Class Review: Gorinich's Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood
Still from Dracula (1931) featuring Helen Chandler as Mina Harker
There are so many GLOG classes! More than you could playtest in a lifetime and more being written all the time. I want to comb through them and write critical reviews, gradually curating a list of suggested classes for my table and honing my sense of how exactly a GLOG class works.
*12/15: I've revised this review slightly to add some nuance to reference to Tiqqun and remove a few typos.
The Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood
I'll admit it: I've been struggling over this review for a little more than a week now. It's not so much the mechanics of the Completely Normal Girl With Too Much Blood (though we'll dig into those, of course), it the content. While Gorinich's tone is playful, the class depicts a girl who by her very nature (biological and mystical) attracts the violence of male strangers. I'm not a scholar of gender and sexuality studies nor do I identify as femme, so I don't have a lot of expertise to lean on, but I think this depiction needs to be unpacked.
Let's start by talking about girlhood. The word denotes not just a femme character, but a young one. By way of a tangle of symbolism in Western / American culture, it connotes a range of other ideas - innocence, purity, fragility, but also an object of desire. I think most readers will be at least loosely familiar with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, a book that has long been a litmus test for literary critical treatment of the dynamic between men and young girls. Emily Prager writes in a 2015 review:
As a modern damsel, Lolita became a model of sexual innocence in the ’60s; a namesake for erotic transgression in the ’70s; a second-wave caution for phallocentrism in the ’80s; and a reclamation of feminist eroticism in the ’90s. Such palimpsests of the “young girl” demand that the real figure of Lolita, the ur-Lolita, must be regarded according to the alternative histories of those other, extra-narrative Lolitas, who exist outside the narrow bookends of Nabokov’s canonical text.
The Completely Normal Girl invokes these themes explicitly. The class feature Object of Desire explicitly name checks them. Can I Fix Him? evokes memes of toxic or abusive relationships. Gorinich 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.
Gorinich introduces two caveats here. First, they claim that you could play this as a "spooky minion gathering class without a hint of romance." I disagree. The subtext is sufficiently baked in here that if you aren't intentionally attending to these themes, you are going to reinscribe gendered violence in normal adventuring situations. Somehow the blood has to get out, right?
Second, they note that "the class refers to the player as female and vampires as male but there aren't any gender restrictions." This is a laudable move to stave off the bio-essentialism we could read into this class. For me it evokes a text cited by Prager, Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl. For Tiqqun, the young-girl need not be young, nor identify as a woman. Being a young-girl is a subject position enforced by capitalism, the primary target of marketing media and a sort of encultured foot soldier of the status quo:
It is through the Young-Girl that capitalism has managed to extend its hegemony to the totality of social life. She is the most rugged pawn of market domination in a war whose objective remains the total control of daily life and “production” time.
Tiqqun's framing is inherently misogynistic, but I think can be usefully applied if we consider it another primary source alongside Twilight and friends. The character Gorinich depicts is the object of desire, but seems ambivalent to it. She maintains a coterie of vampires, but it is she who "makes him worse," not the other way around. She is threatened with violence, but also the agent of it. Gorinich's illustration is telling. The vampires leer over a young girl, but she looks out to the viewer, her expression inscrutable. To put it simply, the power dynamics here are fucked.
I don't want to just clutch my pearls though. You could play this class lightly and trangressively (think Carrie) or as a horror character unto herself (think Tomie). I just think you should have a plan for working through these themes with your table that exceeds a simple safety conversation. If that sounds interesting to you, then I think there is a lot to like about the Completely Normal Girl.
The class is quite concise. It has a resource mechanic, "Vitae" , that fills inventory slots and thus competes with other core tools of being an armored dungeon scavenger. That resource can be used to heal yourself and later others (by relatively small amounts). Perhaps more impactfully, it can be used by other spellcasters to cast big spells. Rules as written, it grants any number of "Blood Dice" which seems likely to quickly break something by letting a party cast 4 MD spells at level 2. It's a bit unclear whether this ability deals damage equal to the [sum] for the spell or just the sum of the Blood Dice.
The other big section of the Normal Girl is her relation to vampires. Gorinich is leaning on an ekphrastic reference to a tumblr post for a whimsical, coarse taxonomy of bloodsuckers - mosquitos and frogs. This injects a sense of humor that I otherwise haven't really spoken to.
As a GM, I'd be quietly ensuring a steady mix of mosquitos and frogs, but I wish the class provided more tools for doing so. Object of Desire provides a vehicle for more of such creatures to arrive, but I'd love to see a sample encounter table or similar tooling that I could pin to my GM screen. Perhaps this is a natural pairing with some of the tables in Amanda Lee Franck's Vampire Cruise? I particularly think having agendas or quirks that made different vampires uniquely weird or unpleasant to work with would be helpful. As I mentioned, there is also no mechanical support for the "romance and sexuality" that might actually occur in fiction. I suspect this is a space where the OSR/NSR/pOSR maxim of "rulings not rules" is uniquely likely to fall on its face.
Vital Revelation feels like the coda of the class. Here Gorinich underlines that it's not actually blood, it's the Completely Normal Girl's "animating spirit" that vampires crave. This is why I think we can't (and shouldn't) evade the conversation around girlhood or the theme of gendered violence that permeate the class. The violence is targeted not at the Completely Normal Girl's physical body, but what it represents. How would you approach this as a "spooky minion gathering class"?
And then there are Life Lessons - a strange collection of specialist skills that feel a bit like an afterthought after the triumphant peal of Vital Revelation. I like all of these better than the usual specialist perks of "you can climb but better" or "you get an extra reroll." I think the blood theming and the clear relation to a specific class of characters that we assume will be present in the scene help a lot in that regard. I just can't help but feel it might be a bit of a hat on a hat - one too many flourishes in a class that already has a lot going on.
The Perfectly Normal Girl With Too Much Blood is almost the canonical example of why I want my rating system to reflect ability to fit into a game with minimal legwork, not relation to "core" dungeon fantasy archetypes. Overall, I'd rate this class as heavy on my effort scale. The work put on the GM is manageable, though I would have appreciated more tools for deploying the vampires this class asks for.
The real concern here is navigating the cultural perceptions of girlhood and the risk of gendered violence that are baked into the class. The light tone of the class provides a route for doing so though and I think with the right table it would be a blast.