Thinking about a post a mutual made about the Beckoning earlier, and it's made me want to broaden my Horizons on lore write ups outside of just Vampire. Because the Beckoning and how it's been handled is interesting as a case of a massive setting shakeup that turned into a lore dead end that we're just trying to move past now. But this is a thing the World of Darkness does all the time. So how about we talk about it, and compare it to another Beckoning style event from Mage: the Ascension?
To start with, why is the Beckoning bad? Big shake ups to the Lore of the World of Darkness can be pretty interesting! The Week of Nightmares is generally considered one of the best, and it was pretty similar!
The trouble with the Beckoning is twofold: first, there's the fact that "All the elders vanish to the mystical east to fight in The War" is racist AF for a ton of obvious reasons not worth getting into. But The Beckoning is also bad from a writing standpoint, because it's a plot point that was impossible to actually resolve. It was implied that all the elders were going to the Middle East because sleeping Methuselahs and Antediluvians were waking up, but there was never any effort to explore this. V5 was an edition that attempted to dramatically power vampires down, so there was no way to explore the idea of what happens when powerful, very scary vampires become part of society again. You can't have Helen of Troy and the god Mithras getting killed by the equivalent of human SWAT teams, and then ask the players to be afraid of Methuselahs waking up.
Even if you could resolve that contradiction, how was the Beckoning ever going to end? The Antediluvians actually wake up, game over, we do a Gehenna book again and nuke the setting? There were only ever two ways this could happen: "Gehenna is actually happening, game over," or "Whoops, false alarm, a lot of very embarrassed elders coming back from Egyptian vacations." Maybe they could have done a module about that Baali Methuselah sleeping under Syria actually being the cause, but that would be so radically against V5's writing ethos that I just can't see it.
You might think "hey isn't that really bad writing?" And you're right! But hey, welcome to the fandom, because this isn't the first or even the second time that White Wolf has done this!
Let's talk about the Avatar Storm, a very similar event from Mage Revised. Basically, Mage Revised, the worst edition of Mage, started out by trying to dramatically power down Mages, to focus on "street level" games of a low power level. Mage: The Masquerade, basically. You might notice that this is very similar to how V5 made a lot of lore changes with the motivation of powering down vampires and the general power level at the table.
The trouble is that Mage is not Vampire. Mages tend to be much stronger than vampires, and there's also just a lot more high flying fantasy elements to the setting than with Vampire. A big example of that is the Horizon Realms, magickal realms built deep into the Umbra that can be anywhere from elemental planes representing various schools of magick to straight up other planets like Mars or Mercury, or even the Courts of the gods themselves! How do you force players into a "street level" game when they have the power to travel to Mars and fight space dragons?
The Avatar Storm is the answer! For rather complicated reasons involving the ghost of a nuclear bomb, an awakening Antediluvian, and an agender bio-clone of the maddest mad scientist to ever live, the entire Umbra gets locked off to all Mages, as the shattered remains of countless Avatars storm through the spirit world. This has the effect of killing 90% or more of powerful Mage NPCs who are mostly in the spirit world when this happens, making the entire Spirit sphere basically useless, and permanently locking most Mages out of the Umbra entirely, forcing them at gunpoint to play the gritty, street level version that developers at the time wanted. Trying to go to the Umbra would involve you getting immediately shredded by the Avatar Storm. Of course, there was technically a way to get into the Umbra, and that was by taking the Merit to make your character a Stormwarden. What is a Stormwarden? Well they're a descendant of experimental Mage-Spirit hybrids created by Nazi science wizards during WWII, they can go into the Umbra without getting hurt by the storm. Perfectly reasonable, right? But the Umbra is mostly empty now and full of screaming magic ghosts, so why bother?
Anyways Mage Revised was bad, and when M20 came along it said "uhhhh the Avatar Storm might not have actually happened, and if it did, it wasn't as bad as the old lore said, and if it was, well everything is basically rebuilt by now" and thus Mage's equivalent to the Beckoning was swept under the rug for better and worse, mostly better.
I have a feeling the official explanation on the Beckoning is going to be very similar. "Uhhhh the Beckoning might not have happened, and if it did, only some vampires went to it, and if a lot did, well they're all back and fine now."
There was no other choice for the Avatar Storm. What else could they do? Delete the now useless Spirit Sphere from the game, and truck forward with Mage now essentially being an entirely different game? I mean, I guess they could have done that, but no one would have played it then. Same with the Beckoning, what would they do? Say that all the elders are just hanging out in the mysterious East fighting some unnamed war that somehow no one knows about or has any information on?
Oh, and there are plenty more examples of Lore Events like this. The Sixth Great Maelstrom which nuked (literally) the setting of Wraith: the Oblivion, The Great Leap Outward, where the evil Asian Kuei-Jin attacked the domains of western vampires, and plenty more. Welcome to the World of Darkness, where the writers bork the setting and have to retcon in major fixes at least once per edition
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