Leesten to ze Cheeldren of ze naight... How sveet zey sahnd...

Vampire: The Requiem is a game which plugs into White Wolf's World of Darkness system.

It allows you to play the part of the blood-drinking creatures of the night, so lovingly protrayed in literature and film, with a major Bram Stoker and Ann Rice vibe. If you are brand new to role-playing games, you may or may not be aware that for about thirteen years, White Wolf published a game called Vampire: the Masquerade, the predecessor of this one, which had shedloads of supplements and reached a point where a rank beginner quite simply couldn't get in: there was simply too much background and backstory. So, to get those sales back up again, and to entice new players, the people at White Wolf decided to end the old setting with an apocalypse, and then reboot the thing. Start everything from scratch. Same concepts, slightly fixed system, new background.

The point is, Vampire: The Requiem (henceforth V:tR) is intended to be an entry point. You are intended to be able to pick up this and the World of Darkness rulebook and be able to start playing. Question is: is it sufficient for a player to do that? well, let's see.

The Artifact
This is a very pretty book. The lovely vaguely metallic matte cover shows a hand with long nails sprinkling rose-petals: the petals and the book title are glossy. Inside, the artwork and layout is mostly very, very nice. It has a nice weight to it, a nice heft. It's on glossy paper, and is bound with proper threads and stuff, meaning it's probably going to be pretty sturdy.

Most of the artwork is very good. Only one or two examples are sub-standard (I have never, ever understood why people like the manga-style stuff that Joshua Gabriel Timbrook does). The layout is presented in two colours throughout, red and black style, which is very pleasing to the eye. The borders are nice but unobtrusive.

Sometimes it falls flat. There's a faint scribble pattern behind the text, which, when I first saw it, annoyed me because I thought I'd scratched the print and ruined the page... then I realised it was on every page. Silly me. The titles are mostly written in a faux-copperplate handwriting font, which is undeniably pretty and thematically appropriate and stuff, but which needs concentration to read, meaning that if you're flipping through the book in a hurry (and trust me, you'll need to - see the bit about the index below), you may miss stuff that's right in front of your eyes.

There are a few typos. The writing style is purple - which I suppose is a good thing, given the gothic style, but often uninvolving and a wee bit dull. Sometimes it's not so good. There's tautology in places. And then there's places where they overdramatise, talking about "the sleep called torpor" or something similar (can't find the exact quote), as if that wasn't exactly what torpor was in any dictionary. Frankly, this is not a book I've found myself able to read all the way through in one sitting. Few RPG books are (the original Delta Green book is a notable exception), but this one made my eyes glaze over in places.

Characters
In this game, you play a vampire, one of the so-called Kindred, an undead crature of the night. You get the idea.

You create a human character using the World of Darkness book, and then you play through how the poor stiff ended up a - well, as a stiff, and then you choose a clan, and, optionally a covenant (of which more below), add an extra attribute dot, some very basic and archetypal supernatural powers (three dots - they go from one to five) and take the weakness attributed to your clan, and there you go. All vampires are affected less by bullets than living human beings, don't usually show up in mirrors, photos or video as more than a blur, can only really conterfeit human feelings, take terrible damage from sunlight and fire, and need to survive on blood, usually human blood.

The clans are essentially five basic approaches to vampires as presented in film and literature and stuff. Each clan has a set of disciplines (the supernatural powers) which they can learn more easily than the others and a weakness. They break down as the Daeva (sexy Ann Rice vampires, who find it difficult not to indulge their baser desires), Gangrel (savage vampires like in Northern European folklore or the film Near Dark, who find it hard to use their higher thought processes), Mekhet (shadowy vampires, who shrink from sunlight even more than the others), Nosferatu (no prizes for guessing the source material here - these are creepy, usually hideous vampires who creep people out by their presence) and the Ventrue (aristocratic, Byronic vampires, who, being posh, are more prone to going nuts)

Incidentally, you don't get the option of not having a clan like you did in the old Vampire.

The Covenants are groups who have some sort of approach to being undead, and basically group together attitudes. So you have the Carthians, who want a sort of democratic vampire government; the Invictus (the old guard, who run things); the Lancea Sanctum, who have a creation myth about how the first vampire was the guy who stabbed Christ in the side with the spear, and who consider themselves to be damned by God... and believe that if you're damned, you should jolly well be acting like you're damned; The Ordo Dracul, who follow the example of Dracula himself, believing that they're bound to be The Best Vampire They Can Be (I would imagine they get vampire members to stand in front of a mirror when they get up and say to themselves, "every day, in every way, I am getting better and better" - only they clearly don't, 'cos they don't show up in mirrors. But it's like that); and the Circle of the Crone, who are your witchy neo-pagan types, who have a creation myth of their own.

They're not at war or anything. They just co-exist and do politics all the time. Vampire politics are very much small picture. There's no "great game", no big overarching history. Vampires don't really know where they came from, and the really old ones go into a deep sleep after a while, where they have so many weird dreams that when they wake up, they find it difficult to work out which experience was real and which was fictional.

You can, if you want, choose not to belong to a covenant (a relief to me). There are also two "enemy" covenants, not available to players' characters, Belial's Brood (devil-worshippers) and the Seven, who are vampires who are dedicated to destroying all vampires. No, really.

Personally, I think the Invictus and the Lancea Sanctum kind of work, while the Carthians are a bit dull and the other two are a bit pantomime-gothic. But then, that's the idea, I suppose: the intent is to try and cover all the gothic bases, and they do. Which bits you decide to use is up to you.

As for the "bad guys", while Belial's Brood fills in a gothic gap and is really obvious, I think the Seven just doesn't work. I mean: vampires who are dedicated to destroying all vampires. Do you see the problem there? I just kept asking myself when I read the page, how on earth do they recruit? I mean, the initial idea is cool, but you need to have absolute conviction to pull such an idea off. A one-page write-up which doesn't even give you enough to make up the ideas for yourself doesn't say to me "conviction", you know?

The book has a big fat set of rules for the various aspects of vampiric life (see below) and it closes with the inevitable essays on how to run a game, some antagonists, which range from the interesting (the Rogue Ghoul - a ghoul is a human who gains some vampiric powers from drinking vampire blood, but who also ends up usually enslaved by the vampire whose blood she's drinking - this one has somehow been released, but is addicted to vampire blood, and has decided to take it from whomever she can) to the obvious (random satanist vampire) to the bizarre (animated gargoyles!?).

There's then a section with optional rules for creating bloodlines, which are sub-clans with extra powers and extra weaknesses, which includes a sample bloodline for each clan: Toreador (arty Daevas); Malkovians (mad Ventrue); Bruja (biker-gang Gangrel); Buruaumin (Japanese Nosferatu) and Morbus (diseased Mekhet). They're all kind of cool, but sort of superfluous, really.

Then there's a long chapter which is a ready-made setting, based in New Orleans, which is OK. It's not setting the world on fire (personally, I'd like to see more potential for PCs to rock the boat), and it doesn't give you an anormous amount of information about what New Orleans is actually like, but it's an atmospheric and useful place to start. I mean, New Orleans! Ann Rice country! Where better?

System
It's the same system as the World of Darkness book, obviously, with a few tweaks. There are rules in the book for the damage you take from sunlight, the way that vampires lose control when faced with hunger, injury, fire or sunlight with a kind of savage "fight or flight" reaction (which they call Frenzy or Rötschreck, respectively), and the way that vampires drink blood.

Vampires have a pool of "Blood Points", which they gain by drinking from mortals, and which they use to heal, make themselves physically stronger and tought, and which they burn up to power their supernatural disciplines. They also have a trait called Blood Potency, which basically is a measure of how powerful the blood running through their dessicated veins is, and which governs how many Blood Points they can retain and how many they can use in one go. It increases over time, and it can also be increased by drinking the blood of other vampires, although this has dire consequences (ie. it's a surefire way to turn you into a monster, and if the other vampires find out what you've done, you really are for it).

The Disciplines are basically the powers you expect a Vampire to have, so you have Animalism (when you need to get yourself a useful flock of bats), Protean (shapechanging), Nightmare (the ability to frighten and drive people mad and stuff), Celerity, Resilience and Vigor (supernatural speed, stamina and strength), Dominate (mind control), Majesty (supernatural beauty and charisma), Auspex (supernatural sensory stuff), and Obfuscate (hiding in shadows and making people forget you and stuff). There are also some special disciplines available to covenant members: Theban Sorcery (which has a series of nasty magic spells right out of some of those Catholic saint stories for the Lancea Sanctum), Cruac (same thing, only with a kind of neopagan feel for the Circle of the Crone) and Coils of the Dragon, which is basically a nine-step vampire self-improvement programme (resist sunlight for a few miniutes, avoid frenzy, that sort of thing for the Ordo Dracul).

After that, they have some "Devotions", which are powers you get from having two or more disciplines working together, so if you have celerity 2 and Protean 4, you can spend experience points to buy Instantaneous Transformation, which is fairly obvious. They're all pretty obvious, really. But then, that's what you'd expect.

Tone
It's grim. Vampires play at politics. They use humans as food animals (one of your possible Merit traits gives the number of people you can feed of: it's called "Herd". It's always been that, and I've always found it creepy). The background gives shedloads of stuff about covenants and politics, but it also keeps on hammering home the fact that it's a horror story, and that being a Vampire is not pretty. It's a curse. Vampires are the referred to as the Damned, and they really, really are. Yeah, you live forever, but you have to do terrible things to keep going, and you live in fear not only of other vampires, from whom you instinctively recoil (there's a system for that) but also from yourself. This is the kind of game which frightens you by asking you to explore what you'd be prepared to do.

The one aspect which I think most embodies where they're going with all this is the Humanity system. Every character has a Humanity rating, which has the potential to fall when you do basd stuff. Ordinary humans (this bit is in the World of Darkness book, but it needs further explanation) have a similar rating called Morality, which serves the same purpose. Both ratings go from 1 to 10, and start at 7 for ordinary people, with 10 being saintly and 1 being hideously evil or bestial. If you do a bad thing, you make a roll and if you succeed, you feel remorse and your Morality stays the same. If you fail, you're hardened to it, and your Morality falls a notch. The higher your Morality, the more things bother you (because you're a better person); the lower it is, the more awful the things you did have to be to bring on a roll. Thing is, with humans, this roll isn't all that hard. With Vampires, it's statistically quite likely that your Humanity will fall and fall. The book tells us that most vampires end up as vicious bastards with Humanity scores of 4 or thereabouts.

The point is, this system supports the intended tone of the game. While the conflict of the game is clearly intended to be based around the dark politics of the night folk (hence all that stuff about covenants), the theme is quintessentially gothic: it's about the degeneration of a human into a monster. The horror comes from realising just what you're capable of. If you're a vampire, you're not really any different from a rapist and a criminal and probably a murderer, and either you have to get yourself some sort of sense of responsibility, or you have to be prepared to be - whisper it - evil. A beast.

This is not going to be to everyone's taste. If I may talk about the old version, Vampire: the Masquerade, for a minute: in later editions and supplements, the loss-of-humanity aspect was played down, and the politics took centre stage. You could do "Vampire superheroics", or "Fantasy" or "Hack and slash" or "splatterpunk"; it was further played down by the concept of adopting alternative vampire moralities or "paths", which basically allowed you to sidestep this issue altogether. V:tR doesn't let you get away with acting like a monster. Here's where I shrug and say, you may not like this. You may be disappointed or annoyed by this. But it was the intention of the V:tR designers to make this a primary theme again, like it was, way back when they first made Vampire, and they have essentially fixed the system so it it fits the themes of degeneration and personal Oh-God-what-have-I-done horror. Me, this was how I always played the game anyway, so I welcome it. I hated the paths system: it always seemed to me to be a set of excuses to play an irresponsibly evil character, on "The Path of What I Was Going to Do Anyway", as one writer put it.

The Stake in the Heart
Another digression: I have a good friend who is a freelance writer like me, but who, unlike me, is actually pretty new to role-playing games. She is smart, quick witted, and easily the best role-player in my group (no gamer assumptions), but as a neophyte, she is of course new to the idiom or role-playing books. For example, she got her own copy of Dark Ages: Fae, which we are currently playing, and found that it assumed so much. It assumed that you would flip forward to the explanation bits when you found a word you didn't understand. It assumed you knew exactly where everything was. But my friend, being unused to this kind of role-playing supplement, found it a royal pain to use. The point being, White Wolf do this all the time: they usually expect that you know where to look in their supplements. And if you're new to the hobby, no matter how intelligent you are, chances are you don't.

Now in the World of Darkness corebook, White Wolf mended this, pretty much. Everything was explained, it was clearly indexed, and the main rules were referenced in nice clear spreads at the front of the book. I thought they were turning over a new leaf. Sadly, V:tR falls into all the old traps: concepts are named before they are explained, the rules are not really organised into any coherent order (in fact, they're even less organised - in the old version, there were separate chapters for traits, character generation, splats, disciplines and systems. In the new version, it's all lumped into chapters two and 3, which total 108 pages. Well, thanks, guys).

And then there's the index. It's useless, unless you know what you're looking for and where it is to begin with, which kind of defeats the object. It's long been a bugbear of mine with White Wolf books that they're badly indexed. I understand that having a nicely designed book is good, and I understand how they'd rather concentrate on atmosphere and stuff, but role-playing rulebooks are used in games as reference sources. How can you use it as a reference source if you don't have a decent index?

For example. In the front of the book, they mention that Vampires don't show up in mirrors etc. unless they really want to. So I thought, how do they do that? and I flipped to the index, and looked for "mirror", "video" and "media" in the hope of finding it. No joy. Later, it turned out that it's under the section marked "Traditions", under the subheading "the Masquerade" (pp169-70, in case you were wondering). How the hell are you supposed to find that unless you know where it is anyway? Or the names of powers? You have to know what discipline they're under (less useful, I admit, but conceivable). Or what about Blood Potency? There are fourteen references to Blood Potency in the index. how do you know which is the main one (the one on page 99, folks) unless you know already? Basically, it's not an index, it's an alphabetical table of contents. And it's no good at all.

Wempires!
So there we are. Time for the evaluation, then. For Substance, I give it 4, since it's complete and full of potential, and it hangs together nicely. It maintains a consistent tone. But there are one or two things that aren't really developed (eg. The Seven), and some bits are just dull.

For Style? well, if I was just rating style on looks alone, it would get a five, since it is lovely to look at, really pretty, but in places it's so pretty, it's harder to use (I'm talking about the handwriting-style headers here). And then there's the whole issue of using the damn thing. It's badly organised (they could at least have split up the different sections of rules into different chapters) and has an index which is basically useless. So for me, it actually gets a 3.

It's pretty, it's so pretty. But it isn't easy to use for the beginner.