamming and locking all on their own. In buying up more and more of the town, she will soon push "civilization" back and "the dungeon" further. Randomly encountered in her full and tyrannical form, she will be friendly and solicitous to potential allies like the PCs, always having good pay for fair work. With luck, the party will develop partisan ferocity for their fierce patron and act in her defense on their own initiative. Her handiwork is seen strewn between the dungeon and civilization.

The Wizard
Most spell-casters are probably not an out of context problem to your standard fantasy town, even if they're a rare sight. This fellow is of an older cast, a previous age, where things were very different. Like Dracula, he thinks and feels according to another idiom, a separate genre of civilization than what has since sprung up. His powers are unique— no one can plan for them. You might even use a totally separate magic system for the wizard and his acolytes. For he knows enough to target the creators of knowledge and consensus, and they are broad-minded enough to overlook every taboo he breaks. He will pose himself as an advisor, a mentor. He is truly beneficent, and wants to restore the old order not for his own advantage but the good of the world, selecting an impressionable youth to beat the bent rod of this upstart nation into submission. Though his own power is whimsical, the outline is simple. Empower a small group to take the heartland, then help them to raise a bigger and bigger army under older and stranger banners. He is a historical figure, his character and abilities encoded into ancient scrolls. Everyone in academia, then in the halls of power, is talking about him, and someone might know something.

The Ghost
They have achieved Dracula's most central goal— to survive forever. But to them this is no comfort, and the longer they persist the less they can even formulate a consistent goal. Mercurial in the extreme, they might be humored by some living followers, but there's nothing in it for them. More likely, the Ghost becomes a true threat when they learn to wake the dead. Men Unburied, or buried wrong, or the oathbroken dead, come when the call comes out. A revolt against the living, in which the guests become the hosts. Most defenses against them are useless, as they can't be killed or conventionally harmed. Cultural institutions that revere the dead are natural points to exert influence, once the power of numbers sways the people to fear. The master ghost is probably increasingly baffled by what has changed since their death, and unable to explain what would calm their wrath. Unsubtle about what they're doing on a given night, characters can seek out mediums and priests to get a fuller picture of the ghost's metaphysical trajectory.