I hope i'm not stepping on any toes when i say this, and i mean it in no disparaging or judgmental way. But personally the lore surrounding Caine being the Father of Vampires never sat well with me, and it's been a recurring stumbling block.

I find it difficult to take it seriously, as in essence V:TM is asking you to admit straight-up and accept that The Old Testament is simply true. Adam and Eve were indeed the first humans, Caine and Abel were their sons, and as a result it brings with it the baggage of several millennia's worth of religious development being hammered into a singular volume, that being inconsistencies.

In a book of religious scripture you can deal with this for the most part even if you're a non-believer, because you can understand that it is a product of centuries of religious development and the development of the Jewish Bible itself, but when V:TM uses it to essentially say that 'as a matter of fact it actually IS true, Caine is the Father of Vampires, he actually WAS cursed by the Hebrew God who is real', it suddenly brings all those inconsistencies and makes them tangible in a way that makes it difficult to ignore, at least for me.

It feels like it's weakest link, because then you have to ask yourself the pressing questions: how did the human race come around then if Caine was Adam and Eve's only living son? Where did Lilith come from? How were then first cities then formed? I am not the first person in my personal life who encountered this as an issue to a lesser or greater extent. Of course, there are also some who don't mind it, which is obviously fine. On it's own, the idea is great. It's a very tempting narrative proposition, it establishes that Kindred are directly cursed by a divine power and will never see the light of Heaven.

But the issue also comes from the fact that V:TM wants to eat their cake and have it too, in the sense that the game will tell you on one hand that this might all well be something someone made up and that it will rarely, likely never actually, factor into your un-life. If you simply assume that this is simply Kindred foklore that is unlikely to be true, you can easily dismiss the inconsistencies as just that, inconsistencies in a belief and not a tangible reality.

On the other they reserve just enough wiggle room and plausible deniability to be able to say that actually maybe it's true, and it's this intellectual and creative cowardice that raises my hackles. If it were simply the former, where it's widely considered that Noddism is a crock of shit that is only sincerely held by a small sect of Kindred it'd be fine.

But then you have to contend with the Antedilluvians, who (unlike Caine) have at one point or another and to one extent or another, been active in the lives of their progeny. The Antedilluvians trace their lineage directly back to Caine and it's much harder to them dismiss the Book of Nod as simply being Kindred folklore.

I understand of course that the reason behind this is to allow Storytellers to craft their own narratives and pick and choose what they want to believe is true, but regardless it feels like taking such a vital part from a major world religion and claiming it as objectively true, to be clumsy. And yes, granted, you can simply safely engage in this game without ever worrying or thinking about this, as the nature of Caine or the Antedilluvians will likely simply never come up in a way that should concern you, but it's still a large Bible shaped hole right there in the corner of your eye.

I hope i didn't offend anyone, this is naturally only my opinion.