You will always learn one thing from White Wolf's Dark Ages books, and that thing is this: You don't know dick about history.
Or, at least, that's the impression that I usually get from them. I'm pretty into history - I have a bachelor's degree in political science, but I always cast longing eyes in the direction of the history department. I learned plenty about this century, and about World War II, but Europe - from about 1000 AD to about, say, 1900 - is pretty much a big mystery. If you asked me about it, I'd probably describe it as a bunch of European guys jabbing each other with swords at irregular intervals.
Iberia By Night, part of the Veil of Night series, focuses on Iberia - a name which left me baffled until I found out that it was the medieval name for what would later become Spain. The Christian kingdoms of Europe have invaded Iberia and have shoved out some the Muslims who have taken it over; the Muslims aren't much interested in leaving, but their internal bickering isn't letting them show a strong hand against the attacking Christians. As the book makes note of, this is ground zero for the Christian / Muslim conflict in the era that Vampire: The Dark Ages is set in, and it's going to be bloody when it finally concludes.
Or, at least, that's what I hope is happening. One of the primary drawbacks with this book is that it goes into astonishing amounts of detail about history, but doesn't help you to piece it together into a single narrative - I've studied history in college before, but I found myself unable to make sense of what exactly was going on because of a lack of a central narrative. I didn't get a really clear impression of which specific Christian countries are fighting with which Muslim countries.
In some sense, this is inevitable - White Wolf's going to get nailed on historical accuracy by the guys who are into that, so they make sure that they're covering all of their bases when it comes to a detailed history. But to the casual player, there's so much information to cover that you may wind up having to take notes to understand what's going on. There's also the question of what all of this historical detail actually achieves. I don't need to know the history of Spain starting from its formation from molten lava into igneous rock. I just need to know how to communicate the particular feel of Iberia to the players, which the book really doesn't help me to do.
The opening fiction isn't bad - it chronicles the adventures of Ibrahim and Isaac, who are -
Yeah, I saw it coming too. Plays out pretty much the way that you'd expect, although it's got a great description of how a Lasombra's shadow tentacles can work. Not a bad start.
The chapter on the history of Iberia goes back a loooong way - as a matter of fact, all the way back to the Romans, then stepping through each segment as it moves towards the present. As a matter of fact, let me prove my thesis:
Umar Al-Rashid was not an Assamite to be easily thwarted. He knew that other Berber dynasties were on the rise and bided his time. He used catspaws such as North Africa to back the rise of one such dynasty - the Almohads ("Those Who Affirm the Unity of God") - most notably through the instrument of zealous young warriors of his clan. He knew the dynasty would turn its sights on Iberia at last. The hope was justified when 'AbdalMu'min became leader of the dynasty in 1130. He decided that the only way to restore Muslim power in Iberia was first to conquer the remaining taifas and impose direct Almohad dominion over the region. Only then, he reasoned, could Islam triumph over the Christian states of the peninsula. Umar quietly supported this policy, working behind the scenes any taifa that stood in the way of the Almohads, such as that of Ibn Mardanish, ruler of Valencia, Murcia, Jaen, Granada and Cordoba. The Assamites warriors rode the wave of Almohad progress, displacing stubborn Lasombra. Miriam bint Aisha saw some of her pawns fall in this wave but set about enacting some of her own counterintrigues.
The Almohads assumed the title of caliph and used their newfound religious authority to introduce severe new laws and measures. Their intention was to strengthen the empire through religious unification. Thus, they compelled both Christians and Jews in their domains to convert to Islam or emigrate - a decision that greatly bolstered support against them in Iberia. Nevertheless, these strictures seemed to have a beneficial effect, as the Almohad empire reached heights of power unseen in Western Islam since the days of the caliphate of Cordoba.
The Almohads then renewed the war against the Christians by defeating the king of Castille, Alfonso VIII, at the Battle of Alarcos. The victory was a great one for the Almohads. Unfortunately, they provded no more able to capitalize on it than their predecessors, the Almovarids. That gave the Christians the time that they needed to regroup for another series of battles, culminating in the Battle of Las Navas De Tolosa in 1212.
Minor alterations caused by my error aside, you can see roughly what's going on here. Major historical sweeps are covered within the space of a few paragraphs - and while they're presumably covered well and accurately, I kept finding myself asking "Okay, the Almohads were here a while ago and got their asses kicked later, thus pushing the Reconquista forwards and making the reclamation of Spain possible - but what does that mean to my tenth-generation Tzmisce neonate?" The sense of how things are now, of what kind of armies are being set up to go where - I never really got a solid answer for that. Even the tale of El Cid is told bloodlessly, and I found myself wondering just whatever everybody saw in the guy after reading his section.
As a matter of fact, I'm willing to step out on a limb here and say something: When I read Deadlands, I was annoyed with how...emotive, and sloppy the background was; everything was done in a Grand Guignol fashion, everybody was the pinnacle of what they could be, every emotion was exaggerated. Heroes didn't just die; they bit the dust while fighting a dozen zombies while a group of orphans were ferried to safety by a flying Bruce Campbell. Heroes were pure stereotype, and they played to it to the hilt. So much so, as a matter of fact, that it was like eating nothing but dessert for breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day - what's cool in small amounts become sickening in huge, unrestrained doses.
But Vampire feels the opposite way - rather than being over the top, it's so restrained that it almost feels like it's being choked to death by its own historical weight. When I played Vampire: The Eternal Night - you know, the computer game based on V:TM - I was struck by how...melodramatic it was, how it played to the stereotypes you'd expect from a beginner's game - a tormented young knight, a big hairy Gangrel, an idealistic nun who fell into forbidden love with the tormented young knight - stereotypes, but just good enough to get the game by. When I'm reading through Iberia By Night, it's like all of that energy is removed, leaving the flesh but not the soul. I wish that they'd make the occasionally attempt to go a little Guignol, even if it does mean that it doesn't have the serious There's more information in the latter half of the book about how to fit the characters into the setting, but I wish that they'd made that
I do, however, quite like the fact that they've got a fairly detailed description of the vampiric power groups that exist within Iberia - the Lasombra, hailing from Spain, are present, but they're fragmented thanks to religion and to internal power struggles. The Cainite Heresy makes a reappearance here as well, making up one of the more major power groups in this area - while I haven't read all of the books in the Dark Ages series, I can say that it's nice to see an older book's material still being used within the body of a newer work. And, just to fuel the fires of the upcoming Inquisition, there's a group of mortal knights who have discovered the truth about vampires and are working, Call of Cthulhu-investigator style, to put them down.
I think that the "prominent vampires of Iberia" section has its ups and downs. A lot of them feel relatively generic - an Assamite vampire who's also a slaver, a Lasombra physician who failed to save Sancho from his death, a vampire who made his way up from a salt mine and eventually made his haven there - and, truth be told, I didn't really say "Wow, that's a cool idea" when I was reading any one of them. It's not a fatal flaw, but it's something that bothered me - there's usually at least one Tzimisce, or Nosferatu that's freaky enough to draw comment. (Well, the Lurker in the Crypt comes awfully close, for the name alone.) The art for the vampires deserves comment, though - it's really, really nice, and the artist deserves to get a lot more work from White Wolf in the future.
The close of the book makes note of the fact that Iberia is big, and that the GM's going to have to decide where he's going to focus his energies. That would have been a great warning at the front of the book, but I suppose that it works as a capper.We also find out how long the Reconquista lasts (from 831 to 1492) and get a pretty decent picture of how the Reconquista is going - just a bunch of skirmishes between the different kingdoms, with no real progress made by either side.
Maybe I'm not reading the opening part of the book carefully enough. I kind of doubt it, though.
Anyways. Is it worth buying?
If you've got Veil of Night...maybe. I'm hard-pressed to recommend it, to be honest; I mean, I like it okay, and there's a lot of work that went into it, but there's nothing that made me read it outside of the necessity of doing a review. I like the idea behind it, but I think that it's basically an attempt to do too much in too little space.
-Darren MacLennan
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