Dark Ages: Vampire is the first book in White Wolf’s new Dark Ages line, as well as being the effective 2nd Edition of Vampire: The Dark Ages. A very well-presented game of dark and gothic medieval nights, Dark Ages: Vampire focuses upon Vampires and their wars to the near exclusion of actual history. It is thus a good game on Vampires in historical dress, without actually being a historical game.

The Book

Weighing in a 320 pages, Dark Ages: Vampire is both hefty and pretty. Its hardback cover is glossy and black, giving that feeling of trendy gothic darkness that just screams sex appeal. The spine is sewn and seems strong; especially when you consider that it is supposed to be separate from the cover spine. (I’ve seen a lot of people get tripped out by that.) The pages are glossy, heavy, and well set up. With the exception of the opening fiction, the whole book is easy to read, with clean layout lines and nice fonts. The art is White Wolf standard, meaning that most of it is very good with occasional pieces of real brilliance, and occasional pieces of total eye-gouging horror. In general the whole work shows the graphical flair that has made White Wolf books so well known for being eye-catching and attractive.

The Run Down

Dark Ages: Vampire is set up like most White Wolf MRBs. It starts out with introductory fiction, which in this case I found utterly lacking, then moves through a brief introduction to the game, a wealth of background and world material, then into character generation and powers, followed by rules for the game, then a long section for Storytellers that deals with running a game and stats for various foes, and finishing with an appendix of merits and flaws, a character sheet, and an index.

The background and setting material covers just about 100 pages solid, and does a very good job of broad-stroke painting the world of the Vampire clans and Kingdoms during the War of Princes. Everything you need to know to start a campaign of vampiric unlife is here, including a hefty section detailing how Vampires see themselves and their relation to the mortal world. That mortal world is never really fleshed out though, because the book saves its word count for descriptions of the feudal society of Vampires.

The central conflict in Dark Ages: Vampire is based around the War of Princes. This war is based around the jockeying for position by the highest and most powerful vampires of the ages, the Methuselah super-princes who have managed to make whole vampiric kingdoms in the medieval nights. This moves the game out of the single city conflicts that much of modern Vampire focuses on, and essentially establishes nations of vampires fighting for control of large parts of Europe. As part of this development, vampires are divided into feudal rankings: Monarchs, Lords, Princes, Barons, Knights, and Low Clan commoners. In general I liked most of the work, as it gave that nice medieval dress feel. I couldn’t say I cared for the divisions between High Clans (the noble and high blooded) and Low Clans (commoner clans with less power), as it felt like it pigeonholed the Clans and stuck them too much in the image of stereotyped classes rather than general lineages.

Another source of power, and therefore conflict, in Dark Ages: Vampire are the emerging sects and the Ashen Priesthood. Once more medieval dress is used to bring a new angle to vampire society, this time mirroring the power and prominence of the Church (and the various heresies within and against the Church) in the roles of vampire priests who lead the faithful along the roads. The roads are the paths that vampires follow to keep their inner demon at bay, and the paths have become mini-religions. The Ashen Priests lead these religions, gaining power and influence through religion. Where the High Clan/Low Clan part of the social structure felt forced almost everything in the Ashen Priesthood felt natural and usable. In fact, the paths were one of the best written and developed areas of the game.

The rules for Dark Ages: Vampire are mostly those of Vampire Revised, though with a few extra changes brought from the Trinity/Exalted version of the system – things like specialties adding dice rather than giving rerolls and the lack of focuses for attributes. The system is the result of things White Wolf has learned over the past decade of making Vampire, and so is about as polished and complete as the Storyteller system is going to get. Many of the bumps and problems of earlier editions are gone, and even some of the nonsense from Revised (like Appearance limiting your social pools) is cleaned up. The Disciplines are the best versions yet, written cleanly and simply enough that trying to figure out things like Thaumaturgy did not give me a headache.

The Storyteller’s section is serviceable and a bit workhorse, without being all that remarkable. The advice there was a bit general and much given to talking about general literary tropes like theme and mood, without showing specifically how they can be used to form and structure a game. Nothing there is bad by any means, but most of it left me wanting more. The antagonists section was better, giving rules for running various supernatural critters that are complete enough to be usable so long as none of the critters are a large part of the campaign.

Merits and flaws are taken from other products, retouched slightly to fit into the medieval dress. The Character sheet is nice, including enough dots for Elder generation vampires to pump their traits up to 6. The index is fairly nice, but too short. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by Hero indexes, but I’ve come to expect a bit more than this.

History and Historicity

Dark Ages: Vampire is not about the historical Dark Ages at all. Rather it is about the Dark Age of Vampires, the wars of Vampires, the politics of Vampires, and the rise and fall of Vampire Kingdoms. The whole focus of this game is on the society, culture, and history of Vampires and not about Medieval Europe. It is, in short, a game in which the tone and feel of a historical period are far more important than the actual history of the period. While this may annoy purists, it strikes me as not being a bad way to run an RPG. Historical games certainly are my ball of wax, but they can often be off-putting to many players. By using the period as flavor one is able to play a game that has a medieval tone, without having to worry about the details that often put players off harder historical games.

Of course, the counter argument is that those details can be used to make a richer and more involved game. A few details may even be necessary to any game that is going to be tightly tied to the mortal world – whether through backgrounds, or by having young vampires who were mortal until recent nights. Because Dark Ages: Vampire has such a dearth of not just detail, but lacks even good framing for such details, integrating them may not be easy for those not conversant with the period. Those wanting details can get them from outside works, but it would have been nice if there hand been a bit more of a hook to hang them on in the main book.

While I don’t think this book needed to have more “hard historical fact” I do think that fewer beasties and a few more pages on period history would have made for a more balanced work. As it is those with no historical knowledge aren’t given so much as a hand, and even those with it may have trouble integrating things smoothly. RPGs do not need to linger on historical trivia, but giving at least a general framework to build from is a good thing.

The Playtest

I’d originally meant to run a playtest of Dark Ages: Vampire on Halloween night. That, however, was destroyed by various other projects, and so we didn’t get to play till All Souls’ Day. It worked out just as well, as that night was dark, windy, and with occasional thunder where Halloween had been rather boringly warm and bland. The atmosphere of the archetypal “dark and stormy night” added immeasurably to the game, and may be one of the reasons everything went so well.

My players showed up on time, a rare event. When I looked over their characters I noticed a small issue, one that will probably trouble a lot of first time DA STs – every single character had a Generation background of 5. Having Generation 5, you see, uncaps your traits so that you can go beyond the human maximum of 5, and lets you have and spend more blood. As one player put it, “it double pumps you!” He was quite correct, that last dot of Generation is such a tempting prize that I’d be willing to be players take it far out of proportion to any other stat. It’s something you might want to watch, unless you’re okay with a group of Elder generation vampires running about, as it could unbalance your game.

Our adventure took place in the northern end of the Tzimisce Voivodate, or the Republic of Novgorod. I stole large amounts of the mortal setting from the Ars Magica book The Dragon and the Bear: The Novgorod Tribunal, as I wasn’t near satisfied with what was in the Dark Ages book. The two together gave me quite a nice balance of setting – especially as I did focus on Vampire life far more than mortal. The basic setup was that the PCs were sent in to fight a Tremere incursion into the area. They played at politics, found out about a rampaging and animalistic vampire that was drawing the eye of the church and local mages, and ended up taking part in a massacre of rather large proportions.

The game went well, other than the glitch of Elder generation vampires being sent off on an errand like they were neonates (my fault for not foreseeing the Generation problem). The players, who normally go for more heroic fare, got into wallowing in their dark and gothic unlives. They also very much enjoyed the new Aura rules, which they used at every opportunity. In fact, they used them rather more than I’d been expecting them to – and it made some sections of the game go rather faster than I’d intended. This rule may seem innocuous at first, but I recommend that STs pay close attention to how it can influence the probability of certain actions in their stories. Unlike the last time we played Vampire, there were no arguments about the use of Disciplines, as the normally problematic powers had been rewritten and explained well enough that even the nitpicky rules lawyer didn’t cause problems over interpretation.

After bloody politics and a nice battle scene in which the players got to lay the (un)righteous smack-down on their foes, the game ended with a confrontation with the animalistic vampire – a Gargoyle (found in the Dark Ages Storyteller’s Companion, the one and only thing I used that was not in the main book.) I was able to use the roads of the PCs to turn the confrontation from another straight battle into an exchange of epic angst, in which the PCs came to question themselves and their place in the world. Of course they did end up killing the Gargoyle, but it was a rather tragic and touching moment.

The general consensus at the table was that the game worked quite well, though many of the players said they wouldn’t want to play it regularly. That, however, was due to their preferences in RP, and not any flaw in the game. In general the players liked the game more than modern Vampire, as they felt the medieval trappings gave them more license to open up and do things, rather than being stuck in cycles of hiding and helplessness as they often were in modern Vampire.

Conclusions

Dark Ages: Vampire is a very good book on playing Vampires at war in a Dark and Gothic Feudal world. It is not so good as a historical RPG, as it lacks much of anything in the way of history. This, however, is not a flaw but a design decision. If you want a solidly historical game, look elsewhere. If you want a game in which Vampire armies clash by night for the fate of Methuselah Kings you need look no further. If, like me, you wanted something between those two polls, you can still start here – but you have to be ready to look to outside sources to round out the reality bits.

The End

For being beautifully laid out, but with occasional bad art and annoying typos Dark Ages: Vampire gets a 4 in style. For being a solid, well designed, and useful book on Dark Gothic Feudal Vampires (but much less useful on the historical period in which it takes place) it gets a 3 in substance.