Sometimes, game books just ask a little too much of players than they’re willing to give. Get a couple of people interested in Call of Cthulhu, and they’ll bite; but bring them up to the point where they have to start researching the origins of the monster, and they’ll tune out, unsure of what the game’s demands on them are. Get a couple of people interested in Pendragon, and they’ll cheerfully beat the ass of any Saxon who rides over the hill; but have them stumble onto the track of the Questing Beast, or have them see a vision of a maid with bloodstained hands rowing downstream, and they’ll tune right out. And in Vampire, they’ll gladly hunt down a pack of marauding Sabbat antitribu, but they won’t get the idea that they can control the government, or the cops, or anything similar - they see other vampires doing it, but they don’t get the idea themselves - they don’t even know where to start.
So, it’s with that problem that Gilded Cage was written; and I’m delighted to report that it makes the process of influencing government - or the police, or the media, or a major corporation - simple to understand, without dumbing it down so far that the Storyteller can’t find any good reason why a neonate Brujah isn’t able to run riot amid GE’s board of directors.
Just by way of a for example: The chapter on how to influence corporations explains exactly why it’s a bad idea to Dominate the living hell out of the CEO - sure, he’s under your control, but there’s an entire board of directors who also keep an eye on what he’s doing, and there’s too many of them for you to control. But the janitor responsible for emptying out the CEO’s classified documents trash bin at the end of the day doesn’t have many people watching him, and his secretary lives alone, and one of his assistants has started to lose control of his heroin habit - so why not slide in among them? The truly delightful part of the book is that its basic design principle is giving the players interesting ideas on how to find the weakest points in an organization - while at the same time, Storytellers can easily explain exactly how the city’s Prince can influence the media and the police at the same time without having to Dominate them every night. As a matter of fact, there’s a step-by-step explanation of how a particular elder vampire is able to control two different institutions, including who she has her hooks into, how, and how her power base could be disassembled - so instead of having some nebulously defined control over the company, we know that she’s bribing the CEO and has blood-bound one of the most valuable researchers in the company.
The book also details social climbing, both within the Camarilla’s salons and in the mortal world. The section on how to enter into high society is interesting, written in the same street-smart tone as the rest of the book, but it doesn’t seem to have a firm grip on what you do with high society once you’re there - and if you’re interested in social climbing, it strikes me as a better idea to try to impress the harpies at Elysium, or an elder vampire, rather than a rich heiress with more money than entertainment. (There’s also the Masquerade requirement, which is going to make doing anything particularly vampiric kind of a bitch.) The low society section is a lot more interesting, especially because it provides invaluable rules on how to start your own business - so if you want to open your own version of the Succubus Club, you can actually see if it’ll survive as a business without having to rely on the Storyteller trying to figure out a good way to determine its success.
The section on politics almost seems to echo the section on corporations, although there’s less money and a lot more “Here’s something you can do with a SWAT team once you have an in with the police” and so forth - more power, but less flexibility. I don’t want to say that it’s boring, but it seems a lot less colorful than other sections of the book - as a matter of fact, I would almost say that it could have been folded into its companion chapter and made shorter without losing too much of its original intent.
The section on criminals: You can take pretty much any movie made about the Mafia and apply it to vampire, all the way back to Little Caesar - think of Henry Hill, from Goodfellas, as a primogen’s agent whose corruption by Setites has been discovered by the Prince, forcing him to join the Sabbat before the Prince’s minions track him down. The chapter here is more about the various types of people that you can recruit to help you out, as well as a short primer on how to become a crime boss without eating more facefulls of shotgun lead than you need to. Maybe World of Darkness: Mafia goes into more detail about creating and running a criminal campaign, but the chapter just rings a little hollow. I think that it has to do with a lack of personality - the various criminal classes are listed by occupation, and described in fairly broad terms, rather than being given specific examples of what they do. It’s a decent chapter, to be sure, but it can be expanded - and, as a matter of fact, I have plans as to what to do with the idea of gangster movies and how they relate to Vampire. I might just expand on that in a future review, come to think of it.
The next chapter, On the Fringe, picks up the same snappy tone as some of the previous chapters, this time dealing with areas of control that wouldn’t occur to the average player - academia, organized religion, psychologists, subcultures and so forth. A pretty decent chapter - there’s a good discussion of how the media relates to preserving the Masquerade, but the details given aren’t giving the immediate, hands-on feel that you get in the corporate or low society chapters. Of course, using organized religion, or a couple of blood-bound psychologists probably won’t occur to the average player, so the chapter succeeds in discussing places to influence that you wouldn’t otherwise consider.
The storyteller’s chapter is another gem - it’s here where we see an elder’s influence over a couple of industries diced down, including a breakdown of who she controls and why, and a discussion of the weaknesses of her plans. There’s excellent advice here also on how to flesh out a power system within your city - a Storyteller could sit down for hours and flesh out a city’s power structure, provided that he’s ready to keep it all in his head when the actual play begins.
While the focus of the book is on the Camarilla, there is a fair amount of material on the Sabbat, mostly comparing their tactics to that of the Camarilla - unfortunately, it’s a little repetitive, basically describing the Sabbat as influencing by blackmail and murder, rather than by blood bonds and domination. One problem that I have is that the Sabbat are frequently portrayed as being into stuff that’s blatantly evil - murdering a child to frame a mortal enemy, engaging in child prostitution, encouraging junkies and killing family members to get what they want. They’re also described as more than willing to get into child pornography and prostitution. It just sort of struck me as a shorthand way of saying “These guys are evil, evil bastards - look, they’re into child porn! Nothing more evil than that!“ - which shortchanges the Sabbat into being shallow, unredeemable bastards, rather than the varied and complex evil bastards that they are.
The sledgehammer tactics that the Sabbat sue also tend to shortchange the Sabbat on brains - I always figured that the Sabbat can be just as subtle as the Camarilla - just in more alien ways, which this book doesn’t even hint at. It also raises the question of why the Sabbat would get into a business which would cause Humanity checks - and eventual losses - for Kindred with only 2 or 3 Humanity left.
Ultimately, this is a great book that’s marred here and there by spots where it gets a little too dry and thin for its own good. I would say that it’s a must-buy for players who want to learn how to influence mortal organizations; for Storytellers, it’s a decent resource marred by the occasional lapse into weaker material, with the appendix rescuing the book at the last minute.
By the way, if you ever want to see an excellent example of a vampiric character who’s got boatloads of fame and influence, then check out Matt Wagner’s Grendel - especially anything with Hunter Rose, like Grendel: Black, White and Red and Grendel: Red, White and Black.
-Darren MacLennan
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