Bloodlines: The Legendary by Wood Ingham, Christopher Kobar, Mur Lafferty, Dean Shomshak, Travis Stout and Chuck Wendig

Vampire: The Requiem role-playing book

Rating - 4: useful for any campaign (buy it)

This is rather good. There are many pieces you can use, maybe even if you are not playing Vampire.

Nine bloodlines for Vampire, each with a bit more description than the previous book, but each seems so much richer with that little more.

Your new bloodlines are questers after the Holy Grail, carnival freaks, the suicidally depressed (and depressing), Nosferatu of hideous beauty, scent-based Daeva, ascetics, gluttons, hive-queens, and pop-culture poseurs.

First praise must go to Dean Shomshak for getting it. His Children of Judas and Players both embody and deconstruct Vampire. The Children are the Suicide Kings: embraced amidst depression and suicide, they bring it to others and savor suffering. Yes, they incarnate angst, and they are playing it straight. Whether you want to mock or embrace the setting, what could be more fitting than those who want to contemplate the beauty of despair? (They also have interesting theology.) Players take it in the other direction: we are so cool and pretty, everyone loves us. They are Hollywood vampires who are deciding whether to be Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. This seems perfect for a comic (tragicomic?) foil in your game, allowing some self-aware mockery of excesses. I am not sure how it works in the long-run, but the setting now has an official Take That! at itself and its players. How many layers of irony can you process ay once?

Chuck Wendig's Macellarius just beg to be used. They are the gluttonous Ventrue, portly power-brokers. They have a perfect mix of Epicurean refined tastes, hedonistic excess, depravity, and gentility. They are Baron Harkonnen, with better manners and worse eating habits. They feature in the opening vignette, and I think they embrace the right contradictions for use as a recurring player: the master of Elysium, a refined planner of parties, a dandy, and behind it all a cannibalistic monster. The signature discipline is a bit odd. There are suggestions of how you might alter the bloodline for your campaign, and switching to Protean could be more viable than something to specific as an eating-based discipline.

Mur Lafferty's Kuufukuji seems like an NPC bloodline. You put one on the fringes of the chronicle, an ascetic sage in a secluded spot, one who causes little trouble and can be forgotten until needed. One who also embodies a concept from Kindred of the East: the strength of the humanity displayed reflects the strength of the Beast controlled.

Wood Ingham's Melissidae are another bloodline that I see as NPCs with a limited role. They make great mid-level or master villains, but their abilities will not fit well on the player-side or when they are weak. Maybe you could do a few sessions on keeping a weak one from becoming strong, but their signature abilities are mostly devotions requiring many dots. A moderately powerful one could focus on the beekeeper role, a physical foe who fights with swarms. A very powerful one would have a hive of mind-controlled followers, a queen bee with many drones. Maybe you can think of another direction for the gaps.

The scent-based Daeva have a bloodline weakness like something from Stephenie Meyer, only more so. I would think fixating on the scent of one type of person would be debilitating in play, unless you choose something so rare as to make it irrelevant. In a city of a few million people, there will be one of anything along any minute now.

You may notice some return engagements. The old Caitiff book had something like the Players. The Gluttons are a classic take on the Ventrue, reminiscent of the old Chicago by Night. There have been carnival freaks, and "freakishly beautiful" sounds awfully familiar (also filling some old Tzimisce slots of body manipulation and inhuman beauty).

That is more than half the book cited as good and useful. Your chronicle would be rather crowded if you included every interesting bloodline, so a few really good ones are all you need.

And since I have not mentioned much on the writing, the presentation gives you really good ones. You get background, parables, side-stories, rumors, variants, factions, stereotypes, outcasts, everything you would want. This is more than the clan descriptions in the core book, although those get much elaboration throughout.

Powers and disciplines are secondary, and they hew closely to the bloodline theme. They may hew a bit too closely, encouraging one-trick ponies and NPC specialists.

There is a limited amount positive here, so why the 4? Because it has pieces you can use, and I do not expect anyone to use a lot of bloodlines. It beats Sturgeon's Law, which is all I can ask.

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