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For new players of Vampire - for which I mean, those players who have yet to play any iteration of Vampire: The Masquerade, but have expressed interest in it, you're in for a treat. Vampire: The Requiem is an outstanding game. Truly a classic.
For everybody else, both those who had no interest in V:TM and those who already play V:TM, I'm going to save you $35 bucks.
I find it hard to review the setting because the big news is that it’s not very different – and I mean, at all – from the previous Vampire setting. It doesn't break new ground. Much of the "new" material is merely old material given new names - sometimes, the change is a single letter. One change that typifies the types of changes found in the new edition is that the Jyhad has been renamed the “Dance Macabre” – the concept is the same but the name is likely changed just to avoid any word that sounded like “Jihad” after September 11th.
Readers will find this to be the same old vampire with a not-altogether-convincing face-lift. The meat of the game is drawn from Vampire: The Masquerade. Requiem characters are still blood-drinking undead creatures of the night who must spend blood to rise or augment themselves, they still have, for the most part, the same discipline-powers with only a few changes, they still have a hierarchical system of elders and neonates, although power is determined more by age than by the power of your sire. Though the Camarilla is gone, the game structure of the Camarilla survives intact, Princes, Seneschal, Harpies, et. al. They still are born into clans (though there are less of them) while they still join sects, (though there are more of them.) The blood-bond still exists, and ghouls make the transition intact (although not every blood-bound mortal becomes a ghoul.) Vampires can still suck the souls out of disabled kin for power, they still must tend to their humanity because of the beast inside which encourages them to frenzy. Most importantly, vampires still scheme and backstab over increasingly petty reasons in order to fend off the ennui and it is this scheming and backstabbing which makes the crux of the game.
The themes, the moods, and even the general type of “missions” player characters will undertake – it’s pretty much the same, and since the truly important aspect of the game is the type of stories that the game helps tell, this can be a major disappointment. The new covenants and clans are merely copies, amalgamations, or particular isolated aspects of material found in the previous version of Vampire. That may very well breathe new life and encourage Vampire players to come back to the fold for a short while, but any fascination is likely to be short lived.
Before I go on, if you’re not familiar with Vampire Revised, Google up a review. 95% of what’s true there is true here, especially with the theme, mood, examples of play, etc – and I’d rather focus on the few differences.
Admittedly, what few changes exist are improvements, and (other than the system) I can’t think of an area where a change made things worse – I just didn’t see enough change. Metaplot is gone. The five clans, for example, do a very good job of representing the main vampire archetypes; bloodlines make it possible to port over pre-existing characters from previous editions and allow for more individuality when coming up with vampire concepts. Still, three of the clans remain the same (Nosferatu, Gangrel, and Ventrue) while the Daeva are the Toreador renamed and the Mekhet tend to be Lasombra/Tremere hybrids.
The "covenants" - the replacement for the Camarilla/Sabbat/Anarch sects – are more important to the setting, and done well. None of them are particularly "good" or "evil," even in comparison to one another. You’ll find something to like – and something to hate – about all the covenants. Since none of them are overtly evil, it avoids the previous edition trap of making one side look like the “good guys by default.” All of them have philosophies and not just dogma or mindless hierarchy. The Camarilla-like Invictus are much more interesting than their predecessors if only deigned by the fact that the Invictus go beyond mere feudal systems and noblesse oblige into Ayn Rand-esque objectivism and power-for-it’s-own-sake obsession. The Carthian movement, (closest to the latter-edition Anarchs) are viable and portrayed more as Ivory Tower activists than Lost Boys who seek to embrace change through the system rather than mindless rebellion against the system. The Tzimisce-esque transformation-obsessed Ordo Dracul are obsessed with changing *themselves* rather than changing the system. The Sabbat-like Lancea Sanctum use the tools of religion to explain and embrace vampiric nature. The Circle of the Crone, based on Lilith-followers from VTM (and perhaps even the Verbena from Mage?), takes a paganistic approach to philosophy. I mean, I've seen it all before, but it's still well done. The main difference between the covenants and VTM’s sects tend to be that I always felt that sects in VTM tended to lack motivation, and were therefore stagnant. Perhaps that was the point – but “Requiem” states compelling motivations right up front, and even provides “pure antagonist” non-player covenants: the Satan-Worshipping Belial’s Brood, and the insane yet mystically protected psycho-killing VII “covenant.”
These covenants are natural rivals but not natural antagonists. It is possible to have a “mixed” coterie working towards a common goal, and the canon supports it. What’s more, the covenants have replaced the clans as the most important social aspect of the character.
Other superficial changes to the setting include the idea that vampires leave blurry photographs, video footage, and mirror reflections, and the idea that sires have to spend a permanent willpower point to create a childe (but there don’t seem to be many socially-imposed restrictions.) The 6 Traditions have been whittled down to 3, with the rest merely “traditions” with a small “t” which may or may not be enforced in a particular city. The Caine/Antedeluvian creation myth is swept away with a “Vampires don’t know for sure, and even the oldest vampire can’t be sure his memories of his embrace are clear because it’s hard to tell dreams from reality when you’re in torpor.” Blood potency has everything to do with age – nothing to do with siring – and can go down while you’re in torpor, which you usually succumb to after you get a high enough blood potency.
Some Disciplines – about 1 power in every 10, are new – most are old, and the ones that are new borrow heavily from previous V:TM listed powers. Cruac borrows from Thaumaturgy, Quietus, and Mortis. Thebian Sorcery borrows from Viscitude and Necromancy, and Coils of the Dragon bestow benefits of the previous edition’s Golconda, Nightmare borrows from Presence, Chimestry, and Dementation. Some powers, like Auspex, make the transition unchanged. If anything, it’s more like the disciplines got “remixed,” though there are some new thematically appropriate powers. On the plus side, if you wanted, to say, make a bloodline using 3rd edition’s Obtenebriation, it wouldn’t mess up a darn thing.
Some organizational changes are welcome – the book doesn’t need to waste word count explaining the system, and it shows – the neo-feudal model is only one of several listed to set up a particular city a particular way. Boardroom, Clergy-based, and even quazi-democratic systems are provided as options. All positions in a city are given, so there shouldn’t be a need for that information to be in a “Guide To The Foo” or “Guide To The Bar” books. The game itself eliminates the metaplot and vampire mythology is just that – myth in canon.
Art isn’t sparse, but it’s used more sparingly than in other WW books in the line, and it’s not “wasted.” You get a lot of words for your page here. It is a very nice looking book and it uses duo-toned ink to very good effect.
Sure, the changes are more significant than, say, the move from 2nd edition to 3rd edition, but if you didn’t like the old Vampire for general thematic reasons rather than specific annoyances about metaplot – you’re not going to like the new Vampire, and if you became bored of the old Vampire, there’s not much in the new Vampire which would hold your interest after more than a month.
To clarify what I mean when I say “Nothing’s changed but there’s a whole bunch of new stuff” – let me bring up, as a counter-example, the “other vampire game.” Even though there wasn’t any change in cosmology, or indeed, setting, between the Whedonverse books put out by Eden Studios, I believe there are more significant changes between the Buffy Unisystem book and the Angel Unisystem book then there are between Vampire Revised and Vampire: The Requiem – mostly because the mood and theme changes significantly between the Buffy and Angel books. Buffy and Angel feel like two different games – Vampire Revised and Vampire: The Requiem do not. Similarly, compared to other White Wolf products, V:TR comes up short. Though it used the same system in the same setting, Guide to the Technocracy felt like a "whole new game" from Mage: The Ascension. In many ways it was - because the themes and moods differed. Mage was an urban fantasy game with individualistic characters doing zany stuff - GTTTech provided a superspy game with characters locked in a conspiracy doing X-Files type investigation. In other words, by buying GTTTech, you didn't just buy a supplement, you bought a new game.
Requiem doesn't feel like a new game.
People might criticize me for saying that perhaps I expected too much from Vampire. Yes, I still expected there to be emphasis on blood-drinking creatures of the night, but I felt that there should be some new take on vampires with the new edition. I feel that while WoD2 didn’t explicitly promise vast changes, I do feel that the themes and mood should change at least slightly, away from social-cliquing and towards the personal aspect of horror – and to the design team’s credit, there’s less high-school cliquing (though it’s still there) and more political/philosophical cliquing.
In short, I felt that this would have been suited better not as a core book with a new system, but because most of the concepts remained identical to V:TM, that this could have been used as a supplement to V:TM – an alternative style of playing Vampires using the existing V:TM rules, if not the canon. Wouldn’t have been more than 64 pages as-written and then you can pad it out to a $30 fatsplat with newer information. Indeed – going off on a tangent – one of the reasons that the World of Darkness core branched off into a second book (other than two books is twice the profit) was that people were tired of buying the same system in every WoD 1 core rulebook. Here I get the exact same feeling – only instead of “rebuying rules,” I’m “rebuying the setting.”
If you're playing Vampire: The Requiem, there's no real reason to play Vampire: The Masquerade - or vice versa. Perhaps Requiem was meant for more sweeping changes when the “end of the World of Darkness” was announced, but it got lost under the rug as the game was actually developed and moved away from imagination into practicality. In the end, however, I get the feeling that this move wasn’t really to update the system, though it did that. I get the feeling that this move wasn’t really to introduce new factions and character types, though it did that.
I get the feeling that this was done in order to sell more books.
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(NB: I give this book high numerical marks in substance mostly because Vampire Revised would have scored the exact same high marks, and since my main criticism is that it's not significantly different from Vampire Revised, I didn't feel it was fair to mark the setting down for my overexpectation. V:TM, and therefore, V:TR, are still fun games.)
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