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Vampire: the Requiem is the first title in White Wolf’s New World of Darkness. It is a spiritual successor to Vampire: the Masquerade – a different continuity, a different setting, a different game. More or less. Vampire : the Requiem is still very much Vampire, but it is very much not Vampire : the Masquerade.
This review assumes some familiarity with Vampire: the Masquerade, but I will do my best to address as broad an audience as possible.
Vampire: the Requiem is not a stand-alone game. It runs under White Wolf’s revamped Storytelling System, which is described in the World of Darkness core rulebook. Since it is not actually described in the Requiem rulebook I will not be discussing the merits of the Storytelling system in this review.
First Impressions
The cover is pretty. Very pretty. A rose petals tumble from a trailing hand, that could be awake or asleep, dead or alive. The entire cover is a rich blood red; the rose petals faintly embossed. It’s a lovely addition to a bookshelf. The flavour text on the back is a little overwrought for my tastes. Still, this is supposed to be a game of gothic horror, and you can’t be properly Gothic without being a little bit over the top. The interior artwork is much as you would expect. Numerous pictures of scantily clad people sinking their fangs into one another, and rugged looking individuals in the middle of fights. Like the World of Darkness core rulebook, each chapter begins with a tangentially-relevant highbrow quotation.
Content
The book is divided into four chapters (“Society of the Damned”, “Character”, “Special Rules and Systems” and “Storytelling and Antagonists”) and two appendices (“Bloodlines and Unique Disciplines” and “New Orleans”), plus prologue and epilogue. The relatively small number of chapters, and their relative breadth, makes navigating the book a little difficult. The “Society of the Damned” chapter, for example, contains the two-page-spreads describing Covenants, inserted halfway through the chapter with little to no fanfare. Clan descriptions similarly, are in the Character chapter between Character Generation and Discipline rules, the one just leading straight into the other. This combined with the cursive script used for subheadings makes navigation very difficult.
That’s the overview, on to the chapter-by-chapter.
Chapter One: Society of the Damned. The chapter begins with a description of The Embrace (the process by which a mortal becomes a vampire), The Requiem (the term the Kindred – vampires to the uninitiated – apparently use for their condition), and the Danse Macabre (the interactions between vampires). I must confess to a certain irritation at the terminology here. While the musical imagery is all very apt, it still smacks very much of White Wolf trying a bit too hard to keep to their Whatever: the Something format for titles. One cannot help but feel that the term “Requiem” grew out of the need to find a subtitle for their game. “Masquerade” made intuitive sense, “Requiem” feels a little forced.
The opening sections go to great pains to drive home the fact that Being A Vampire Is A Bad Thing. “If one thing is for certain,” it says, “it’s that the Embrace is not some kind of blessed immortality.” Indeed apparently there is an Official Policy that WW writers are not allowed to refer to vampires as being “immortal” because the connotations of the term are too positive (which I am sure must come as a comfort to Melmoth and the Wandering Jew). The emphasis on the negative aspects of vampirism is commendable but is in some ways at odds with creating a commercially viable roleplaying game. Most vampire players, in my experience, were attracted to the game because vampires are sexy and cool, not because they want to explore the unlife of a damned wretch who is but an echo of a memory of a dead man. This leads to a fundamental dichotomy in the game. Half the time, the books are telling you how wretched the unlife of a vampire truly is, the other half they’re trying to get you excited about how cool it would be to play a Daeva or a member of the Circle of the Crone.
The chapter continues with a discussion of Vampire Society. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Vampires live in the cities, where they are ruled over by Princes, who are advised by Primogen. They are divided up into Clans (only five) and follow Traditions (only three). They respect Elysium. The Camarilla is gone, as are the other Sects you might remember from the Masquerade. Instead there are five (or six, or eight, depending on how you look at it) Covenants: The Circle of the Crone, The Carthian Movement, The Invictus, the Lancea Sanctum and the Ordo Dracul. Mention is also made of “the Unaligned” – vampires without a particular covenant who for some reason are treated as a covenant in their own right, and of Belial’s Brood (satanist anarchist vampires – think Baali meet Sabbat). Then there are the mysterious “Seven” (Vampires who want to wipe out all other vampires and who are Really, Really Mysterious).
I am undecided about Covenants. On the one hand it is good to see that White Wolf have finally separated your political affiliation from your Clan. It’s also nice to see a vampiric society that’s less utterly monolithic. Vampire: the Requiem places vampire politics firmly at the local level, that of individual Princes and their cities, rather than a grand conflict of Camarilla versus Sabbat. That being said, there is something about the Covenants that rings false. One would have thought that if vampiric society was entirely on the level of the individual city, that globe-spanning Covenants would not exist. Similarly, one would think that there would be more than minor local variations on the theme of governing a city. Requiem does suggest multiple possible models for Kindred Society in a given Domain (Feudal Monarchy, The Boardroom, The Diocese, By the Kindred For the Kindred). It then goes on to describe the first three as being basically identical (an autocratic Prince/Director/Bishop advised by a council of Primogen/Board Members/Bishops) and the last as being unworkable (“To date, few of these attempts have lasted… Those few cities that do still remain often resemble the worst aspects of mortal government”). Occasional remarks to the effect that “domains differ greatly” only serves to highlight the fact that the rest of the chapter posits an almost absurd level of uniformity in Kindred society.
Chapter Two: Character. I personally felt that this chapter could have benefited from being subdivided into Character Creation and Disciplines. Character creation is as described in the World of Darkness core rulebook, plus a couple of little extra bells and whistles. Vampire characters have to pick a Clan, which grants them +1 to one of their Attributes (depending on the Clan they choose), and three dots of Disciplines – two of which must be In Clan.
The chapter adds the Haven, Herd and Status merits to those described in the main rulebook. It also introduces the Blood Potency trait. Blood Potency effectively replaced the function of Generation in the previous game. It is rated 1-10, sets your maximum blood pool, your maximum blood-per-turn and your maximum Attributes, Skills and Disciplines. All vampires start with Blood Potency 1, and gain a point every 50 years (or through Diablerie), and drops by 1 every 25 years you spend in Torpor. The wording of the Blood Potency rules is a little bit odd. It seems to imply that once your Blood Potency increases beyond 10, you fall into Torpor (it says that vampires will fall into torpor about every 500 years, which is how long it would technically take to hit BP 11) but this isn’t ever explicitly stated. Increased blood potency also restricts your feeding options. At BP 1-2 you can feed from animals (and humans), at BP 3-6 you can feed from humans but not animals, and at BP 7-10 you can only feed from other vampires. White Wolf veterans may find that this sounds very familiar. It was always talked about under Vampire: the Masquerade, but never actually implemented.
The Clans that exist in the Requiem are the Daeva (sensualists), the Gangrel (savages, much like the original gangrel), Mekhet (“dwellers in darkness”, apparently), Nosferatu (pariahs, again much like the originals) and Ventrue (nobility, again like the originals). Notable changes are to the Clan Weaknesses of the old clans. The Gangrel now have penalties to actions involving concentration, due to their tie to the savagery of the Beast. The Nosferatu don’t have to be deformed, they can just be “creepy”. Perhaps most interestingly of all, the Ventrue, instead of having selective tastes, now gain Derangements more easily as a result of losing Humanity. On the whole I far prefer the new, stripped down, clan structure. By keeping to a few broad, archetypal clans, White Wolf succeeds in removing the emphasis from clan-as-character-class. Every Clan now gets a “unique” discipline (that is to say, one that is only in-clan for that clan, but not exclusive to it). The Daeva get Majesty (what used to be Presence), the Gangrel get Protean, the Mekhet have Auspex, the Nosferatu have Nightmare, and the Ventrue get Dominate.
Disciplines are pretty much as ever they were, however your Dice Pool for Disciplines is now composed of Attribute + Skill + Discipline. In some ways this is a shame, I always quite liked the distinction between having access to a lot of different abilities (high discipline) and being able to use them effectively (high levels in the appropriate Attributes and Skills). A nice touch in the Discipline section is the inclusion of sample circumstance modifiers to your Discipline dice pools. For example, you get bonuses to use Animalism on predatory mammals, and if you’re capable of assuming the appropriate shape through Protean. Most of the changes to the Disciplines are sensible, although I am not certain that Nightmare is terribly well thought through. It seems to have much the same problem as Obfuscate had in Masquerade – it’s basically just increasingly powerful versions of the same effect (in this case, scaring people).
Also included in this section are the unique disciplines taught to members of the various Covenants. These effectively replace Thaumaturgy from the old system. Members of the Circle of the Crone get a discipline called “Cruac” which is, apparently, “a mixture of pre-Christan and Pagan magic from across the globe, whose only common element is a reliance on blood sacrifice”. Members of the Lancea Sanctum get Theban Sorcery. Unlike the old Thaumaturgy, these Disciplines rely exclusively on Rituals. This makes them feel a lot more like occult secrets, and a lot less like Tremere Superpowers, which can only be a good thing. The actual rituals are a little bit variable, many of them seeming like general utility effects with biblical or Celtic-derived names more than anything else. For example the Theban Sorcery Ritual “Transubstantiation” basically boils down to a “polymorph other” spell, which isn’t really what I understand the mystery of Transubstantiation to be about.
Members of the Ordo Dracul, meanwhile, get the Coils of the Dragon, which allow them to sidestep various aspects of the Vampiric Curse. It took me a while to decide if I liked these or not, but I think I’ve come down in favour. They might be a little bit too easy to get hold of, but I quite like the idea of vampires devoting their studies to “Disciplines” that just make up for their weaknesses and only partially at that - rather than allowing them to throw trucks or kill people by looking at them. That being said, the Coil of Blood is damnably useful – blood points are power, so anything that stops you burning through it so fast is a huge bonus.
The chapter ends with “Devotions” – combination Disciplines. These are a bad sign. I can see how it is a good idea to break up the linearity of the Discipline system, but ultimately they’re just an invitation to silliness and power creep.
Chapter Three: Special Rules and Systems. Basically, I pretty much approve of pretty much all of the changes that have been made to the Vampire system – at least, to the vampire-specific bits of it – since Masquerade. Blood has all the old uses – healing, waking up, boosting your stats (you now get +2 per point for one turn). There are also a whole host of new concepts that are introduced. The addictive effects of vampiric blood are now properly quantified, rather than just having a vague and handwavey statement that “vampire blood can be addictive” and never doing anything with it. The Blood Bond has been fiddled with to make it less clear cut – you now have a chance of not becoming fully bound after the third drink, and there are specific effects for a two-drink bond. This all makes the process feel a lot more real, rather than the faintly clinical approach of the three-drink limit.
Characters now have powerful ties to their sires, grandsires, childer and grandchilder. These ties grant bonuses to the use of certain disciplines, as well as an innate sense for one another’s wellbeing and whereabouts. This all adds to the creepy, alien feeling of vampirism, and strengthens the blood-imagery of the game. This is all to the good, too many vampire games (and, for that matter, vampire books, films, and movies) completely ignore the actual blood, in favour of black leather and shiny katanas. Reinforcing the fact that vampires are actually… well… vampires, rather than (as so many pundits have it) superheroes with fangs, is a good thing.
Another real hammer blow on the side of “you’re freaking vampires, remember that” is Predator’s Taint. When two vampires meet, they recognise one another as rivals, and, if they meet for the first time, must make an immediate Frenzy check, either to fight or flee, depending on their Blood Potency relative to the other vampire. The book advises you to display caution when invoking Predator’s Taint, “Important: Use of Predator’s Taint should be based on the dramatic potential of the situation” it says. It goes on to say that Storytellers should not feel that they have to incorporate Predator’s Taint into every interaction between Kindred. While I see what they’re driving at, I can’t help but feel that this is a bit of a copout. Predator’s Taint is a great rule, it wonderfully highlights the basically inhuman nature of vampires. Indeed it is one of the elements of the game that most strongly supports its avowed premise – that vampirism is a curse, that the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. If it is ignored then one of the greatest elements of the curse – the enforced isolation from everybody and everything – is lost. Again this seems to be a sign of the incompatibility of Vampire the Storytelling Game about the wretched unlives of the Damned, and Vampire the commercially viable RPG.
Creating Ghouls now requires the expenditure of a Willpower point, by either the Vampire or the Ghoul, every month with the ghoul’s feeding. This makes the ghouling process nicely non-trvial, while the detailed rules for Vitae Addiction give you a solid idea of how messed up Ghouls are likely to get. Hopefully the combination of these factors will stop people treating Ghouls as faceless extensions of the will of their master. On a similar note, siring new vampires now costs a permanent dot of Willpower. This change in particular I am heartily in favour of. I’ve seen far too many plans in Vampire games that begin “well first we Embrace a bunch of people…” requiring such a hefty game mechanical sacrifice really drives home the fact that Embracing somebody is a big deal, not an act of idle whimsy.
The one addition to the system I am not sure of is the statement that Vampires appear in mirrors and on film with their features distorted. From a “so why has nobody ever just videoed a vampire” point of view it makes absolute sense. From a style point of view it just feels a bit odd. I am at a loss as to why they did not simply say that Vampires do not reflect in mirrors and appear on film at all. It would be, in many ways, less noticeable (an absence being less easily spotted than an unusual presence), and would fit better with archetypal vampire mythology.
Chapter Four: Storytelling and Antagonists. This chapter is reasonably standard “how to run a roleplaying game” fare, with a Vampire slant. Most of the advice is relatively sensible – talk to your players, make sure you integrate their characters into your plots, that sort of thing. On the other hand I still feel that there is a lot being missed here. For example, it assumes that Stories will be about Clans and Covenants and Princes, rather than just being about Vampires. It assumes that your setting will be a City rather than a suburb. It assumes that your first step in designing your game will be to detail the Primogen and the Kindred politics, rather than the PCs relationships with their sires, grandsires and mortal families. Again we see the conflict between Vampire as a personal game about people living with a the curse of undeath, and Vampire as a game about unbelievably stylish immortals looking cool and politicking against each other.
It assumes also that the Storyteller should have his plot worked out from beginning to end, potentially even before the players create characters. Although it does encourage STs to talk to their players about character creation, it only ever suggests getting your players to change their character concepts, or cosmetically altering the plot to interest the characters. At no point does it actually suggest that if the PCs aren’t interested in the Rise and Fall of the New Prince (the sample story) that you should scrap that idea and come up with a plot they will be interested in. There is certainly no mention of the possibility of a player-driven Chronicle, with a relationship map in place of a plot. It describes the process of Storytelling very much as literal Storytelling, with the PCs as all but passive spectators, able to influence the plot only in small and predetermined ways. Of course you could argue that this is a design feature – after all it is supposed to be a Storytelling Game, however for my money a Storytelling game is a whole lot more fun when everybody gets to tell their story.
The Antagonists section is nice and straightforward, a list of sample NPC stats. I confess to being a little confused by the Gargoyles – apparently they exist, big hulking masses of stone that guard stuff. I’m not sure what they’re doing here, they’re certainly mentioned nowhere else in the book.
Appendix One: Bloodlines and Unique Disciplines. My heart sank when I saw the title of this chapter, but it turned out to be one of the best bits of the book. Bloodlines in Vampire: the Requiem are rather different to Bloodlines in Vampire: the Masquerade. For a start they’re actual bloodlines – that is to say, offshoots of one specific parent Clan. Five Bloodlines are presented in the book – Bruja, Burakumin, Malkovians, Morbus and Toreador. Offshoots of the Gangrel, Nosferatu, Ventrue, Mekhet and Daeva respectively. Bloodlines get all of the traits of their parent clan, plus an extra Discipline and an extra weakness.
What really impresses me about the Bloodlines is the fact that all bar one of them has a sensible, interesting backstory, which is clearly and concisely explained in their writeup. The Bruja are descended from a particular psycho biker from the American Southwest, who got embraced, and formed his own gang of vampires. The Malkovians are descended from one asylum inmate from the 19th century by the name of Anton Malkov. The Burakumin evolved because of feeding restrictions that were placed on Nosferatu in feudal Japan and the Toreador are descended from a particular Spanish nobleman, and adopted their current name out of respect for Jaques Bouhy’s performance in Carmen. Sure, some of them aren’t terribly grandiose, but that’s part of the appeal. I am overused to RPGs that describe every single faction, phenomenon and sect in their setting as being “extremely mysterious, their origins lost in the mists of time”. It’s great to finally see a vampire bloodline that is explicitly decended from this one bloke from ‘40s California. The sly tips of the hat to the occasionally silly etymologies of the old Vampire clan names are also appreciated.
The unique disciplines are less inspiring, and the Morbus (who are archetypal “shrouded in mystery, lost in the mists of time”) really don’t work for me. I sincerely hope that the level of that sort of thing in future supplements is kept to a minimum.
Appendix Two: New Orleans. This is the signature setting for Vampire: the Requiem. It’s fairly standard RPG setting fare. I am a little disappointed to see that the vast majority of the setting information and NPC writeups focus on the “stylish, deadly, immortal” interpretation of vampirism, rather than the allegedly canonical “cursed, tormented undead”. The information in this chapter focuses heavily on the Requiem-specific aspects of the setting, rather than the actual vampiric nature of the New Orleans Kindred. Baron Cimitiere in particular seems to grossly violate the image of vampires as accursed walking corpses – he apparently faced Final Death in Haiti, but was restored to his current incarnation by the intervention of Baron Samedi (the actual Loa, not the Masquerade NPC). He is also, of course, an accomplished houngan and enjoys the support of the voudunist community. If that isn’t vampirism-as-blessing, I don’t know what is.
Conclusion
As I said at the start of this review, it is most definitely Vampire. It’s Vampire done a good deal better than it was, but it is still very much Vampire. If you liked Vampire: the Masquerade, you’ll probably like Vampire: the Requiem. If you liked Vampire: the Masquerade First Edition, and were then put off by the amount of power creep and supplement flooding that characterised the later editions, you will definitely like Vampire: the Requiem. If the idea of being a vampire strikes you as cool, you will probably like Vampire: the Requiem. On the other hand, if you never got on with Vampire, this incarnation probably won’t be different enough to bring you around.
Vampire the Requiem is a cool game, a stylish game, a pretty damned good game. However the Requiem, like the Masquerade, is ultimately about Vampire, not about Vampires. Although it has done an awful lot to redress the balance, the Covenants and Primogen and Politics are still clearly the focus of the game. Buy this game if you’re interested in Clans and Princes and Disciplines. Consider buying this game if you are interested in telling Stories about Vampires, but don’t expect it to be exactly what you’re looking for.
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