Bitter Crusade is a Chronicle for Vampire: The Dark Ages covering the events of the Fourth Crusade, advancing the setting in history from 1197 to 1204. For those who don’t know, the Fourth Crusade was a shambles, with the Crusaders falling into severe debt with the people of Venice who were providing them with ships, destroying the Christian city of Zara in Dalmatia, a rival to Venice in shipping, to try and repay it, and being diverted from ever reaching the Holy Land to storm Constantinople.
In the Vampire setting, Venice is the centre of the Cainite Heresy, and Constantinople by Night was Dark Ages developer Philippe Boulle’s first work for the game line, so the Fourth Crusade was always marked as a major event in Cainite history.
The body of the book is made up of three stories, set in Venice, Dalmatia and Constantinople. A prologue provides a brief but useful overview of the Crusade, and a lengthy epilogue thoroughly covers additional stories to tell before, during and after the three central scenarios. I will avoid spoilers in reviewing the stories.
Venetian Nights by James Maliszewski centres on the vampires of Europe reacting to the call for the Crusade, and a few nights of chaos. It is a short story (the shortest in the book) set during a brief period of the year-long holdover in Venice, using the Crusade as the backdrop and excuse for a fairly traditional mystery plot. Of the three scenarios, I found it the most disappointing, making this bizarre chapter of history a background detail. The mystery itself is fine, although Mr. Maliszewski notes that the initial gambit for involving the players’ characters is very weak. He advises storytellers to emphasise the weakness, but this won’t stop players picking it apart. Another weakness in the text is that several scenes focus on debate between skilled orators, but very few examples of their dialogue and speech patterns are given.
Venetian Nights also features appearances by Lucita and another signature character for the Vampire game lines, which amount to Lucita speaking to the PCs once and the other staying hidden throughout. Stranger still, the Giovanni do not make so much as a cameo appearance in the adventure. The Giovanni have been based in Venice for several hundred years at this point. In fact, one member of the future clan appears in the entire book, in a suggested subplot in Constantinople of all places.
In truth, the year 1202 in Venice could have provided enough fuel for a Chronicle of Bitter Crusade’s entire length, but the decision to follow the entire Crusade is understandable. That said, Venetian Nights makes the setting largely incidental. The story could result from any cause for debate between Cainites.
Fiendish Winter by Zach Bush, similarly, is nominally set around Zara, but while the initial preamble occurs there, the body of the scenario takes place in a village ruled by a rogue member of Clan Tzimisce, the Eastern European shapeshifters. Like Venetian Nights, it uses the Crusade as a backdrop. Also like the Venice chapter, it features a guesting signature NPC. I won’t name him in case that qualifies as a spoiler. He adds intrigue to a relatively straightforward story without overshadowing the characters, and his appearance genunely adds to the adventure rather than being “a cough and a spit”, a signature character stopping by to say hello.
Since the Zara sequence could be excised very easily, making this an interesting stand-alone scenario. While it has little to do with the Fourth Crusade, it could be useful elsewhere. It might run well as a one-off game at a convention, for example. More could definitely have been made of the Crusaders wintering in Zara, although it is not as important a setting to the Vampire series as Venice, so Fiendish Winter shares Venetian Nights’ flaws but is less disappointing, being an unusual adventure focusing on characters rather than a straight mystery.
Dying Embers by Mr Maliszewski, the final story, ties directly into the sack of Constantinople, keeping the derailed Crusade in the foreground, as a series of encounters and subplots intertwine as vampires and humans battle to conquer, understand what is going on, or simply survive. As noted in the text: “Only Dying Embers revolves explicitly around an actual historical event. In Venetian Nights and Fiendish Winter, the characters’ attention is focused elsewhere.”
Because of this, it is the chapter which best reflects the subject matter of Bitter Crusade. The fragmentary nature of the story makes it a poor choice as a stand-alone story, unlike its predecessors, but it is a very strong climax to a Fourth Crusade chronicle, or one where Constantinople has been an important setting. Also, Mr Maliszewski has learned from other published stories where characters are witnesses to history and the unfolding of a game line’s metaplot, by ensuring that the characters have something to do other than look impressed.
Bookmarking the three setpiece stories are an introduction, Innocence and Folly, which covers the history of the Crusade, and an Appendix, Come To Dust by Joshua Mosqueira Asheim, which discusses the fallout of the Fourth Crusade and ways to integrate its events into a Dark Ages or Masquerade game. It includes a handful of suggestions for additional stories. Those for Venetian Nights hint at the Chronicle it could be alone, and those for Dying Embers add to the chaos and uncertainty of Constantinople at the time, while one for Fiendish Winter could have made an adventure with a far stronger connection to the Fourth Crusade.
Stylistically, Bitter Crusade holds to White Wolf’s high standard - with their occasional proofreading glithces. A few references to page XX crop up, and there are several cases of a word being misused. Unfortunately, the first appears in the first paragraph of Innocence and Folly, stating that “the young have chaffed under their rule”, instead of chafed. Thankfully this is not a sign of excessive errata to come.
In the writing, Mr Maliszewski’s words are workmanlike, occasionally poetic in the destruction of Dying Embers. The lack of character dialogue has already been noted, and is the only major failing in my view. Mr Bush’s prose is more colourful, including jokey asides in headlines, and featuring a scene that he notes could be absurd, with advice on keeping a straight face throughout to disturb amused players. He unfortunately does not reiterate this advice for the overly freakish Tzimisce villain who, in appearance, seems to have escaped from the Chaos armies of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Mr Asheim’s advice in Come To Dust is solid, and his adventure ideas generally intriguing and workable. A few are too short for the concepts they contain, and could have been expanded, but most are enough to fire the imagination.
As noted, Bitter Crusade continues the plotlines of Cainite Heresy and Constantinople by Night, neither of which I have read. That said, I feel the various antagonists’ reasoning is explained clearly enough without recourse to these books. I am sure that they would be useful to running Bitter Crusade, but the book stands without them.
In all, Bitter Crusade is a mixed bag. Only one of the three stories really concerns the Crusade, which is a failing in its declared intent, but all are playable, Dying Embers is excellent, and the additional advice and story ideas add greatly to its value.
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