Hunter Book Hermit is the second-to-last book detailing the Creeds that make up Hunters. Hermits are one of the two "lost" Creeds, having been touched by the Messengers to an extent far greater than most other Hunters. This extra attention has resulted in a continuous stream of information from the Messengers, but at a cost of physical and psychic trauma whenever a Hermit comes in contact with a monster or fellow Hunter. This drawback has caused many a player to deem the Hermit the "NPC PC class," finding it too much of a problem to run such a character in a Hunter chronicle. This may be so, but it doesn't change the fact that Hunter Book Hermit is an excellent read.
The book starts out with a letter from Violin99 and several "missing" pages from the Hunter: Apocrypha book. Those of you who have read my review of that title know how disappointed I was with it, and will probably be surprised to learn I was impressed with the pages found within Hermit. Unlike the actual Apocrypha book, this "excerpt" is intelligently written and contains much valuable and entertaining information: if the actual book was this good I would have had no complaints about it. It hints at goings by the supernatural all over the world, some of which I recognized from my years of playing Mage and other World of Darkness games, others which made me wonder when (if) White Wolf was going to follow up on them. There's also a disturbing story about the infamous Fyodor and his use of Edges on a fellow Hunter---I leave it up to the individual reader to decide whether the outcome means Fyodor is tainted like Oracle, if it was the astral Hunter he encountered was evil, or a combination of both options.
The book is followed by an excellent piece of short fiction staring Violin99. I won't spoil a moment for you, just read it yourself and be impressed. A note to White Wolf authors: the individual who penned this tale managed to not only leave the ending a mystery, but still manages to have a beginning, middle, and ending to his tale. None of that feeling that the story is nothing more than a hook to get you to buy a book to be published later ( Predator & Prey: Werewolf).
Chapter One, Alone in the Crowd, introduces us to the three Hunters whose lives we will be observing in this book. I chose those words carefully, as this is the first Hunter Creed book in which our perceptions of a Hunter are given to us entirely by a non-imbued. Doctor Arthur Wu is a doctor in Australia who is treating a newly-imbued Hermit. What makes this portion especially notworthy is the Don't-Blink-You'll-Miss-It connection to the Hunter Survival Guide, showing that vampires have not only learned of the existence of Hunters, but have gone global in their pursuit of knowledge about them. The remaining two Hermits whose lives we get a glimpse of are Violin99 himself (before the events in the prologue fiction) and Wayne Berg, the mystery man mentioned first in the Hunter Survival Guide and the Avenger Creedbook as the fellow who helped out in the Citadel Juarez debacle; the tale of Wayne in this book tells us of his imbuing and the events that led up to Citadel Juarez, Wayne's abilities as a Hermit allowing him to observe far more than the other Hunters involved in the debacle know. Some minor details differ from the info given in those two books, and as Hermit progresses we learn that the Citadel Juarez incident progressed far beyond what we learned in the other Hunter books. The chapter is very good, among its highlights an excellent example of the Messengers arranging events in the real world to gather them for an imbuing. The author of Violin99's portions portrays his Megalomania excellently in the tone of the character's words, which means it felt to me like I was reading a Vampire sourcebook. At first annoyed by this, I came to realize it was a sign of the skill of the author and was impressed by it. I should note this chapter has the "People who know each other becoming imbued together" theme which the Hunter Storyteller Handbook says is only for weak roleplayers: as you may have guessed by the way I mention every example of this I can think of, I really hate White Wolf's hypocracy on the matter. This chapter is also notable for some Messenger-Provided views of the other denizens of the World of Darkness (apparently the Messengers feel the Garou really dropped the ball in protecting the world), and we get hints of individual intelligences among the Heralds, broken into chain of command.
Chapter Two, Keeping Your Distance, has among its highlights excellent examples of Patron guidance, sure to help any Storyteller having trouble judging the effect of the Patron background in play. We also learn that Hunter Code and Hunter Net both cause discomfort to Hermits, though apparently not to the same extent as actual supernaturals or other Hunters, since no mention is made in game terms later on about such exposure; I'm left to wonder if Talismans, Fetishes, and other mystical objects and places have the same effect on Hermits as supernaturals, or are just merely annoying like the code and Hunter.net are? There are also some excellent examples of tactics in the war against the supernatural, and perhaps the best description in a Hunter book so far of Hunters playing the "Let you and him kill each other" game with supernatural entities. The Citadel Juarez story really begins here, though the text on page fifty contradicts the Hunter Survival Guide account of events by Traveler72; the quality of this book is such that I'm willing to look over this inconsistency caused by multiple writers working on the same story over a period of several years; given how anal I am about continuity that's pretty impressive. There's also the same problem we found in the Hunter Players Guide, where the gender of a character in a piece of art doesn't match the text the illustration is supposed to display. All in all, though, this is a great chapter, with real, believable characters, dialogue, and actions.
Chapter Three covers the Hermit viewpoints on other Hunters while continuing the stories begun in the previous chapters. Excellently done.
Chapter Four reveals, among other things, that Traveler72, Soldier91, and all the others really blew it at Citadel Juarez, and follows a Hunter and his allies as they try to pick up the ball--For those of you who read the Avenger Creedbook and thought Soldier91's visions of his dead comrades were some Patron-inspired visions to go back and finish the job, get yourself a piece of cherry pie and some damn-fine coffee. Violin99 finishes up his text paper, and the third Hermit of the book disappears in the wonderful world of institutionalization.
Chapter Five goes into the rules system behind Hermits. For the most part it is pretty good, though like almost all the Creed books the authors again discuss the gaining of Conviction and the "cashing in" of it for Virtue Points as though Hunters were aware of the 10 Conviction equals 1 Virtue Point rule. From reading this over and over again in all the Creed books one can imagine Hunters getting together somewhere and whipping out character sheets, saying "look, I just have to fill in three more dots and I'm ready for another point of Zeal. Derangement, here I come!" Another flaw is the Animal Companion Background, which allows for such things as trained attack dogs or exceptional horses. At first I thought this was a great idea, but when I brought it up with my players they pointed out to me that, with a high enough Resource rating, why would a character invest Background points into Animal Companion, as they should be able to just buy trained dogs or other exotic animals with no real impact on their Resource rating. I'm inclined to agree with them on that.
The last problem I had with this section is the Hermit-only power which can be summed up as "Message in a Bottle." Each Creed Book has introduced a special power unique to the Creed it covers, and in the case of Hermits they are able to send Messenger-inspired, well, messages that miraculously reach other Hunters; both Apocrypha and portions of the Martyr Creedbook were apparently distributed to Hunters through the use of this power. While making sense story-wise, it seems unfair to those players who wish to play Hermits. While other Hunters create/do things that have a lasting impact they can see, Hermits must spend time and Willpower (please, let's not get into the "Willpower can't be spent on anything Edge/Messenger Power related" debate--I believe this expenditure is to represent stress on the Hermit) on something whose results may never involve the characters in their gaming group. Just another cross for Hermits to bear, I suppose, and another reason to label them the NPC PC class.
The new Edges are very nice, especially level 4 (let's astral project and kick Casper's ass) and level 5 (Are you there Messengers? It's Me, Margaret). Given the Hunter Storyteller's Guide proclamation that demons provide all Level 5 Edges I find it odd the level 5 power grants a link to the Messengers--I think they'd notice the hook-up to their earthly agent was caused by Big Daddy Satan.
Chapter 6 has some utterly worthless pregenerated Hermits for players to run, along with some descriptions of four prominent Hermits---of the four, only Violin99 has game stats, just as Cop90 was extensively described and stated in Avenger, and we all know what happened to him.
Some random thoughts on the book include the art, which ranges from terrible (see the Prominent Hermit pictures for an example of this) to slightly above average. Amusingly enough, when I first got this book and saw the pictures for the Hermits in the back my first thoughts were "Why do they all look like inhuman monsters?" and "Why are their hands shown so prominently in every picture, and why does the typist lean into the picture frame like that? Were the hands supposed to be a sign that Hermits were the Messengers hands upon the earth?" I don't believe so, as purely by chance a few weeks after I got Hermit I ran across an art book from France. Either this style of distorted, prominent-hand, wide-eyed like a child in a velvet painting is a popular artistic style from France, or the artist for said pictures saw the same book I did before he got this assignment. Whatever the case, the art is below average for the most in this book, but still better than, say, the Hunter Players Guide.
Also worthy of mention are the fonts used in this book. One of my first thoughts on this book was that White Wolf was running short of ideas on fonts to use to distinguish individual character postings. While I grew used to them after a while, it is noteworthy that the font used for the portion of the book set in Australia is crunched in several places, as though during layout random paragraphs were set to a smaller font and had spaces deleted so everything would fit in the allotted pages. While nothing like the problems I had with fonts in Avenger, it's still something that should be pointed out and corrected by White Wolf in the future.
All in all, Hunter Book Hermit is an excellent read, and worthy of inclusion in any Hunter fans collection. It may not have made them into the perfect player character class, but it still goes far to illuminate the Hunters' place in the World of Darkness, and just makes for some fine reading.
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