The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Kindred of the East marks White Wolf's flagship entry into the eastern half of the World of Darkness, and also stands as one of the harder reviews that I've had to write. I've got a pair of failed attempts hanging around on my hard drive, from which I've decided to crib assorted useful bits.

Why is it hard to review? It's not a bad product, but it launches itself boldly into the East, doing the same thing for the vampires of the East as it did for the vampires of the West - taking diverse myths about vampires and refining them into something that's uniquely the property of White Wolf.

Or, at least, I'd guess. I have absolutely no clue about what Eastern vampires are supposed to be like, and what I do know about them tends to the Monstrous Manual and such. Some of them are the result of improper burial. Some of them hop around. Some of them steal breath, rather than drinking blood. Some of them, called pannagalaans, or something spelled like that, are able to detach their heads from their bodies, and float around.

The Kindred of the East are able to do most of those things and more. There's a direct link to Hunter: The Reckoning in their story. Originally, they weren't really vampires; they were the Wan Xian, dedicated to fighting the malevolent Yama Kings and their servants, empowered by the August Personage of Jade. If you're reminded of Hunter: The Reckoning, it's not by accident - the parallels between the two are deliberate. The Wan Xian themselves used chi to fuel their powers - but then found out that they could get more chi by draining things. At first, they drained only from the monsters and demons that they fought. Eventually, giving in to temptation, they drank from people. The August Personage of Jade took offense at having some of his creations treated like Slurpees, and cursed the Wan Xian, transforming them into the Wan Kuei - lifeless vampires. Now that the Wan Xian have fallen, the Yama Kings have seeped back in, and the World of Darkness came into being. That's where the Wan Xian - now called Kuei-Jin - come in.

Now that the blessing of the August Personage of Jade has been lifted, the Kuei-Jin have dramatically changed. For one thing, only those who have a strong dark side - a Shadow, in Wraith terms - are able to claw out of their graves and back into a second life. Until they're trained, they're slavering monsters, and once they've regained control of their P'o - their dark half - they spend some five years being extensively trained in the courts of the Kuei-Jin. They're also required to pick a Dharmic path, to avoid being eaten up from within by their ravenous P'o. Once they've managed to get themselves squared with the karmic requirements of being a Kuei-Jin, they can begin a period of apprenticeship, which lasts a human lifetime, and is where most PCs will play their characters. Meanwhile, the Kuei-Jin also naturally form into social groups called wu, which can be assigned various tasks by the Kuei-Jin courts . They can even have their own totem-spirits, if everybody spends the apppropriate Background points.

What can they do? Compared to the Western Kindred, there's not a whole lot that they can't do.

They've got access to a wide variety of powerful combat disciplines, including the ability to fly, breathe fire, corrupt the chi of other beings, and create weapons that inflict aggravated damage out of their own bone structures. They can also do a rudimentary form of shapeshifting, going from a normal form to a pumped-up demon form, which gives them substantial benefits to their stats, monstrous weapons and increased size, like a werewolf. And since they're essentially wraiths that have reincorporated into human bodies, they've got Shadows (P'o) that they can harness - and be controlled by. That also allows them to go into the Umbra - the spirit world - and the Deadlands, where wraiths live. Did I mention that they've got totems, too? And rites? The only thing that they're missing, I think, are some Changeling abilities.

They're also the most segmented creatures I've ever seen trotting around the World of Darkness. They've got a dualistic split between their Hun and P'o, which ensures that they've got the same kind man/beast dualism as Kindred. They've also got a split between Yin and Yang energies, a split that most gamers will be familiar with from the Yin-Yang symbol. Yin energy is passive, quiet, deathly, while Yang energy is bright, active, sexual, energetic. These particular energies are much like Willpower, in that you've got both a permanent attribute - measuring how much you can store - and a temporary attribute, which indicates how much energy you have available to spend. And, to boot, you can choose to deliberately imbalance yourself, meaning that your vampire takes on the attributes of the Chi energy that he's imbalanced himself with. Yang vampires are hyperactive, Yin vampires are essentially walking, rotting corpses.

There's also the Dharmas, which complicate things even further. There are five provided within Kindred of the East, and cover a range of interests. Roughly speaking, the Devil Tigers are the bad boys, the Resplendent Cranes are legalists, the Bone Flowers commune with the dead, the Thrashing Dragons glow with Yang energy, and the Thousand Whispers deliberately cultivate multiple personalties, choosing as they'd like. They're not just suggested templates for characters, like Nature and Demeanor in regular White Wolf games; they're actually a traditional part of Kuei-Jin society. You absolutely have to have one of these Dharmas in order to play a Kuei-Jin.

In one sense, it's helpful. It increases the feeling that the Kuei-Jin have grown hidebound and stratified, with a lot of emphasis on the five directions, astrology, polite society and etiquette, and the general impression that the old ways are best. You're not just any Devil Tiger - it's your karmic place in the order of things to be a Devil Tiger, to take on the role of a devil and punish the wicked. There's also enough range within the Dharmas to come up with some decent concepts.

However, this approach also entails a fair amount of pigeon-holing, and it's in full force here. White Wolf has always liked to break potential characters into categories; you're not just a werewolf, you're a lupus Black Fury Ahroun. Or a 12th generation Brujah vampire. Changeling genuinely needed that kind of breakdown, since there are many different kinds of fairies in myth, and Wraith managed to escape it entirely. But it seems to reduce player freedom when you either pick your character from a shopping list, or make up a character and then try to break him down into the appropriate categories.

Some of them will also provide sharp role-playing challenges, such as the Thousand Whispers - you create a life for your character, then break it and make a new one, according to the tenets of your Dharma. It's called one of the rarest Dharmas, especially for the Kuei-Jin, but it's also one of the only five choices provided. On the other hand, there are concepts provided for each Dharma; and there are two other Dharmas provided in the Companion. All in all, I'd say that the Dharmas encourage role-playing, rather than stifling them, but I'd personally prefer that the game not try to force concepts on the players.

And then we come to the Disciplines. A friend of mine suggested that Kindred of the East had been afflicted with the kind of power inflation that plagues lesser efforts, like Rifts. In a sense, that's true. This isn't quite true. Kuei-Jin can change into a demon shape by using the Chi of the P'o half of their bodies, which have a variety of funky abilities at their disposal - tails, wings, maws that do Str + 3 aggravated damage, a demon weapon, hideous foulness, extre size, the ability to cause delirium, and other such nasty features. Even a single level of Demon Shintai provides a bonus to the three physical stats, which goes up with every new level of the discipline. But it takes three turns to transform into that form, and costs you three Demon chi - and only by increasing the power of your darker half can you increase the amount of Demon Chi that you've got available. If you get jumped, you're not going to be able to access your demon form for a bit. (Then again, a Kuei-Jin in Demon Hunter X seems to do exactly that - an instant metamorphosis between human and monster.) Despite the strength of the discipline, it has a good number of drawbacks.

You can also use your Demon Chi to power your Black Wind discipline, which allows you an extra action for every dot that you have in the power - and it only costs a single point of Demon chi. Say that you have Black Wind at 3, and three demon chi points. Your enemies can now expect to deal with nine actions per turn as soon as you fire it up. On the other hand, it's underpowered when compared to Celerity, for Kindred, which allows you to take an extra action equal to your Celerity for every blood point you spend. The average Kuei-Jin has about three Demon chi, if he chooses not to increase the strength of his P'o; the average Brujah has, say, about ten blood points, assuming that he's fed recently. See who wins first.

The rest of the disciplines are much like that - they're powerful, but they've also got drawbacks, probably more than the Kindred do. The disciplines themselves are also quite vivid, lending a very different feel to the Kuei-Jin. The Ghost flame discipline allows Kuei-Jin to manipulate chi energy into various kinds of flame, which can cause Rotschreck in vampires - too easily, I feel - while the Flesh Shintai allows a vampire to warp his own body, even detaching limbs and creating homoculi from his own flesh. Almost all of the disciplines have multiple options, which allows those owning a particular level in a Discipline to create various effects for differing amounts of Chi. The third level of Bone Obedience, which lets you manipulate your skeleton, allows for effects ranging from a bone sword talons to face-changing to creating a skeleton key out of one's own finger. The Kuei-Jin are also able to step into the Umbra and are able to use caerns, granting them a lot more flexibility.

You may be wondering why I keep contrasting the Kuei-Jin and conventional Western Kindred; there's a reason for it. As portrayed in the book, the Kuei-Jin dislike the Western Kindred, regarding them as nothing more than claimants to the legacy of a homicidal farmer, disgusting parodies of the Kuei-Jin and deserving of nothing more than a quick death. And, within the book, the Kindred don't come off very well. One of the first fiction segments includes a Ventrue elder being slain - with a stunningly good description of what a severed head sees as it rolls across the street - and the rest of the book doesn't find the Kindred doing much better. The Kuei-Jin are strongly traditional, casually racist, and have a superiority complex; but this also turned off Vampire: The Masquerade players who weren't happy about their favorite race getting its head handed to them by the new guys. Subsequent books have evened the balance, and I believe that the Kindred of the East Companion details the success that the Giovanni clan has been having, but it was a bit of a mistake to make the Kuei-Jin sound like the new baddest boys on the block. In some respects, yes. In others, far from it.

As for what's there to do within the Middle Kingdom: Plenty. The Kuei-jin have the same kind of political intrigues as the Kindred, so fans of political games will have much to do. Fans of Wraith will find interest in resolving the remnants of their character's lives, as well as interacting with the Shadowlands - the Dark Kingdom of Jade is described, in moderate detail, in the back of the book. (One nitpick: It takes five years to go from a chih-mei - a larval Kuei-Jin - to a recognized member of Kuei-Jin society. In that time, your old conflicts can be resolved and then some.) There's a lot of other stuff to do, but the book also suggests heroic struggle against the Yama Kings as a viable option. Even though the Kuei-Jin have lost their favored place as the Wan Xian, they can still fight against the machinations of the Yama Kings, and akuma - Kuei-Jin who have gone bad and undertaken service to them. Even the Devil-Tigers regard such behavior as blasphemous - as the book says, the object is to become a demon, not serve one. It seems kind of odd to send supernatural predators against the forces of evil, personally - "Well, Mr. Fox, your resume of 'killing and eating chickens 1990-1996 seems a bit suspect, but I'll give you a night guarding the henhouse anyhow!" - but I don't imagine that'll stop most players.

There's also the pursuit of Dharma, one of the game's subthemes. The Kuei-Jin are trying to re-establish their place in the world, mostly through their Dharmas, which in turn translates into a game mechanic. Every time a Kuei-Jin gets into a situation that could cause a burst of enlightenment, the player gets to roll a particular virtue against another - which in turn causes an increase in Dharma. Increases in Dharma lead to the ability to store more chi and spend it much more quickly. In short, it's like Generation for vampire, but without the nastiness of diablerie. But you can also lose Dharma from failing contested rolls against your P'o, which may also throw you into a period where your P'o takes over and runs your body for a while. It's a neat play mechanic, borrowing from the best of all of White Wolf's games.

The book does provide a good amount of information about the Middle Kingdom and its inhabitants. However, it's not entirely clear just what the hell is going on in political terms. The Five August Courts of China have lost power, and two of their courts are practically gone. Japan and Korea have their own courts - the Bishamon and the Green Courts - while the rest of Southeast Asia has the Scarlet Dragon court. The exact nature of the political machinations is left to the GM, but I haven't the faintest clue of what to do with it. Most of the material is focused on the history of the courts, rather on their present, and what they have in terms of the present isn't all that much. There's also a tour of the Middle Kingdom in the present day, but I have to say that I didn't find anything that really set the tone of the area in my head. It's also worth noting that Japan is ailing from the effects of a pair of atom bombs, and the resultant warping of the chi. This doesn't happen for the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the millions dead in the Chinese famines, all of which caused more deaths than the atomic bomb. Which leads me to conclude: If you're going to kill a lot of people, make sure that you don't do it with an atomic bomb, or there might be a reaction in the spirit world. Otherwise, kill as many people as you like, because nobody will remember.

There's the standard list of enemies in the back, as well as artifacts for Kuei-Jin - including living sashes, disguise masks, and charms that do different things once activated with chi. I wish that they'd included more artifacts, just for the sake of unimaginative GMs such as myslef, but I'm sure that a space limitation was involved. There's brief writeups for the shih, Strike Force Zero, bakemono - Oriental fomori - dhampyrs, mages, werewolves, and such; enough to get you past, but it's really just better to buy Werewolf, or Mage, or whatever you intend to throw at your players.

The art and tone of the book are pretty good, although the wild variation of the art tends to lend the book a disorganized feel. What's especially annoying is the gray pattern behind some of the pages. While it does lend an appropriate feel to the game, it's also extremely hard on the eyes, and later supplements - especially Shadow War - don't make it any easier. The naked breast quotient for all White Wolf products is filled, of course, as is the "What in the hell is that supposed to be?" quotient. On the other hand, some of the art fits the game perfectly, including a hunched Kuei-Jin whose hideous face is shrouded in shadow and a half-mask of a child's face and a monk in a Mexican standoff with a gangster - the monk has a bow, the gangster a gun, and both of them have the drop on the other. Other art isn't as sucessful. Some of the artwork just portrays Chinese people standing around. I suppose that they're supposed to be Kuei-Jin, but I have to wonder. Another piece has a female Kuei-Jin barfing flame, looking - well, I can't describe it, but it looks really, really weird, even though it's not exactly hard to make cool. Unfortunately, the chapter illustrations just don't work. Most of them are just victims of trying to fill too much space, and the lack of color seems to combine to exaggerate the flaws of the artists involved. They're good artists; they're just not showcased to their best. On the other hand, Ron Spenser turns in his usual excellent artwork, proving againt that he's one of the best artists in the industry.

One final note: One of the complaints that I've heard about Kindred of the East is that it "rapes the culture". Well, yes, it probably does; the same way that Vampire: The Masquerade rapes most vampire myths for their good parts and leaves some of the rest. I'm sure that purists won't be too happy about the way that the game blends mythologies, or summarizes local religions, but I can't really say that I'd go so far as to call it rape. It's done respectfully, it's done with an eye to game play, and I can't really stomach those guys who make it their life's work to learn everything Oriental, only to then use that knowledge to seem superior to everybody else. If you are going to do that, do what I do: Make it your life's work to learn everything about role-playing, and then seem superior to everybody else. ;->

So, in short, Kindred of the East is a damned interesting game. It's worth purchasing as an add-on for Vampire players, or used as source material for any other White Wolf game. The Kuei-Jin are fascinating, if not a little specialized, and I'd recommend the purchase of this book to anybody interested.

-Darren MacLennan

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Kindred of the East
Author: Robert Hatch, Phil Brucato, Jackie Cassada, Mark Cenczyk, Nicky Rea, Richard E. Dansky, Ian Lemke, Ethan Skemp Category: game Company/Publisher: White Wolf Publishing Line: Vampire: The Masquerade Cost: $25.00 Page count: 224 ISBN: 1-56504-232-8 SKU: WW2900 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 06/14/00. Genre tags: Fantasy Modern day Historical Horror Anime Conspiracy Vampire Gothic Asian/Far East	Kindred of the East marks White Wolf's flagship entry into the eastern half of the World of Darkness, and also stands as one of the harder reviews that I've had to write. I've got a pair of failed attempts hanging around on my hard drive, from which I've decided to crib assorted useful bits. Why is it hard to review? It's not a bad product, but it launches itself boldly into the East, doing the same thing for the vampires of the East as it did for the vampires of the West - taking diverse myths about vampires and refining them into something that's uniquely the property of White Wolf. Or, at least, I'd guess. I have absolutely no clue about what Eastern vampires are supposed to be like, and what I do know about them tends to the Monstrous Manual and such. Some of them are the result of improper burial. Some of them hop around. Some of them steal breath, rather than drinking blood. Some of them, called pannagalaans, or something spelled like that, are able to detach their heads from their bodies, and float around. The Kindred of the East are able to do most of those things and more. There's a direct link to Hunter: The Reckoning in their story. Originally, they weren't really vampires; they were the Wan Xian, dedicated to fighting the malevolent Yama Kings and their servants, empowered by the August Personage of Jade. If you're reminded of Hunter: The Reckoning, it's not by accident - the parallels between the two are deliberate. The Wan Xian themselves used chi to fuel their powers - but then found out that they could get more chi by draining things. At first, they drained only from the monsters and demons that they fought. Eventually, giving in to temptation, they drank from people. The August Personage of Jade took offense at having some of his creations treated like Slurpees, and cursed the Wan Xian, transforming them into the Wan Kuei - lifeless vampires. Now that the Wan Xian have fallen, the Yama Kings have seeped back in, and the World of Darkness came into being. That's where the Wan Xian - now called Kuei-Jin - come in. Now that the blessing of the August Personage of Jade has been lifted, the Kuei-Jin have dramatically changed. For one thing, only those who have a strong dark side - a Shadow, in Wraith terms - are able to claw out of their graves and back into a second life. Until they're trained, they're slavering monsters, and once they've regained control of their P'o - their dark half - they spend some five years being extensively trained in the courts of the Kuei-Jin. They're also required to pick a Dharmic path, to avoid being eaten up from within by their ravenous P'o. Once they've managed to get themselves squared with the karmic requirements of being a Kuei-Jin, they can begin a period of apprenticeship, which lasts a human lifetime, and is where most PCs will play their characters. Meanwhile, the Kuei-Jin also naturally form into social groups called wu, which can be assigned various tasks by the Kuei-Jin courts . They can even have their own totem-spirits, if everybody spends the apppropriate Background points. What can they do? Compared to the Western Kindred, there's not a whole lot that they can't do. They've got access to a wide variety of powerful combat disciplines, including the ability to fly, breathe fire, corrupt the chi of other beings, and create weapons that inflict aggravated damage out of their own bone structures. They can also do a rudimentary form of shapeshifting, going from a normal form to a pumped-up demon form, which gives them substantial benefits to their stats, monstrous weapons and increased size, like a werewolf. And since they're essentially wraiths that have reincorporated into human bodies, they've got Shadows (P'o) that they can harness - and be controlled by. That also allows them to go into the Umbra - the spirit world - and the Deadlands, where wraiths live. Did I mention that they've got totems, too? And rites? The only thing that they're missing, I think, are some Changeling abilities. They're also the most segmented creatures I've ever seen trotting around the World of Darkness. They've got a dualistic split between their Hun and P'o, which ensures that they've got the same kind man/beast dualism as Kindred. They've also got a split between Yin and Yang energies, a split that most gamers will be familiar with from the Yin-Yang symbol. Yin energy is passive, quiet, deathly, while Yang energy is bright, active, sexual, energetic. These particular energies are much like Willpower, in that you've got both a permanent attribute - measuring how much you can store - and a temporary attribute, which indicates how much energy you have available to spend. And, to boot, you can choose to deliberately imbalance yourself, meaning that your vampire takes on the attributes of the Chi energy that he's imbalanced himself with. Yang vampires are hyperactive, Yin vampires are essentially walking, rotting corpses. There's also the Dharmas, which complicate things even further. There are five provided within Kindred of the East, and cover a range of interests. Roughly speaking, the Devil Tigers are the bad boys, the Resplendent Cranes are legalists, the Bone Flowers commune with the dead, the Thrashing Dragons glow with Yang energy, and the Thousand Whispers deliberately cultivate multiple personalties, choosing as they'd like. They're not just suggested templates for characters, like Nature and Demeanor in regular White Wolf games; they're actually a traditional part of Kuei-Jin society. You absolutely have to have one of these Dharmas in order to play a Kuei-Jin. In one sense, it's helpful. It increases the feeling that the Kuei-Jin have grown hidebound and stratified, with a lot of emphasis on the five directions, astrology, polite society and etiquette, and the general impression that the old ways are best. You're not just any Devil Tiger - it's your karmic place in the order of things to be a Devil Tiger, to take on the role of a devil and punish the wicked. There's also enough range within the Dharmas to come up with some decent concepts. However, this approach also entails a fair amount of pigeon-holing, and it's in full force here. White Wolf has always liked to break potential characters into categories; you're not just a werewolf, you're a lupus Black Fury Ahroun. Or a 12th generation Brujah vampire. Changeling genuinely needed that kind of breakdown, since there are many different kinds of fairies in myth, and Wraith managed to escape it entirely. But it seems to reduce player freedom when you either pick your character from a shopping list, or make up a character and then try to break him down into the appropriate categories. Some of them will also provide sharp role-playing challenges, such as the Thousand Whispers - you create a life for your character, then break it and make a new one, according to the tenets of your Dharma. It's called one of the rarest Dharmas, especially for the Kuei-Jin, but it's also one of the only five choices provided. On the other hand, there are concepts provided for each Dharma; and there are two other Dharmas provided in the Companion. All in all, I'd say that the Dharmas encourage role-playing, rather than stifling them, but I'd personally prefer that the game not try to force concepts on the players. And then we come to the Disciplines. A friend of mine suggested that Kindred of the East had been afflicted with the kind of power inflation that plagues lesser efforts, like Rifts. In a sense, that's true. This isn't quite true. Kuei-Jin can change into a demon shape by using the Chi of the P'o half of their bodies, which have a variety of funky abilities at their disposal - tails, wings, maws that do Str + 3 aggravated damage, a demon weapon, hideous foulness, extre size, the ability to cause delirium, and other such nasty features. Even a single level of Demon Shintai provides a bonus to the three physical stats, which goes up with every new level of the discipline. But it takes three turns to transform into that form, and costs you three Demon chi - and only by increasing the power of your darker half can you increase the amount of Demon Chi that you've got available. If you get jumped, you're not going to be able to access your demon form for a bit. (Then again, a Kuei-Jin in Demon Hunter X seems to do exactly that - an instant metamorphosis between human and monster.) Despite the strength of the discipline, it has a good number of drawbacks. You can also use your Demon Chi to power your Black Wind discipline, which allows you an extra action for every dot that you have in the power - and it only costs a single point of Demon chi. Say that you have Black Wind at 3, and three demon chi points. Your enemies can now expect to deal with nine actions per turn as soon as you fire it up. On the other hand, it's underpowered when compared to Celerity, for Kindred, which allows you to take an extra action equal to your Celerity for every blood point you spend. The average Kuei-Jin has about three Demon chi, if he chooses not to increase the strength of his P'o; the average Brujah has, say, about ten blood points, assuming that he's fed recently. See who wins first. The rest of the disciplines are much like that - they're powerful, but they've also got drawbacks, probably more than the Kindred do. The disciplines themselves are also quite vivid, lending a very different feel to the Kuei-Jin. The Ghost flame discipline allows Kuei-Jin to manipulate chi energy into various kinds of flame, which can cause Rotschreck in vampires - too easily, I feel - while the Flesh Shintai allows a vampire to warp his own body, even detaching limbs and creating homoculi from his own flesh. Almost all of the disciplines have multiple options, which allows those owning a particular level in a Discipline to create various effects for differing amounts of Chi. The third level of Bone Obedience, which lets you manipulate your skeleton, allows for effects ranging from a bone sword talons to face-changing to creating a skeleton key out of one's own finger. The Kuei-Jin are also able to step into the Umbra and are able to use caerns, granting them a lot more flexibility. You may be wondering why I keep contrasting the Kuei-Jin and conventional Western Kindred; there's a reason for it. As portrayed in the book, the Kuei-Jin dislike the Western Kindred, regarding them as nothing more than claimants to the legacy of a homicidal farmer, disgusting parodies of the Kuei-Jin and deserving of nothing more than a quick death. And, within the book, the Kindred don't come off very well. One of the first fiction segments includes a Ventrue elder being slain - with a stunningly good description of what a severed head sees as it rolls across the street - and the rest of the book doesn't find the Kindred doing much better. The Kuei-Jin are strongly traditional, casually racist, and have a superiority complex; but this also turned off Vampire: The Masquerade players who weren't happy about their favorite race getting its head handed to them by the new guys. Subsequent books have evened the balance, and I believe that the Kindred of the East Companion details the success that the Giovanni clan has been having, but it was a bit of a mistake to make the Kuei-Jin sound like the new baddest boys on the block. In some respects, yes. In others, far from it. As for what's there to do within the Middle Kingdom: Plenty. The Kuei-jin have the same kind of political intrigues as the Kindred, so fans of political games will have much to do. Fans of Wraith will find interest in resolving the remnants of their character's lives, as well as interacting with the Shadowlands - the Dark Kingdom of Jade is described, in moderate detail, in the back of the book. (One nitpick: It takes five years to go from a chih-mei - a larval Kuei-Jin - to a recognized member of Kuei-Jin society. In that time, your old conflicts can be resolved and then some.) There's a lot of other stuff to do, but the book also suggests heroic struggle against the Yama Kings as a viable option. Even though the Kuei-Jin have lost their favored place as the Wan Xian, they can still fight against the machinations of the Yama Kings, and akuma - Kuei-Jin who have gone bad and undertaken service to them. Even the Devil-Tigers regard such behavior as blasphemous - as the book says, the object is to become a demon, not serve one. It seems kind of odd to send supernatural predators against the forces of evil, personally - "Well, Mr. Fox, your resume of 'killing and eating chickens 1990-1996 seems a bit suspect, but I'll give you a night guarding the henhouse anyhow!" - but I don't imagine that'll stop most players. There's also the pursuit of Dharma, one of the game's subthemes. The Kuei-Jin are trying to re-establish their place in the world, mostly through their Dharmas, which in turn translates into a game mechanic. Every time a Kuei-Jin gets into a situation that could cause a burst of enlightenment, the player gets to roll a particular virtue against another - which in turn causes an increase in Dharma. Increases in Dharma lead to the ability to store more chi and spend it much more quickly. In short, it's like Generation for vampire, but without the nastiness of diablerie. But you can also lose Dharma from failing contested rolls against your P'o, which may also throw you into a period where your P'o takes over and runs your body for a while. It's a neat play mechanic, borrowing from the best of all of White Wolf's games. The book does provide a good amount of information about the Middle Kingdom and its inhabitants. However, it's not entirely clear just what the hell is going on in political terms. The Five August Courts of China have lost power, and two of their courts are practically gone. Japan and Korea have their own courts - the Bishamon and the Green Courts - while the rest of Southeast Asia has the Scarlet Dragon court. The exact nature of the political machinations is left to the GM, but I haven't the faintest clue of what to do with it. Most of the material is focused on the history of the courts, rather on their present, and what they have in terms of the present isn't all that much. There's also a tour of the Middle Kingdom in the present day, but I have to say that I didn't find anything that really set the tone of the area in my head. It's also worth noting that Japan is ailing from the effects of a pair of atom bombs, and the resultant warping of the chi. This doesn't happen for the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the millions dead in the Chinese famines, all of which caused more deaths than the atomic bomb. Which leads me to conclude: If you're going to kill a lot of people, make sure that you don't do it with an atomic bomb, or there might be a reaction in the spirit world. Otherwise, kill as many people as you like, because nobody will remember. There's the standard list of enemies in the back, as well as artifacts for Kuei-Jin - including living sashes, disguise masks, and charms that do different things once activated with chi. I wish that they'd included more artifacts, just for the sake of unimaginative GMs such as myslef, but I'm sure that a space limitation was involved. There's brief writeups for the shih, Strike Force Zero, bakemono - Oriental fomori - dhampyrs, mages, werewolves, and such; enough to get you past, but it's really just better to buy Werewolf, or Mage, or whatever you intend to throw at your players. The art and tone of the book are pretty good, although the wild variation of the art tends to lend the book a disorganized feel. What's especially annoying is the gray pattern behind some of the pages. While it does lend an appropriate feel to the game, it's also extremely hard on the eyes, and later supplements - especially Shadow War - don't make it any easier. The naked breast quotient for all White Wolf products is filled, of course, as is the "What in the hell is that supposed to be?" quotient. On the other hand, some of the art fits the game perfectly, including a hunched Kuei-Jin whose hideous face is shrouded in shadow and a half-mask of a child's face and a monk in a Mexican standoff with a gangster - the monk has a bow, the gangster a gun, and both of them have the drop on the other. Other art isn't as sucessful. Some of the artwork just portrays Chinese people standing around. I suppose that they're supposed to be Kuei-Jin, but I have to wonder. Another piece has a female Kuei-Jin barfing flame, looking - well, I can't describe it, but it looks really, really weird, even though it's not exactly hard to make cool. Unfortunately, the chapter illustrations just don't work. Most of them are just victims of trying to fill too much space, and the lack of color seems to combine to exaggerate the flaws of the artists involved. They're good artists; they're just not showcased to their best. On the other hand, Ron Spenser turns in his usual excellent artwork, proving againt that he's one of the best artists in the industry. One final note: One of the complaints that I've heard about Kindred of the East is that it "rapes the culture". Well, yes, it probably does; the same way that Vampire: The Masquerade rapes most vampire myths for their good parts and leaves some of the rest. I'm sure that purists won't be too happy about the way that the game blends mythologies, or summarizes local religions, but I can't really say that I'd go so far as to call it rape. It's done respectfully, it's done with an eye to game play, and I can't really stomach those guys who make it their life's work to learn everything Oriental, only to then use that knowledge to seem superior to everybody else. If you are going to do that, do what I do: Make it your life's work to learn everything about role-playing, and then seem superior to everybody else. ;-> So, in short, Kindred of the East is a damned interesting game. It's worth purchasing as an add-on for Vampire players, or used as source material for any other White Wolf game. The Kuei-Jin are fascinating, if not a little specialized, and I'd recommend the purchase of this book to anybody interested. -Darren MacLennan Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 4 (Meaty)