Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)
The back cover twice compares the author to David Sedaris. That is unfair, as it sets a standard that she cannot meet.
This is a book of personal essays. I abandoned this two essays into it. There is probably a gem or two hidden within, but it is a bad sign when the first two essays are this poor.
The first could be summarized as "I vacation badly." Of course, the point of this kind of essay is not to summarize it but rather to dwell on the journey, to explore emotions and digressions, and so on. In this case, you will want the summary. It is not silly and irreverant, nor deeply personal and touching. It is mostly tired complaining, with better diction but the same content and emotion as you will find around any Sunday brunch table.
If you want a funny version of "I vacation badly," here is Maureen Johnson.
The second essay segues to its conclusion with, "Look, I don't know how to tie this up neatly." This is a rather damning admission for an essayist, but true.
Amazon link
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Bloodlines: The Hidden by John Goff, Jess Heinig, Christopher Kobar, Brand Robins, Dean Shomshak and Chuck Wendig
Vampire: The Requiem role-playing book
Rating - 2: of use for some campaigns (but not most)
This is poor. There will be a brief pause in the glut of gaming book reviews after this.
Ten bloodlines for Vampire, each explained in ten pages or less.
I said in the Vampire review that bloodlines would bring back everything that simplification had taken away. Here we go.
Your new bloodlines are dream-controllers, druggies, architects, luck-manipulators, stigmata-wielders, the Lasombra with a Setite theme, institutional wardens, Aztecs monsters, ill-defined gluttons (with some interesting powers), small-towners, "mothers" of the undead, and the Rakshasa (more demon than illusionist this time).
The first weakness is brevity. Half of each bloodline's description is its new discipline or devotions, so you get four to five pages of background and description. You could do a lot with some of these ideas, but not a lot has been done.
Second, some of these are uninteresting or useless. Maybe that is just me; since some of them give me ideas, you may get ideas from the opposite ones. But if one bloodline takes over small rural towns, how are you going to incorporate them into your chronicle unless you send the vampires on a road trip and have a Deliverance moment? Several seem to be "monster of the week" vampires who can pass through town, cause trouble, and be driven out; for that, I suppose the minimal background works.
There are also some editing issues, but those seem minor. For example, are the Nelapsi nicknamed "Gluttons" or "Locusts"?
Let us start positive comments with the mechanically interesting. The "Gilded Cage" rituals fit well with the urban setting, although they seem jarring with the existing rituals (and threaten the re-multiplication of different ritual types). The Nelapsi have useful devotions.
Thematically, I like the Bohagande, the luck-manipulators. They come across as Nuwisha-themed Ravnos. The same applies to the Egyptians with Obtenebration. Engaging in Aztec ritual sacrifice and bloodshed is a viable take on vampiric monstrosity. A bloodline of deranged mothers may or may not fit well in your chronicle.
I keep referring to items from previous editions because many of them are back, with different takes. If you missed the Setites, what part? We have drug dealers/addicts, and we have an Egyptian-themed group of shadow-dwellers (who are more like the Sabbat anti-Setites than the originals). If you missed the Lasombra, those shadow-dwellers bring back Obtenebration. If you like the Ravnos, what part? We have an Indian-themed bloodline and another of wandering tricksters. Those tricksters are themed after Crow, so they have much in common with the werewolves' old Nuwisha (or new Crow lodge). The institutional wardens finish out the old Malkavian role in asylums. If you missed the Cappadocians, the stigmata-fetishists enter that gap. There have been too many Lilith-focused Vampire things for me to think of who the twisted mothers are most like, especially with the Circle of the Crone already in-game.
So if any of those sound like something that excites you, something you can run with, give the book a look. But there is probably not enough there to get a lot of use from it.
Amazon link
Rating - 2: of use for some campaigns (but not most)
This is poor. There will be a brief pause in the glut of gaming book reviews after this.
Ten bloodlines for Vampire, each explained in ten pages or less.
I said in the Vampire review that bloodlines would bring back everything that simplification had taken away. Here we go.
Your new bloodlines are dream-controllers, druggies, architects, luck-manipulators, stigmata-wielders, the Lasombra with a Setite theme, institutional wardens, Aztecs monsters, ill-defined gluttons (with some interesting powers), small-towners, "mothers" of the undead, and the Rakshasa (more demon than illusionist this time).
The first weakness is brevity. Half of each bloodline's description is its new discipline or devotions, so you get four to five pages of background and description. You could do a lot with some of these ideas, but not a lot has been done.
Second, some of these are uninteresting or useless. Maybe that is just me; since some of them give me ideas, you may get ideas from the opposite ones. But if one bloodline takes over small rural towns, how are you going to incorporate them into your chronicle unless you send the vampires on a road trip and have a Deliverance moment? Several seem to be "monster of the week" vampires who can pass through town, cause trouble, and be driven out; for that, I suppose the minimal background works.
There are also some editing issues, but those seem minor. For example, are the Nelapsi nicknamed "Gluttons" or "Locusts"?
Let us start positive comments with the mechanically interesting. The "Gilded Cage" rituals fit well with the urban setting, although they seem jarring with the existing rituals (and threaten the re-multiplication of different ritual types). The Nelapsi have useful devotions.
Thematically, I like the Bohagande, the luck-manipulators. They come across as Nuwisha-themed Ravnos. The same applies to the Egyptians with Obtenebration. Engaging in Aztec ritual sacrifice and bloodshed is a viable take on vampiric monstrosity. A bloodline of deranged mothers may or may not fit well in your chronicle.
I keep referring to items from previous editions because many of them are back, with different takes. If you missed the Setites, what part? We have drug dealers/addicts, and we have an Egyptian-themed group of shadow-dwellers (who are more like the Sabbat anti-Setites than the originals). If you missed the Lasombra, those shadow-dwellers bring back Obtenebration. If you like the Ravnos, what part? We have an Indian-themed bloodline and another of wandering tricksters. Those tricksters are themed after Crow, so they have much in common with the werewolves' old Nuwisha (or new Crow lodge). The institutional wardens finish out the old Malkavian role in asylums. If you missed the Cappadocians, the stigmata-fetishists enter that gap. There have been too many Lilith-focused Vampire things for me to think of who the twisted mothers are most like, especially with the Circle of the Crone already in-game.
So if any of those sound like something that excites you, something you can run with, give the book a look. But there is probably not enough there to get a lot of use from it.
Amazon link
Sunday, August 24, 2008
VII by Christopher Kobar, Greg Stolze, and Chuck Wendig with Will Hindmarch
Vampire: The Requiem role-playing book
Rating - 2: of use for some campaigns (but not most)
This feels a lot like Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, the new edition. The Black Hand was a bunch of avenging angels/demons, the conspiracy behind the conspiracy behind the conspiracy behind everything. There were several takes on them over the years, and there are several takes on VII here. (There is some spoilage, but I have tried to be gentle.)
VII, recall, is the bogeyman of Vampire: The Requiem. They are the secretive covenant that no one really understands, driven to genocide against vampires, their minds cloaked. This book presents three takes on them.
The book is presented as three mini-books, three options for using VII in your chronicle. Unless you adapt very liberally, you will be throwing away most of it to start with, although maybe you can recycle the other pieces. That is why the rating falls to a 2: even under the best of circumstances, you will not be able to use most of this book.
I think Greg Stolze has the best take with the first. Again referring back to the previous edition, this reminds me of a semi-heroic take on the Ba'ali, so we start with a digression. One take on the clan of devil-worshippers is that some (most?) of them were soothing the devils in their restless sleep. Long ago someone got the attention of Lovecraftian horrors with a dark pact, and now they must be kept satiated lest they devour the world. So the Ba'ali have the tiger by the tail, committing atrocities to prevent worse ones, and it does not help that there are rogue clan members disturbing demonic slumber by invoking their names in pursuit of power. Fighting them is the sort of Xanatos Gambit that woke Ravnos. In many ways, it embodied the theme of Requiem: a beast I am lest a beast I become.
So the first take on VII casts them in a similarly literal deal with the devil. They have been granted vampirism and power by an abyssal pact, one that taints the ancient purity of their quest against the vampires. They have a mix of motives, starting with the obliteration of all vampires, but including factions for and against demonic influence. There is some question of what exactly will happen if they finally win. They already accepted damnation via vampirism to prevent the greater evil of others' vampirism. Are you willing to give up your salvation to have your vengeance?
This section combines competing ideas very well. The basic idea is heroic: wipe out the vampires. The means are not: become a vampire (kind of cliché, even if their path to it was not). And it gets worse: there is more power, but tied to the demon. So we have a lot of white knights in black hats, sometimes literal medieval crusaders cum modern terrorists. Then you have the guys in black robes hanging around them, some of whom are fighting the good fight, some of whom are deeply in that demonic Xanatos Gambit.
You get a mix of pragmatism and idealism. Some of them really are trying to do the right thing in a World of Darkness. Some of them are pragmatists or cynics, who would like the right thing but sometimes send people on suicide missions to get rid of troublemakers. And again the blood-soaked cultists, who you keep around for those pragmatic reasons.
The introduction says it well: "As protagonists, they are tragic and noble warriors who have made a deal with the devil to restore their ruined glory. As antagonists, they are zealous soldiers of sin from a time before history bent on the bloody resurrection of their damned city, no matter the cost." You can choose any shade of light along that spectrum to cast your chronicle into relief.
With the space to develop this idea, there is loving detail. We have several competing philosophies, the modus operandi under different circumstances, how to arrange an ideal haven, all that. This is well done.
(Also the most Black Hand-like take, complete with a discipline reminiscent of Temporis.)
The second take on VII is an interesting story, but not a lot for gameplay. It is a great tale of betrayal and damnation. In practice, it gives a scattershot with many little things that fail to add up.
The biggest problem is having six sub-clans. These are theoretically bloodlines, but they are written up as separate clans. So one-third of the section is devoted to giving them the standard clan/bloodline descriptions. Since almost as much time is spent on the clan backstory, that leaves relatively little for everything else.
The third take on VII is the most original, but it also needs more development. "VII as mind virus" presents great themes. The physics of magi-tech blood reprogramming are sometimes shaky, but we will look past that.
VII as another layer of "monster within" is a fun take. It works very well for NPCs, who can be co-opted as convenient, although by the write-up that should happen far more than it is likely to in-game. It works interestingly with PCs who are mostly in on the game.
If you can get around the implementation issues, which can often be hand-waved with NPCs, this could be an interesting take. You may not want that much paranoia in your game, but maybe you do. (Inverted Black Hand: they are not fighting the vampiric soul virus, they are the virus.)
The best take is perhaps the one in the introduction: there is no VII. VII is a myth, a story told to keep the little ones in line. Sometimes, the Prince might do something and claim it was VII; no one has to know. And if someone else in town does the same thing, and the Prince cannot track down who, does that mean someone is better at striking from the shadows, or there really is truth to those old stories? Now that is my kind of paranoia.
Amazon link
Rating - 2: of use for some campaigns (but not most)
This feels a lot like Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, the new edition. The Black Hand was a bunch of avenging angels/demons, the conspiracy behind the conspiracy behind the conspiracy behind everything. There were several takes on them over the years, and there are several takes on VII here. (There is some spoilage, but I have tried to be gentle.)
VII, recall, is the bogeyman of Vampire: The Requiem. They are the secretive covenant that no one really understands, driven to genocide against vampires, their minds cloaked. This book presents three takes on them.
The book is presented as three mini-books, three options for using VII in your chronicle. Unless you adapt very liberally, you will be throwing away most of it to start with, although maybe you can recycle the other pieces. That is why the rating falls to a 2: even under the best of circumstances, you will not be able to use most of this book.
I think Greg Stolze has the best take with the first. Again referring back to the previous edition, this reminds me of a semi-heroic take on the Ba'ali, so we start with a digression. One take on the clan of devil-worshippers is that some (most?) of them were soothing the devils in their restless sleep. Long ago someone got the attention of Lovecraftian horrors with a dark pact, and now they must be kept satiated lest they devour the world. So the Ba'ali have the tiger by the tail, committing atrocities to prevent worse ones, and it does not help that there are rogue clan members disturbing demonic slumber by invoking their names in pursuit of power. Fighting them is the sort of Xanatos Gambit that woke Ravnos. In many ways, it embodied the theme of Requiem: a beast I am lest a beast I become.
So the first take on VII casts them in a similarly literal deal with the devil. They have been granted vampirism and power by an abyssal pact, one that taints the ancient purity of their quest against the vampires. They have a mix of motives, starting with the obliteration of all vampires, but including factions for and against demonic influence. There is some question of what exactly will happen if they finally win. They already accepted damnation via vampirism to prevent the greater evil of others' vampirism. Are you willing to give up your salvation to have your vengeance?
This section combines competing ideas very well. The basic idea is heroic: wipe out the vampires. The means are not: become a vampire (kind of cliché, even if their path to it was not). And it gets worse: there is more power, but tied to the demon. So we have a lot of white knights in black hats, sometimes literal medieval crusaders cum modern terrorists. Then you have the guys in black robes hanging around them, some of whom are fighting the good fight, some of whom are deeply in that demonic Xanatos Gambit.
You get a mix of pragmatism and idealism. Some of them really are trying to do the right thing in a World of Darkness. Some of them are pragmatists or cynics, who would like the right thing but sometimes send people on suicide missions to get rid of troublemakers. And again the blood-soaked cultists, who you keep around for those pragmatic reasons.
The introduction says it well: "As protagonists, they are tragic and noble warriors who have made a deal with the devil to restore their ruined glory. As antagonists, they are zealous soldiers of sin from a time before history bent on the bloody resurrection of their damned city, no matter the cost." You can choose any shade of light along that spectrum to cast your chronicle into relief.
With the space to develop this idea, there is loving detail. We have several competing philosophies, the modus operandi under different circumstances, how to arrange an ideal haven, all that. This is well done.
(Also the most Black Hand-like take, complete with a discipline reminiscent of Temporis.)
The second take on VII is an interesting story, but not a lot for gameplay. It is a great tale of betrayal and damnation. In practice, it gives a scattershot with many little things that fail to add up.
The biggest problem is having six sub-clans. These are theoretically bloodlines, but they are written up as separate clans. So one-third of the section is devoted to giving them the standard clan/bloodline descriptions. Since almost as much time is spent on the clan backstory, that leaves relatively little for everything else.
The third take on VII is the most original, but it also needs more development. "VII as mind virus" presents great themes. The physics of magi-tech blood reprogramming are sometimes shaky, but we will look past that.
VII as another layer of "monster within" is a fun take. It works very well for NPCs, who can be co-opted as convenient, although by the write-up that should happen far more than it is likely to in-game. It works interestingly with PCs who are mostly in on the game.
If you can get around the implementation issues, which can often be hand-waved with NPCs, this could be an interesting take. You may not want that much paranoia in your game, but maybe you do. (Inverted Black Hand: they are not fighting the vampiric soul virus, they are the virus.)
The best take is perhaps the one in the introduction: there is no VII. VII is a myth, a story told to keep the little ones in line. Sometimes, the Prince might do something and claim it was VII; no one has to know. And if someone else in town does the same thing, and the Prince cannot track down who, does that mean someone is better at striking from the shadows, or there really is truth to those old stories? Now that is my kind of paranoia.
Amazon link
Friday, August 22, 2008
Mage: The Awakening by Kraig Blackwelder, Bill Bridges, Brian Campbell, Stephen Michael DiPesa, Samuel Inabinet, Steve Kenson, Malcolm Sheppard
World of Darkness role-playing book
Rating - 3: useful for many campaigns
Forgive me for attempting a somewhat briefer style for this.
Mage is the third core setting for the World of Darkness. It is a world of modern day magic: awakened beings that can bend reality to their will, within limits. Your time in-game will be spend expanding those limits, with some balance between seeking enlightenment and seeking power.
If you looked at my reviews of the other two relaunched World of Darkness books, this will hold no great surprises. The setting got a reboot to lose a decade of baggage. It still uses basically the same Storyteller system. It is based around the rule of five. "Legacies" will bring back everything those five seem to exclude. More than either of the other books, this one is successful in trimming its baggage to something both more focused and more flexible than the original.
There are no longer more than a dozen ways to be a mage. There are instead five big tents. This is narrower in that you need not try to accommodate Sons of Ether, Verbena, and Hermetic mages all together. (The old Technocracy book was one of my favorites, and it mocked that tendency: your cabal is the magical Real World, where the Vedic death mage shares an apartment with the lesbian tantra ritualist! Antics ensue!) This is more expansive in that each school of magic is not tied to one of those very specific traditions, so you can focus on Correspondence without being a Virtual Adept. Oh, and there are only 10 schools of magic now, so there is no Correspondence as such.
That removes a bit of enforced silliness. Many approaches to enlightenment and the occult is one thing; trying to keep all of them in play gets odd, especially since some of them are odd to begin with. If you believe in fairies hard enough, they really will appear and grant your wishes. Now fit that into the name "World of Darkness."
I like how magical "legacies" fit in better than vampiric bloodlines or werewolves' lodges. The standard 5x5 boxes hold many possible magical traditions. A legacy adds specificity, a particular approach to magic. At least it makes a lot more sense than the previous edition's Traditions.
"Theme: Power Corrupts"; "Mood:Ancient Mystery." The book does that well. The Technocracy is gone, although Paradox remains. Instead, mages are the ostensive heirs to a lost Atlantean kingdom in a fallen world, separated from the world of spirit. Meanwhile, bringing that "Darkness" thing back to your power-tripping fantasy, using reality as your playtoy can do to your soul the kind of things that happen when vampires lose their Humanity or werewolves lose their Balance. And that is before you get the option of trafficking with demons.
It feels like there is less room for techno-magic. It is not explicitly banished, just not nearly as emphasized as the old books that had Hit Marks hunting mages. I liked the Technocracy in many ways, but we will see what comes in its passing.
And going with this somewhat briefer style, no chapter-by-chapter analysis.
Amazon link
Rating - 3: useful for many campaigns
Forgive me for attempting a somewhat briefer style for this.
Mage is the third core setting for the World of Darkness. It is a world of modern day magic: awakened beings that can bend reality to their will, within limits. Your time in-game will be spend expanding those limits, with some balance between seeking enlightenment and seeking power.
If you looked at my reviews of the other two relaunched World of Darkness books, this will hold no great surprises. The setting got a reboot to lose a decade of baggage. It still uses basically the same Storyteller system. It is based around the rule of five. "Legacies" will bring back everything those five seem to exclude. More than either of the other books, this one is successful in trimming its baggage to something both more focused and more flexible than the original.
There are no longer more than a dozen ways to be a mage. There are instead five big tents. This is narrower in that you need not try to accommodate Sons of Ether, Verbena, and Hermetic mages all together. (The old Technocracy book was one of my favorites, and it mocked that tendency: your cabal is the magical Real World, where the Vedic death mage shares an apartment with the lesbian tantra ritualist! Antics ensue!) This is more expansive in that each school of magic is not tied to one of those very specific traditions, so you can focus on Correspondence without being a Virtual Adept. Oh, and there are only 10 schools of magic now, so there is no Correspondence as such.
That removes a bit of enforced silliness. Many approaches to enlightenment and the occult is one thing; trying to keep all of them in play gets odd, especially since some of them are odd to begin with. If you believe in fairies hard enough, they really will appear and grant your wishes. Now fit that into the name "World of Darkness."
I like how magical "legacies" fit in better than vampiric bloodlines or werewolves' lodges. The standard 5x5 boxes hold many possible magical traditions. A legacy adds specificity, a particular approach to magic. At least it makes a lot more sense than the previous edition's Traditions.
"Theme: Power Corrupts"; "Mood:Ancient Mystery." The book does that well. The Technocracy is gone, although Paradox remains. Instead, mages are the ostensive heirs to a lost Atlantean kingdom in a fallen world, separated from the world of spirit. Meanwhile, bringing that "Darkness" thing back to your power-tripping fantasy, using reality as your playtoy can do to your soul the kind of things that happen when vampires lose their Humanity or werewolves lose their Balance. And that is before you get the option of trafficking with demons.
It feels like there is less room for techno-magic. It is not explicitly banished, just not nearly as emphasized as the old books that had Hit Marks hunting mages. I liked the Technocracy in many ways, but we will see what comes in its passing.
And going with this somewhat briefer style, no chapter-by-chapter analysis.
Amazon link
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Werewolf: The Forsaken by Carl Bowen, Rick Jones, James Kiley, Matthew McFarland and Adam Tinworth
World of Darkness role-playing book
Rating - 3: useful for many campaigns
The second relaunched World of Darkness follows the same pattern as the previous: fewer tribes, narrower focus, more limited geography, less fantastic. In this case, I find that to the detriment of the setting.
Werewolf is the violence-driven World of Darkness setting, as opposed to its angst- and imagination-driven siblings. You are part of a hidden race of predators in the midst of mankind, connected to a shadowy world of spirits. Partly man and partly beast, your ways are not truly of either. Can you become fully both at once?
I see fewer compelling stories to tell and games to play here. The re-envisioned setting puts the focus on pack and territory. You hang with your gang on your turf. This means that the story must come to you. How many things can believably go wrong in your square mileage before it starts to look like Gotham? The suggestions to storytellers seem to suggest having players create personal connections with their territory, then use those connections to hurt them by attacking them.
This is a classic RPG cliche that encourages orphans and uncaring loners. If you have family members, they will fall under curses, turn against you, be threatened or captured by your foes, or slaughtered to show just how horrible this new foe is. This can only get worse in a horror setting. See page 227: have the characters' lovers and family members get possesses by evil spirits. "A werewolf might be able to kill a Claimed stranger without hesitation, but can she do the same to her niece? ... String it out, and the players will be on tenterhooks waiting to see whose character goes through the emotional wringer next." So if that sounds like a fun evening to you, go for it.
This book follows the rule of five like its siblings: five tribes, five auspices. In this case, thinking of them as race and class is less far from the mark, as the auspices assign roles like the combat-based Rahu or the Ithaeur occultists. The tribes are less "race" than the previous editions.' They now read more like general tendencies than familial clans. Given the narrowed setting, you no longer have a tribe of werewolves that treats with faeries.
I was fond of the old Werewolf cosmology of Wyld, Weaver, and Wyrm. That is gone, replaced with a story of the primordial wolf-father, slain in his dotage by the werewolves. The D&D-style spirit planes are out, with a single "twisted reflection" shadow world in its place (D&D 4th Edition's shadow plane is more or less identical). The fera are gone, although a couple were re-built under the category of spirits. Pentex is gone. Those collectively remove the Black Shadow Dancers, and with no War of Rage there was no Bunyip genocide. So who conflicts are left?
There are three "pure tribes," the ones that did not help kill the primordial wolf-father. Part of their sparse description is that they are more numerous and powerful than the other tribes. So instead of one fallen tribe, we have several tribes than consider all the others to be fallen. And since the other tribes are Forsaken, they have a point.
There is conflict amongst the orthodox werewolves, although this is poorly elaborated. I think the implication is of interaction between nearby packs. With the claiming of territory, I would expect less interaction between them, instead having each little group of five werewolves off by itself, occasionally posturing towards the neighbors. There is no Vampire danse macabre, there is no central interaction place for all the packs, there are no global tribal politics.
Humans are always a vague specter. The great mass, the herd: ignore it unless it stampedes. Upon reflection, I would have expected more about how the human world impacts the werewolf world, consider that they overlap and that all werewolves started out as humans. The most important human link seems to be the last, expanded foe:spirits.
Werewolves have been recast as the regulators of the spirit world. There was always a lot about the Umbra before, but that takes a central place in the new edition. There is resonance between the spirit and mortal worlds, so human developments affect local spirits while the spirits sometimes seek human hosts. This is also how wererats and weavers have been brought back, under the category of possessed human hosts.
I note the morality of Harmony. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is a venal sin and 10 is utter depravity, carrying a silver weapon is a 2 and using it is a 7. Murdering a fellow werewolf is an 8, killing one in the heat of battle (including the pure tribes that will try to kill you) is a 6, slaying a human "needlessly" is a 5, disrespecting an elder is a 3, and killing people for a good reason is not on the list of sins. So this is perhaps an unusual approach to the world. Reflecting back on taking away the characters' stuff, having the pure tribes attack gives the players this lovely choice: die; kill your enemies, and risk suffering derangements for violating your morality; or let the enemy live, at which point they heal quickly and you repeat until you pick one of the first two options.
The chapter-by-chapter would be less interesting here. There are few chapters, and I have already covered most of what there is to say about them. The titles are pretty explicit: The Wold of the Forsaken, Character, Rules and Systems, Storytelling and Antagonists. Just what is says on the tin. The appendices are of note.
Appendix One: The Spirit World is 38 pages on just that. About an eighth of the book has that pure focus, in addition to the spirit world content in the other chapters. This shows the shift in emphasis and gives you something to work with.
Appendix Two: The Rockies is a 25-page sample setting. It is a sketch, but it shows some of what you can do with the new setting. It takes an approach that helps churn things through a relatively small area: filling a power vacuum. Diverse parties can squabble over a poorly claimed area in the wake of eliminating the great foe that had claimed it. The Rockies are also just a great region for this sort of thing: the sort of wilds where you could expect wolves along with all sizes of cities and towns right up to Denver itself. This chapter shows the potential of the setting.
The vignette spread over the prologue and epilogue is good. The art that goes with it is good too, showing the major plot points in a few drawings.
I should comment on the art, but I have even less to say than usual. I am having trouble spotting names associated with each illustration, so I cannot cite anyone's work in particular. The large pictures that open each chapter are good. The art styles vary dramatically throughout the book, several of them not to my taste but perhaps you will enjoy them.
Amazon link
Rating - 3: useful for many campaigns
The second relaunched World of Darkness follows the same pattern as the previous: fewer tribes, narrower focus, more limited geography, less fantastic. In this case, I find that to the detriment of the setting.
Werewolf is the violence-driven World of Darkness setting, as opposed to its angst- and imagination-driven siblings. You are part of a hidden race of predators in the midst of mankind, connected to a shadowy world of spirits. Partly man and partly beast, your ways are not truly of either. Can you become fully both at once?
I see fewer compelling stories to tell and games to play here. The re-envisioned setting puts the focus on pack and territory. You hang with your gang on your turf. This means that the story must come to you. How many things can believably go wrong in your square mileage before it starts to look like Gotham? The suggestions to storytellers seem to suggest having players create personal connections with their territory, then use those connections to hurt them by attacking them.
This is a classic RPG cliche that encourages orphans and uncaring loners. If you have family members, they will fall under curses, turn against you, be threatened or captured by your foes, or slaughtered to show just how horrible this new foe is. This can only get worse in a horror setting. See page 227: have the characters' lovers and family members get possesses by evil spirits. "A werewolf might be able to kill a Claimed stranger without hesitation, but can she do the same to her niece? ... String it out, and the players will be on tenterhooks waiting to see whose character goes through the emotional wringer next." So if that sounds like a fun evening to you, go for it.
This book follows the rule of five like its siblings: five tribes, five auspices. In this case, thinking of them as race and class is less far from the mark, as the auspices assign roles like the combat-based Rahu or the Ithaeur occultists. The tribes are less "race" than the previous editions.' They now read more like general tendencies than familial clans. Given the narrowed setting, you no longer have a tribe of werewolves that treats with faeries.
I was fond of the old Werewolf cosmology of Wyld, Weaver, and Wyrm. That is gone, replaced with a story of the primordial wolf-father, slain in his dotage by the werewolves. The D&D-style spirit planes are out, with a single "twisted reflection" shadow world in its place (D&D 4th Edition's shadow plane is more or less identical). The fera are gone, although a couple were re-built under the category of spirits. Pentex is gone. Those collectively remove the Black Shadow Dancers, and with no War of Rage there was no Bunyip genocide. So who conflicts are left?
There are three "pure tribes," the ones that did not help kill the primordial wolf-father. Part of their sparse description is that they are more numerous and powerful than the other tribes. So instead of one fallen tribe, we have several tribes than consider all the others to be fallen. And since the other tribes are Forsaken, they have a point.
There is conflict amongst the orthodox werewolves, although this is poorly elaborated. I think the implication is of interaction between nearby packs. With the claiming of territory, I would expect less interaction between them, instead having each little group of five werewolves off by itself, occasionally posturing towards the neighbors. There is no Vampire danse macabre, there is no central interaction place for all the packs, there are no global tribal politics.
Humans are always a vague specter. The great mass, the herd: ignore it unless it stampedes. Upon reflection, I would have expected more about how the human world impacts the werewolf world, consider that they overlap and that all werewolves started out as humans. The most important human link seems to be the last, expanded foe:spirits.
Werewolves have been recast as the regulators of the spirit world. There was always a lot about the Umbra before, but that takes a central place in the new edition. There is resonance between the spirit and mortal worlds, so human developments affect local spirits while the spirits sometimes seek human hosts. This is also how wererats and weavers have been brought back, under the category of possessed human hosts.
I note the morality of Harmony. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is a venal sin and 10 is utter depravity, carrying a silver weapon is a 2 and using it is a 7. Murdering a fellow werewolf is an 8, killing one in the heat of battle (including the pure tribes that will try to kill you) is a 6, slaying a human "needlessly" is a 5, disrespecting an elder is a 3, and killing people for a good reason is not on the list of sins. So this is perhaps an unusual approach to the world. Reflecting back on taking away the characters' stuff, having the pure tribes attack gives the players this lovely choice: die; kill your enemies, and risk suffering derangements for violating your morality; or let the enemy live, at which point they heal quickly and you repeat until you pick one of the first two options.
The chapter-by-chapter would be less interesting here. There are few chapters, and I have already covered most of what there is to say about them. The titles are pretty explicit: The Wold of the Forsaken, Character, Rules and Systems, Storytelling and Antagonists. Just what is says on the tin. The appendices are of note.
Appendix One: The Spirit World is 38 pages on just that. About an eighth of the book has that pure focus, in addition to the spirit world content in the other chapters. This shows the shift in emphasis and gives you something to work with.
Appendix Two: The Rockies is a 25-page sample setting. It is a sketch, but it shows some of what you can do with the new setting. It takes an approach that helps churn things through a relatively small area: filling a power vacuum. Diverse parties can squabble over a poorly claimed area in the wake of eliminating the great foe that had claimed it. The Rockies are also just a great region for this sort of thing: the sort of wilds where you could expect wolves along with all sizes of cities and towns right up to Denver itself. This chapter shows the potential of the setting.
The vignette spread over the prologue and epilogue is good. The art that goes with it is good too, showing the major plot points in a few drawings.
I should comment on the art, but I have even less to say than usual. I am having trouble spotting names associated with each illustration, so I cannot cite anyone's work in particular. The large pictures that open each chapter are good. The art styles vary dramatically throughout the book, several of them not to my taste but perhaps you will enjoy them.
Amazon link
Monday, August 18, 2008
Vampire: The Requiem by Ari Marmell, Dean Shomshak, and C.A. Suleiman
World of Darkness role-playing book
Rating - 3: useful for many campaigns
Since I looked at the re-launch of Dungeons and Dragons, why not of World of Darkness? Wow, was that four years ago?
Vampire the Requiem is a modern gothic role-playing game. You can add "of personal horror" to keep the inheritance of its predecessor, Vampire the Masquerade. You play a modern day vampire in a dance of blood, death, power, and politics. Take a pre-Christian Anne Rice vampire novel and place yourself in it.
Let's be honest, it is too much fun to mock World of Darkness. It is also too easy, with jokes about LARPing goths, playing at being dark princesses. The setting facilitates a strange sort of wish-fulfillment that gets far too deeply into the sexxxy vampire motif.
Because the gothic and horror elements too often drop beneath the surface of how awesome it all is. You and your friends are special, not just adventurers in a world of fantastic monsters but fantastic monsters in a world of muggles. You are superhumanly strong, graceful, beautiful, and powerful, and if that is not enough, you can probably control minds, fly, fade into shadow, and/or deflect bullets. You live on a world with 6-point-something billion talking cattle and a small number of peers; those peers are almost always worse than you because they are inhuman monsters, misguided idealists, or less powerful/beautiful/awesome.
Or to rephrase, the ideas and writing can be compelling, but they frequently attract the sort of people who D&D nerds can feel comfortable mocking. The mockery is mutual.
I may by now have offended the sort of people most likely to read a review of this book. If it makes you feel better, you can assume that I meant those other guys, and heck it's probably true. There are lots of ways of using Storyteller games that do not make you look like a pretentious pouf. (Or you can take the abuse in the other direction, like our old Vampire the Dark Ages game that my friends played as D&D in the dark with vampires.)
Storyteller is a perfectly adequate gaming system. It is not a tightly structured set of rules, but for the sort of games that use it, it provides enough backbone for the resolution of disputes without getting in the way of play. It lends itself more to deep role-playing (or structured make-believe) than D&D's obvious wargaming roots. There should be more talking than rolling.
There have been some rule revisions for the re-launched World of Darkness, complete with a separate rulebook, but I am not going to review that (anytime soon). The rules have not changed enough to make that interesting. What has always been interesting has been the setting, not the rules. The World of Darkness has a lot of good writing and ideas, ranging from great spectacles to convoluted conspiracies that unravel over the course of dozens of books. The web is intricate, sometimes breaking under the strain of too many writers, but the meta-plots for each World of Darkness game are compelling stories. So we are going to talk about what is here, what has changed, etc.
The first thing you will not is a purging of clans. Five remain, each themed around one classic vampire archetype: monster, beast, tyrant, beauty, or shadow. You can slot the previous clans into this, so the Mekhet fill the slots where you would expect Lasombra, Setites, and maybe Giovanni, while the Gangrel subsume the Brujah.
These are supplemented by covenants, another set of five. (Try not to think of them as "race" and "class." That won't do any good.) Many philosophies given to clans or movements are now organized into political factions. These are dominators, democrats, churchmen, pagans, and ritualists. The various forms of Thaumaturgy that were attached to clans are now attached to covenants, in their new forms. The Caitiff are also replaced by an Unaligned (lack of) covenant. Former Anarchs might be more comfortable with the Unaligned or the democrats, depending on what sort of anarchy they wanted.
There is no Camarilla/Sabbat conflict. There are no clanless vampires, no clans outside of politics. Everyone is regrouped under one umbrella. Fight smaller battles, not globe-spanning wars. The struggle has been brought back to politics, without an external enemy to unite.
Okay, that is not entirely true. There are two mini-covenants for NPCs, to provide monsters and spectacles. You have VII, the unseen assassins, and Belial's Brood, who adopt the worst practices of the old Sabbat or Baali. VII is seeking a "Sabbath." If the Sabbat played a role as evil outsiders in your old chronicle, the replacements are already here. Because we may be blood-sucking monsters, but we're not as bad as those guys, the vampire says, as he rides the "we are cool, dark anti-heroes" slippery slope into moral depravity.
The "back to basics" approach is a commendable pruning. If you wanted a tighter, character-driven story that did not involve a dozen factions, this is for you. The setting is very much one city, a small group of people, and you are stuck with them potentially forever.
I also do not expect the pruning to last long. There is an appendix of "bloodlines." Yes, there are five clans, but each can have as many bloodlines as you like. Great, we can re-introduce every clan from every book in the first edition, complete with a unique discipline for each, and it still fits in the neat structure. Without having kept track of the revised World of Darkness, I know of several books of bloodlines, to say nothing of what must get included in every other supplement.
Still, the pruned, constricted world presented suggests a more tightly focused campaign. The latter days of Vamprie the Requiem suggested global conflict, with the Camarilla and Sabbat warring between cities, Kuei-jin taking advantage of this from the west (assuming a US-centric campaign), werewolves attacking, a dozen types of supernatural beings popping up, and of course the elders awakening and bringing down the end of the world. You became part of an epic story. This is less epic, more claustrophobic. You are a local monster like the local monsters three cities over, not part of a global vampiric conspiracy.
The rules facilitate some major purges of the world's backstory. First, the torpor rules are expanded, providing a reason why some elders intentionally enter torpor. As an addition to that, torpor has wiped history clean. Despite having ancient clan elders, their memories are untrustworthy because of the mental havoc wreaked by years of nightmare-filled sleep. Origins have all been irredeemably lost to the mists of time (until a book introduces someone who has managed to stay awake for millennia). I cannot find the words "methuselah" or "antediluvian" in here.
This is tied to new blood potency rules, replacing generation. Blood naturally thickens over time. This lets vampires become stronger, but it makes it harder to feed. So vampires have a built in boom-bust cycle. So there is no way or even reason to look at blood strength and extrapolate back to demigod founders.
With a world that cannot remember millennia of baggage, you get to start fresh. This loss of history hurts in some story ways, but it certainly cleans things up for your game.
"Humanity" returns as the standard moral code. There are no other paths or such (yet). Some of that will have been subsumed under the covenants' philosophies, but following a philosophy consistently does not help your Humanity score. There is a surprising amount about Golconda and becoming human again. I know "human again" is a common vampire theme, but it seems odd to be a human pretending to be a vampire who wants to be a human, except for the standard "tortured soul on an eternal crusade" thing.
On the "the more things change..." front, every clan and covenant comes with a box on their opinions of the others. Guess what? Everyone thinks every other group is a bunch of useful idiots at best. Why everyone hates everyone else is potential character development, but the stereotypical nature minimizes it.
I am leaving the rating as a 3 rather than a 4, despite the need for this book if you are going to play Requiem, because it is an interesting read that does not call one to play. Maybe I just don't have any stories about a vampire alter-ego, but I would be content to read about the stories set in this setting. That is good as a book, bad as a game. The revamped set of clans and covenants is not compelling enough to make me want to unlearn everything I read from the previous edition, especially when I expect half of it to return in future publications. Let's go to the chapter-by-chapter.
Prologue, "Dance of the Dead" (10 pages) and Epilogue, "Strings and Piano" (4 pages) are the little vignettes that always start or close these books. In this case, they mostly start or close the vampires' unlives, at about a page each. They are pretty good.
Introduction (12 pages) is just what it says on the tin. I am fond of the "sources and inspiration" section. More publishers should have those. Most games will implicitly try to resemble something, and knowing what that is going in will set expectations properly.
Chapter One, "Society of the Damned" (70 pages) goes through all the concepts and terms you will need. Clans, domains, havens, Elysium, princes, and all that. This will update Masquerade players and introduce new ones. The big points are the same, except as noted before. This includes the detailed descriptions of the covenants. This is the heart of the fluff.
Chapter Two, "Character" (66 pages) has most of the crunch. It starts with the steps of character creation then moves to its bulk, the detailed descriptions of clans, disciplines, and rituals. This is what you will need dice for.
Chapter Three, "Special Rules and Systems" (42 pages) opens with twelve pages on blood: blood bonds, ghouls, using blood, and all the other sanguine times that come with vampirism. Add in the rest of the crunch, the details of undead combat, sleep of the ages, morality, insanity, and redemption.
In Chapter Four, "Storytelling and Antagonists" (36 pages), you put together a coterie, a city, a chronicle, and the characters who play in it. The chapter summarizes story types and themes, with some suggestions of how to have a group of unholy monsters work together and do something coherent. Your group might spend most of its time on infighting, or maybe you will take the standard gaming leap of an improbably unified group against a hostile world. Ends with some sample enemies and awarding/using experience points.
Appendix One, "Bloodlines and Unique Disciplines" (34 pages) gives you back the Brujah, Malkavians, and Toreadors, with some edits for the new edition. The return to a glut of clans begins early! As a bonus, a bloodline gets a fourth clan discipline, usually a unique one; the downside is a bonus clan drawback. Hey, the Samedi are Japanese now, not Jamaican!
Appendix Two, "New Orleans" (30 pages) recasts the city in the somewhat over-written style you would expect. I skimmed most of this, because it holds limited interest for me, but I do recommend the character descriptions at the end. They are a good mix of playing to- and against-type. With the new five-clan/five-covenant structure, writers can include everything in a sane number of pages, without needing members from a dozen clans or an explanation for the missing.
Amazon link
Rating - 3: useful for many campaigns
Since I looked at the re-launch of Dungeons and Dragons, why not of World of Darkness? Wow, was that four years ago?
Vampire the Requiem is a modern gothic role-playing game. You can add "of personal horror" to keep the inheritance of its predecessor, Vampire the Masquerade. You play a modern day vampire in a dance of blood, death, power, and politics. Take a pre-Christian Anne Rice vampire novel and place yourself in it.
Let's be honest, it is too much fun to mock World of Darkness. It is also too easy, with jokes about LARPing goths, playing at being dark princesses. The setting facilitates a strange sort of wish-fulfillment that gets far too deeply into the sexxxy vampire motif.
Because the gothic and horror elements too often drop beneath the surface of how awesome it all is. You and your friends are special, not just adventurers in a world of fantastic monsters but fantastic monsters in a world of muggles. You are superhumanly strong, graceful, beautiful, and powerful, and if that is not enough, you can probably control minds, fly, fade into shadow, and/or deflect bullets. You live on a world with 6-point-something billion talking cattle and a small number of peers; those peers are almost always worse than you because they are inhuman monsters, misguided idealists, or less powerful/beautiful/awesome.
Or to rephrase, the ideas and writing can be compelling, but they frequently attract the sort of people who D&D nerds can feel comfortable mocking. The mockery is mutual.
I may by now have offended the sort of people most likely to read a review of this book. If it makes you feel better, you can assume that I meant those other guys, and heck it's probably true. There are lots of ways of using Storyteller games that do not make you look like a pretentious pouf. (Or you can take the abuse in the other direction, like our old Vampire the Dark Ages game that my friends played as D&D in the dark with vampires.)
Storyteller is a perfectly adequate gaming system. It is not a tightly structured set of rules, but for the sort of games that use it, it provides enough backbone for the resolution of disputes without getting in the way of play. It lends itself more to deep role-playing (or structured make-believe) than D&D's obvious wargaming roots. There should be more talking than rolling.
There have been some rule revisions for the re-launched World of Darkness, complete with a separate rulebook, but I am not going to review that (anytime soon). The rules have not changed enough to make that interesting. What has always been interesting has been the setting, not the rules. The World of Darkness has a lot of good writing and ideas, ranging from great spectacles to convoluted conspiracies that unravel over the course of dozens of books. The web is intricate, sometimes breaking under the strain of too many writers, but the meta-plots for each World of Darkness game are compelling stories. So we are going to talk about what is here, what has changed, etc.
The first thing you will not is a purging of clans. Five remain, each themed around one classic vampire archetype: monster, beast, tyrant, beauty, or shadow. You can slot the previous clans into this, so the Mekhet fill the slots where you would expect Lasombra, Setites, and maybe Giovanni, while the Gangrel subsume the Brujah.
These are supplemented by covenants, another set of five. (Try not to think of them as "race" and "class." That won't do any good.) Many philosophies given to clans or movements are now organized into political factions. These are dominators, democrats, churchmen, pagans, and ritualists. The various forms of Thaumaturgy that were attached to clans are now attached to covenants, in their new forms. The Caitiff are also replaced by an Unaligned (lack of) covenant. Former Anarchs might be more comfortable with the Unaligned or the democrats, depending on what sort of anarchy they wanted.
There is no Camarilla/Sabbat conflict. There are no clanless vampires, no clans outside of politics. Everyone is regrouped under one umbrella. Fight smaller battles, not globe-spanning wars. The struggle has been brought back to politics, without an external enemy to unite.
Okay, that is not entirely true. There are two mini-covenants for NPCs, to provide monsters and spectacles. You have VII, the unseen assassins, and Belial's Brood, who adopt the worst practices of the old Sabbat or Baali. VII is seeking a "Sabbath." If the Sabbat played a role as evil outsiders in your old chronicle, the replacements are already here. Because we may be blood-sucking monsters, but we're not as bad as those guys, the vampire says, as he rides the "we are cool, dark anti-heroes" slippery slope into moral depravity.
The "back to basics" approach is a commendable pruning. If you wanted a tighter, character-driven story that did not involve a dozen factions, this is for you. The setting is very much one city, a small group of people, and you are stuck with them potentially forever.
I also do not expect the pruning to last long. There is an appendix of "bloodlines." Yes, there are five clans, but each can have as many bloodlines as you like. Great, we can re-introduce every clan from every book in the first edition, complete with a unique discipline for each, and it still fits in the neat structure. Without having kept track of the revised World of Darkness, I know of several books of bloodlines, to say nothing of what must get included in every other supplement.
Still, the pruned, constricted world presented suggests a more tightly focused campaign. The latter days of Vamprie the Requiem suggested global conflict, with the Camarilla and Sabbat warring between cities, Kuei-jin taking advantage of this from the west (assuming a US-centric campaign), werewolves attacking, a dozen types of supernatural beings popping up, and of course the elders awakening and bringing down the end of the world. You became part of an epic story. This is less epic, more claustrophobic. You are a local monster like the local monsters three cities over, not part of a global vampiric conspiracy.
The rules facilitate some major purges of the world's backstory. First, the torpor rules are expanded, providing a reason why some elders intentionally enter torpor. As an addition to that, torpor has wiped history clean. Despite having ancient clan elders, their memories are untrustworthy because of the mental havoc wreaked by years of nightmare-filled sleep. Origins have all been irredeemably lost to the mists of time (until a book introduces someone who has managed to stay awake for millennia). I cannot find the words "methuselah" or "antediluvian" in here.
This is tied to new blood potency rules, replacing generation. Blood naturally thickens over time. This lets vampires become stronger, but it makes it harder to feed. So vampires have a built in boom-bust cycle. So there is no way or even reason to look at blood strength and extrapolate back to demigod founders.
With a world that cannot remember millennia of baggage, you get to start fresh. This loss of history hurts in some story ways, but it certainly cleans things up for your game.
"Humanity" returns as the standard moral code. There are no other paths or such (yet). Some of that will have been subsumed under the covenants' philosophies, but following a philosophy consistently does not help your Humanity score. There is a surprising amount about Golconda and becoming human again. I know "human again" is a common vampire theme, but it seems odd to be a human pretending to be a vampire who wants to be a human, except for the standard "tortured soul on an eternal crusade" thing.
On the "the more things change..." front, every clan and covenant comes with a box on their opinions of the others. Guess what? Everyone thinks every other group is a bunch of useful idiots at best. Why everyone hates everyone else is potential character development, but the stereotypical nature minimizes it.
I am leaving the rating as a 3 rather than a 4, despite the need for this book if you are going to play Requiem, because it is an interesting read that does not call one to play. Maybe I just don't have any stories about a vampire alter-ego, but I would be content to read about the stories set in this setting. That is good as a book, bad as a game. The revamped set of clans and covenants is not compelling enough to make me want to unlearn everything I read from the previous edition, especially when I expect half of it to return in future publications. Let's go to the chapter-by-chapter.
Prologue, "Dance of the Dead" (10 pages) and Epilogue, "Strings and Piano" (4 pages) are the little vignettes that always start or close these books. In this case, they mostly start or close the vampires' unlives, at about a page each. They are pretty good.
Introduction (12 pages) is just what it says on the tin. I am fond of the "sources and inspiration" section. More publishers should have those. Most games will implicitly try to resemble something, and knowing what that is going in will set expectations properly.
Chapter One, "Society of the Damned" (70 pages) goes through all the concepts and terms you will need. Clans, domains, havens, Elysium, princes, and all that. This will update Masquerade players and introduce new ones. The big points are the same, except as noted before. This includes the detailed descriptions of the covenants. This is the heart of the fluff.
Chapter Two, "Character" (66 pages) has most of the crunch. It starts with the steps of character creation then moves to its bulk, the detailed descriptions of clans, disciplines, and rituals. This is what you will need dice for.
Chapter Three, "Special Rules and Systems" (42 pages) opens with twelve pages on blood: blood bonds, ghouls, using blood, and all the other sanguine times that come with vampirism. Add in the rest of the crunch, the details of undead combat, sleep of the ages, morality, insanity, and redemption.
In Chapter Four, "Storytelling and Antagonists" (36 pages), you put together a coterie, a city, a chronicle, and the characters who play in it. The chapter summarizes story types and themes, with some suggestions of how to have a group of unholy monsters work together and do something coherent. Your group might spend most of its time on infighting, or maybe you will take the standard gaming leap of an improbably unified group against a hostile world. Ends with some sample enemies and awarding/using experience points.
Appendix One, "Bloodlines and Unique Disciplines" (34 pages) gives you back the Brujah, Malkavians, and Toreadors, with some edits for the new edition. The return to a glut of clans begins early! As a bonus, a bloodline gets a fourth clan discipline, usually a unique one; the downside is a bonus clan drawback. Hey, the Samedi are Japanese now, not Jamaican!
Appendix Two, "New Orleans" (30 pages) recasts the city in the somewhat over-written style you would expect. I skimmed most of this, because it holds limited interest for me, but I do recommend the character descriptions at the end. They are a good mix of playing to- and against-type. With the new five-clan/five-covenant structure, writers can include everything in a sane number of pages, without needing members from a dozen clans or an explanation for the missing.
Amazon link
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