I don't know much about history - or, at least, I don't know much about the Dark Ages. One of my worst fears is that someday I'll be running a Vampire: Dark Ages campaign, and one of my players will point out that, say, the serfs were nowhere near as affluent as I portray them, or the medeival baron that I've been playing up as a major villain for most of the campaign was actually a grandson of, say, King Ethelred the Unready who was strangled by a stray Viking or what have you.
Fortunately, Ashen Thief manages to communicate a lot of historical information about the medeival underworld without getting too bogged down in historical minutiae - and gets across what it was actually like to be a thief during the Dark Ages anyways. As a matter of fact, if you're planning to do a street-level Dark Ages campaign - any kind - this is an invaluable resource. Caitiff trying to survive on the street while the Prince of the city hunts you down, Nosferatu beggar kings running influence networks through street urchins and prostitutes, running with a pack of Gangrel brigands in the pine forests of Germany - there's actually quite a bit of possibility here. Adding in the Proemtheans, who are the roughest suggestion of what will later become the Sabbat, and you've got a pretty healthy resource.
The opening story is a touch off-topic. Somebody else's line keeps running through my head - something to the effect of "It's another story about how fucked up the Tzimisce are." It's not, but it's got a funny rhythm - cutting back and forth between a vampiric assassin/thief crawling up the side of a castle while the Tzimisce lord inside engages in the usual fucked-up Tzimiscisms. ("Dinner is being a bore again - not putting up much of a fight.") The story ends on a rather unexpected note, and the impact of the story is kind of lost - it feels like the story was written for another product, or for another adventure, since it does make a pretty good story hook. (Who sent the assassin in the first place? And since the lord will know thanks to a bit of diablerie, what will he do about it?)
The second story, on the other hand, is right on the money, tracking the passage of a ruby ring from its original owner to a vampiric crime lord - and it's like getting a cross-section of a medeival underworld, going from petty extortionist to prostitute to pimp to vampire. It's got one or two plot hooks - not huge ones - but its value for how all of the petty thieves and muggers actually work within a society. The extortionist can't simply arrogantly squeeze his mark dry becuase he knows that the mark can either go to the cops or hire somebody else to beat the crap out of him; the prostitute grifts what she can from her customers, then tries to hide as much as she can from it from her pimp, and so forth. There's no criminal mastermind except for the vampire, and her domain consists of people who are barely able to get by on their own. It's quite a drop from the traditional heights enjoyed by vampires.
That attention to detail follows through in the next chapter - there's a lot of good information here on the legal system of the medeival period (including trials and methods of determining guilt - including the old favorites that you may have seen ascribed to the Puritans in America, like dropping somebody in the water to see if they float and so forth.) There's a lot of very good information on excommunication and what it means in a society which is still heavily ruled by the Church's law - excommunication doesn't just mean that you're no longer part of a religion, it's a complete banishment from society itself. Most of this particular part of the chapter, however, concerns itself with mortals, mentioning how their activities affect vampires - or vice-versa - by way of sidebars. There's nothing wrong with it, but I just keep wondering if they could have focused more on vampires affect the underworld; GM tips for setting up an influence network, or for diagramming who owes allegiance to whom - but then you wouldn't have the underpinnings that make that stuff make sense.
(Mateter of fact, it would be kind of cool to see somebody come up with a chart - that uses White Wolf's mechanics somehow - that lets GMs map out which characters control what, what their vulnerabitlies are, and so forth. It's probably not much more complicated than writing out a little list of the character's flaws and then drawing arrows back and forth, but t'd be neat to see actually mapped out - with a template, I mean.)
Vampiric society get a lot of attention in the section thereafter, where the Prometheans are described. In principle, they're a bit like the Sabbat without the savagery, or the Anarchs with organization - they believe in equality for all vampires, regardless of their age. (I just now realized that one of the major themes of Dark Ages is that age hath its privileges - rather than the egalitarian V:TM, young vampires are on the bottom of the heap.) It's an interesting way to play an idealistic character in a setting in which idealism is represented by the complete and utter destruction of Carthage, and in which the good have to conspire in order to avoid being dragged to their deaths.
The section on being a brigand - in other words, being a vampiric Robin Hood - is pretty decent. Actually, if you've been reading a lot of 7th Sea, then it feels downright revolutionary. Instead of everything being painted in the most romantic terms imaginable, everybody here is working on practicality. The bandits, rather than being hunted outlaws, are actually getting low-level sponsorship from the locals, or they're being used as a form of exile for a local noble, or they're just a small group of peasants who poach off the local noble's land. They're not romantic abstractions - I'm not sure that it's going to mean anything to anybody but me, but it's refreshing.
There's also a neat bit of added advice on running a brigands campaign, pointing out all of the things that can go wrong with running a campaign like that - the lack of ability to travel, the absence of a political campaign and so forth. The funny thing, while I really wouldn't have pegged those things as necessarily problems to be solved, the book does a great job of providing solutions to them.
Pirates do get a brief mention, but it's understandably brief; it's not the era of piracy just yet, and the major pirate activity of the Dark Ages gets amply covered in Wolves of the Sea.
Intially, when I was writing this review, I got the Prometheans - gentle idealists - confused with the Furores, who are the beginnings of what will eventually be the Sabbat. The "old screw the young" paradigm is fully in effect here - the opening description has an elder vampire disciplining his childe by having his hands amputated by a ghoul for a minor breach of courtly etiquette. If you want the anger and the energy of the Sabbat in a period where the Sabbat don't exist, the Furores are it. Plus - and this particular stroke is brilliant - there's a section on what happens when the Furores win - the resultant infighting, political feuding, and petty bickering can bring down a new kingdom just as quickly as an elder attack can. (As a matter of fact, the experiences of the Furores reminds me a lot of what I've heard regarding communes during the seventies - once you're on your own, people who used to be with you vs. the world are suddenly squaring off against you over matters of trivial import now that the world's no longer a threat.) You could easily mine this part of the book for about a year's worth of play, if not more.
The art in the book varies. Some of it - like the chapter frontispieces - are absolutely amazing; there's a depiction of a couple of coffins, or Iron Maidens, that have to be seen to be believed. Other pieces are good, but confusing; some of them are apparently trying to tell a sequential story, but they don't hang together. For example: in the first panel, we see a man in the foreground looking really upset, with a guy in the background looking really, really smug. In the second, we see the smug-looking guy look as if somebody just shot Old Yeller right in front of him. Then, in the third, we see somebody in the foreground - whose back is turned - kneeling at the feet of somebody in an executioner's hood. What it all means, I have absolutely no idea, especially since the figure in the third panel has his face turned. Somebody needs to run through Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics a couple of times before they try their hand at sequential art again.
Ultimately, Ashen Thief excels at things that it really didn't set out to do in the first place - detailing two vampiric secret societies and the innumerable plot hooks that can come from them. That's not to say that there's not information on the criminal underworld of the Dark Ages, but it pales in comparison to the sheer possibility of the Furores. But there is more to be said about the criminal underworld of the Dark Ages, and I hope that with the new line, White Wolf will give it the chance it deserves.
-Darren MacLennan
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