Author: Ronni Radner and Ethan Skemp
Category: game
Company/Publisher: White Wolf

Cost: 15.00

Page count: 118

ISBN: 1-56504-230-1 Playtest Review by Heather Grove on 10/15/97. Genre tags: none

I'll start simply: if you want a ghoul in your campaign, then "Ghouls" is worth your money and reading time. It addresses those nit-picky little rules questions you thought of after reading "Vampire: the Masquerade", and even answers most of them. I was surprised and pleased by the thoroughness of the book; this is definitely better than your average White Wolf supplement.

If you have V:tM, then you have some idea of what a ghoul is. It's a human who's fed on the blood of a vampire without being completely drained first. You get some of the spiffy powers of a vampire without those little drawbacks like being burned by sunlight. Of course this comes with a few heavy price tags: a craving for vampire blood (which you must have at least once a month, but oh, do you want it more than that), and, quite often, a supernatural Blood Bond to the vampire who feeds you.

I went into this book with a lot of questions (how high can you take disciplines? do you acquire the clan flaw of the vampire who feeds you? how much blood do you need? what happens if you ghoul a mage? do any of these sound familiar?). I was surprised by just how many of them were answered by the book. Radner and Skemp certainly did their homework.

There were a few things that either were mildly unclear or slightly contradictory, but if you read the whole thing you can usually find a detail here or there that makes things clear. For example, one of the horrors a ghoul must sometimes face is that of withdrawal. Running out of vampire blood is not a pretty thing. However, it doesn't say if you go into withdrawal at the end of the month, when you run out of blood, or before. It does say, however, that ghouls who do drugs in an attempt to curb the withdrawal cravings are liable to spread their tainted blood among mortals by sharing needles. So, you can infer that the poor ghoul's cravings start before they run out of vampire blood. Yes, I'm sure it would be nice if it was spelled out, but the information is there. It's clear that the authors understood their concept and what they wanted out of "Ghouls".

My experiences using the rules for ghouls have been good. They consisted of taking an existing character and rewriting them as a ghoul, and the process has worked well. The book made it easy, making it clear what the character could and couldn't do, how the process might affect them emotionally, etc. I've enjoyed running my new character, and have had no problems implementing the rules. The downsides seem to well-balance-out the new abilities.

My only complaint about the book would be regarding style. The cover art leaves more than a little to be desired: it's ugly, it's pointless, and it's fairly irrelevant. I can think of a dozen scenes that could have more effectively gotten across the horror of a ghoul's situation (if only I had any artistic talent to go with). The story is okay, the templates are somewhat interesting; the examples of conflict are good. The authors seemed to have a preoccupation with B&D; I don't have a problem with that, but it interferes with the book in places and gets tiresome after a while. It has the feel of the writers saying "oh, wait, this book is supposed to be *bad*. I'd better stick another bondage description in here."

Thanks to the style problems this isn't a supplement I'd pick for side-reading material, but if you want to have ghouls in your campaign at all then it's an amazingly useful book.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)