I admit, I was a trifle intimidated when I took up the task of reviewing this book. The Kindred of the East line is generally regarded as one of the more solid contributions White Wolf has made to the world of horror roleplaying. It is also said to contain the apotheosis of all splatbooks in its line in the form of Dharma Book Devil Tigers, an opinion uttered by two writers whose judgment I usually consider entirely sound. My own experience with White Wolf splatbooks tends to follow the standard pattern – some are good, some are godawful, and consistency varies wildly from product to product, and occasionally within the same author’s body of work.
I’m afraid that Dharma Book Thrashing Dragons isn’t a second apotheosis for Kindred of the East – but it is better than average. And it really made me want to get my hands on Dharma Book Devil Tigers.
Dharma Book Thrasing Dragons begins, as is usual, with a short mangaesque comic drawn by artist Melissa Uran. Mileage will vary on how useful or enjoyable individual readers will find this section. I personally always enjoyed Melissa Uran’s work, but then I’m also a fan of anime and manga, and I think the style that she employs here, somewhat rougher and more stripped down than her more polished cover and set-piece illustrations, conveys a great deal of mood and emotion. The text is likewise spare and simple, elegantly describing the archetypal Thrashing Dragon – one who, in life, failed to drink the cup of passion to is dregs, who waited for her life to come to her, and returned to make good her failures.
Pulling Out the Pin is the standard splatbook introduction to the Thrashing Dragons, giving a brief overview of the nature of the Dharma and its dynamic approach to enlightenment, brief references to the Dharma’s relationships with the other Kuei-Jin, the ubiquitous How To Use This Book, and a Lexicon. The Lexicon, as with the core book’s vocabulary section, is actually extremely useful.
Chapter One, Reflections On Our State, covers the philosophy and outlook of the Thrashing Dragons, as told from the viewpoint of the mandarin Hungry Badger. This is an extremely meaty chapter and covers a great deal of ground, detailing the Dharma’s basic outlooks on the undead condition, the nature of enlightenment, relations with both the other Dharmas and other supernatural creatures, the Dharma’s opinions on heretical cults, and its own internal schisms, sects, and relationship with the Directions. These sects are all interesting in their own rights; though none feels quite as fully fleshed out as they could, they add spark to what is otherwise an extremely dry chapter.
Chapter Two, The Holy Rhythm, covers the actual philosophy of the Dance of the Thrashing Dragon in much greater detail, laying down the Dharma’s specific tenets, its methods of dealing with each vampire’s Demon, and the variant beliefs practiced by the Dharma’s four major sects. Again this is an extremely information-dense chapter, written in fairly dry, no-nonsense, out of character prose.
Chapter Three, Tiger’s Claws, Dragon’s Teeth, contains both “playing the Dragon” notes for how to appropriately play the Thrashing Dragon Dharma’s viewpoint, as well as crunchy rules goodness in the form of new powers, detailed in both tabletop and Mind’s Eye Theatre format. It also contains a very useful discussion as to which discipline paths the average Thrashing Dragon would and would not practice, along with philosophically appropriate rationales for each.
Chapter Four, Young Lions, is the templates chapter. Your mileage will vary, as the quality of the templates here is rather uneven. None of them particularly leapt out at me and demanded that I play them, though the concept of the Kung Fu Rapper made me cackle maniacally.
The Appendix, Faces of the Dragon, provides a selection of six influential Thrashing Dragons, one of whom, Thousand Crane Mother, is the actual arhat of the Dharma, its founder and spiritual mother; a powerful Bodhisattva, Black Earth Boy, the Thrashing Dragon who sallied forth to battle the Ravnos Antediluvian in Time of Thin Blood and was destroyed; two potent mandarins, one of the penangallan Thrashing Dragons of southeast Asia and one of the vampires of the New Promise Mandarinate first detailed in Nights of Prophecy; and two younger disciples, who come with stats and two very different outlooks on the Dharma.
MY NOT SO HUMBLE OPINIONS
THE GOOD: This book was an extremely interesting and thought-provoking read. The sheer amount of thought that went into every aspect of its creation is very apparent, from first page to last; it never stoops to shock tactics to get its point across. The density of the information presented, the alternatives and variant approaches, are all well-considered. It presents the concept of the philosophical path as the thinking vampire’s way to pass eternity very well indeed, and encourages the reader/player to ruminate on the Dharma’s internal inconsistencies and contradictions on the way to enlightenment. That being said...
THE BAD: As much as I appreciate the whole thinking vampire’s approach to eternity, Dharma Book Thrashing Dragons is the second driest White Wolf book that I’ve ever read. For a Dharma that’s all about wringing every drop from life, then cracking open its bones to lick out the marrow, this book is remarkably devoid of juice, energy, passion. This is, in my opinion, a fairly crippling defect – even the IC narrator of the first chapter asserts that applying moderation to one’s behavior is the most appropriate means of following the Dharma, when the Thrashing Dragons are presented as being the incarnation of enlightenment through excess. Yes, it does indeed educate you on how to go about thinking like a Thrashing Dragon. It completely fails when it comes to presenting how to feel like a Thrashing Dragon, and that’s what killed my ultimate enjoyment of it, and my desire to actually play a member of this Dharma.
THE UGLY: The presentation of the penangallan courts is a topic innately vulnerable to charges of sexist bias – either biased toward females against males, or by female gamers who feel that an entire court of vampires devoted to the philosophical enlightenment of Black Widow Syndrome is insulting. I personally don’t think either bias or insult was intended, but there is that way of looking at it. Also, some of the actual layout in this book is nearly physically painful – the background pattern on several of the sidebars (apparently an attempt to look like highly textured bamboo shoot paper, in my opinion) is so dark as to make the text printed over it virtually unreadable, and the background pattern in all of Chapter Two is irritatingly distracting to the eye, drawing it away from the text rather easily.
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