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Lisa: What do they do there, Dad?
Homer: What do they do? What don't they do? [laughs] Oh, they do so many things they never stop. Oh, the things they do there, my stars.
Lisa: You don't know what they do there, do you?
Homer: ...not as such, no.
-”Homer the Great”, Sixth Season
And I get the same impression with the Lancea Sanctum. The book does give an awful lot of information about what the Lancea Sanctum is, and how it's organized, but doesn't actually explain what the player characters are supposed to do within its ranks.
I should elaborate. The Lancea Sanctum are one of the major factions in the new Vampire. They're the creepy religious vampires, the ones who've picked up some weird mutant variation of Christianity and based their unlives around it; they worship Longinus, the centurion who stuck a spear into Christ's side and wound up being converted into a vampire for his sins. The Lancea Sanctum's philosophy revolves around tormenting ordinary humans, so that they stop concentrating on the world around them and start looking forward to the glory of Heaven.
Or, at least, that's what I gather from the few fragments that I managed to glean from the book that bears their name. Rather than focusing on what the Lancea Sanctum actually does, the book focuses on the least useful aspects of the Lancea Sanctum – the doctrine, the organizational aspects, the way that the clans and various age groups of vampires interact with it. Completely lost in the bargain is anything that'll actually allow a GM to add new stuff into a Lancea Sanctum campaign.
Let me see if I can explain this: In Unknown Armies, they talk about three different kinds of campaign – local, global and cosmic, each accommodating a different range of play. Vampire: The Masquerade tended to focus on the global; a lot of supplements were about the various globe-spanning organizations and how they affected other nations, other cities and so forth. At points, the supplements stopped talking about individual vampires and focused entirely on the machinations of the Camarilla and the Sabbat – how you fit their agenda, not how their agenda fit your character concept.
Vampire: The Requiem, by contrast, focused entirely on the local. If you were a member of a particular cabal, then you belonged to a fairly small organization that probably didn't stretch much beyond your city, if that. There might be a few heavy hitters, but they only affect you if they actually decide to show up in your town.
Lancea Sanctum inverts this. It's about the Lancea Sanctum and its storied history, and its philosophy, and if the characters happen to belong, there's perilously little within it to offer to them. It contributes to the same feeling of ancient weight that you had in the original Masquerade, where you were acutely aware of your character's place as a Johnny-come-lately in a conflict that had been going on for about two thousand years. All of the great stuff that made Vampire: The Requiem so tense – the sense that the vampiric curse came with more problems than assets – seems to drift away.
Step by step: The book opens up with a short story by Greg Stolze, whose work on Vampire: The Requiem has been nothing short of fucking spectacular. “A Blood Like Fire” should be required reading for anybody who's got Requiem – as a matter of fact, it should be made required reading for everybody with even a tangential interest in the World of Darkness, but I'll finish drooling all over the book in another review.
The opening chapter goes into the history of the Lancea Sanctum, describing its origins – Longinus pokes Jesus with a spear, God makes Longinus a vampire, Longinus promptly goes off into a sulk for a while. After he's done, he finds a monastery, kills all but one monk and Embraces him, and creates the foundations of the Lancea Sanctum, which evolves over the years into a sort of vampiric religion.
While I understand that there's got to be some kind of history behind the Lancea Sanctum, I find the entire chapter to work against the original atmosphere of the core book. Vampires in the Requiem world don't know what happened five hundred years ago, because the elders who would know have all dropped in and out of torpor a few times since then. Having a canonical history of the Lancea Sanctum, free of the ambiguity of the core book, gives the splat a feeling like the characters are just the tip of an eight-hundred-year old movement of which they're only a small part. Vampire Revised, at times, felt like a description of two NPCs called Camarilla and Sabbat, without emphasis on the player characters, and this book kinda feels the same way.
On top of that, we also get a description of how the Lancea Sanctum operates worldwide, including how they work in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. But Requiem's never really felt like it was a globe-trotting game, and Mysterious Places showed that you could derive a lot of horror from picking a particular place and time – spooky America in the present day. Knowing that you can go to Asia and find some version of the Lancea Sanctum gives it a franchised feel – no matter where you go, you can still get a Big Mac and a Lancea Sanctum mass. Confining them to America and Europe would have been a smarter choice, as well as allowing for further development of those areas in supplements that are designed to play to those areas.
The next chapter just strikes me as largely useless. We get a description of various Lancea Sanctum texts, ranging from its central text – the Testaments of Longinus – and including the various subtexts that have grown up around it. We get a description of the various rules of the Lancea Sanctum, which can basically be broken down to “We're vampires, we suck, let's beat on humanity, no Embracing, and no diablerie.” I should note that the ban on Embracing is going to immediately make the Lancea Sanctum unappealing to any vampire who doesn't want to be entirely dependent on the covenant. It could lead to some interesting conflicts, though – what happens if you Embrace somebody out of panic, then have to cover it up. But the rules don't really say anything. The first rules says that they're divine predators, the ninth says that you're supposed to prey on humanity, not get close to individual humans or torture them unnecessarily – but the book also says that vampires of the Lancea Sanctum are supposed to make human lives miserable in order to make them look forward to the heaven that's waiting for them. So, do they kill cops? Degrade social structures? Encourage people to stay near churches by hunting in areas where there aren't churches? Kill anybody who screws with a particularly religious person?
The Lancea Sanctum's answer, as can be deciphered from the book, is to say “We're GOD'S DIVINE PREDATORS and we're SUPPOSED TO PREY ON MANKIND”, increasing the volume on each repetition as necessary. The Lancea Sanctum's entire point seems to be justifying what they already do, without really adding anything onto it. Good, you prey on mankind; now what? The book doesn't say.
On top of that, there's also various creeds of the Lancea Sanctum, which further fragments what would have been a decent covenant into a fractured collection of half-related groups. For instance, there's a Catholic/Protestant split (Monachal vs. Westminster), an American fundamentalist creed (the Tollisons), and, just because racism is such a huge factor in every vampire story ever written, a heretical splinter group of white-supremacist vampires in the form of the Crimson Calvary. Beating up a bunch of straw-man white supremacists makes people feel good about themselves, but doesn't do much either for racial relations and/or the game.
Just to water them down further, there's also a Muslim creed and a Jewish creed of the Lancea Sanctum. This is, I should note, in a covenant that's explicitly focused on the idea of Christ as God in the form of man – they don't worship Christ, but their imagery is directly drawn from that religion. It's the same way that the old Celestial Chorus worked, and just as unsatisfying. We've already seen Muslim vampires covered in some detail in Veil of Night, and Jewish vampires – well, Jewish vampires seem like a Woody Allen sketch waiting to happen, but it could be done. It just doesn't feel right to have three major religions stuck into one creed, especially with the real-world history that the three religions have. (See: The Middle East, beginning of time to present.)
Titles and offices: I can't be motivated to particularly care, especially since the new Vampire is less about grinding rank and more about your character's unlife. There's Inquisitors who run around rooting out heresy, so you can bring back a little of the old Archons & Templars feel, but I can't see that as particularly important.
Clan roles in the Lancea Sanctum: This is particularly unhelpful because clans no longer matter nearly as much as they did in the original game. As a matter of fact, I'd say that it's actively harmful to the game, because it forces people to start regarding their characters less as unique individuals and more as a Nosferatu who happens to be a former cop. The hell with that.
The ritae of the Lancea Sanctum are pretty unsatisfying too. For instance, most of the Lancea attend midnight masses, which are basically like standard Catholic masses except with vampires and a transubstantiation of human blood into that of Longinus. The Creation Rite actually manages to feel appropriately creepy – since Embracing somebody is a sin, the sire of the vampire-to-be is ritually punished for his sins and the sins of his childe. This section does feel influenced by the old Sabbat rituals, particularly since they've got a Gran Ballo. Actually, the Gran Ballo, with its dressing up and celebrating feels directly contradictory to the heavy medieval feel of the Lancea Sanctum at its most potent. I'm also a little nonplussed at the whole “Kidnap people and have a blood feast at the end of the ceremony” thing. It always bugged me how the Sabbat in Masquerade seemed to be able to kidnap twenty or thirty people without anybody noticing; in Requiem it's even harder to buy.
Compare the Midnight Mass, however, to a scene that occurs in The Marriage of Virtue and Viciousness. Solomon Bell kidnaps a white-collar criminal, humiliates and terrifies him on an altar – shades of the Devil-Tigers – but then scolds the other vampires for laughing at him, describes him as an inherently less sinful being than the vampires and one of God's holy works. He finishes by telling the man that he's going to die, but offers him a sword – whether he slits his own throat, attacks the vampires or does something else is up to him. It's an amazing scene, and one that isn't echoed in this book. The next chapter actually comes back a little with details of how neonates are impressed into the Lancea Sanctum. There's some interesting stuff regarding initiation rites, why vampires go to the Lancea Sanctum (for safety and for a sense of belonging), and the various roles that they play. But the chapter starts losing its way when it starts describing the various interrelations between neonates and ancillae, neonates and elders – there's no particular insight into the motivations of the people who are joining. It feels pretty tedious. The details of relations between the Lancea Sanctum and other covenants gives us some information that we didn't have before, but doesn't offer any revelations – Circle of the Crone boo, Invictus yay, Ordo Dracul and Carthians ehhh. (Well, there's some interesting interaction between the Ordo Dracul and the Lancea Sanctum; both wield blood magic, both investigate the nature of the vampiric relationship, but both regard the other with great suspicion.)
We get a breakdown of the various factions within the Lancea Sanctum, which is actually interesting. Hardliners cleave to the original, medieval interpretation of the Sanctum's works, Unifiers try to keep everybody under the same undead roof, Neo-Reformists try to bring the covenant into the modern day, while the Mendicants walk the earth on spiritual pilgrims. It's actually useful; I can see a GM sitting down to sketch out a Lancea Sanctum NPC a little better with the information presented.
The bloodlines: A little iffy. The Icarians believe that they're destined to rule the Lancea Sanctum, but are constantly unable to achieve what they see as their great destiny; their discipline, Constance, buffs their Composure in the same way that Potence buffs Strength. They pay for it by not recovering willpower when they fulfill their Virtues, and only recovering half when they sleep. I'm not sure why they're a blooodline at all, as they're ambitious Ventrue within the Lancea Sanctum who can't seem to actually get to lead the damned thing. There's no particular vampiric myth that they adhere to, and without the Lancea Sanctum, they shouldn't exist. It's like a covenant whose theme revolves around never being able to kick the football before the little girl pulls it away.
Mortifiers of the Flesh make a lot more sense in a supernatural sense, but not so much as a playable bloodline. As their name suggests, they're flagellants and self-punishers who push their bodies as far as they can in an attempt to cleanse themselves of sin. As NPCs, they're kinda one-note; as players, they're going to require a lot of work to make them seem something other than drama queens.
The Osites: I love the concept of these guys, because the Cappadocians were one of my favorite clans from the original Vampire game. They're pretty much the Cappadocians reborn, studying people at the moment of their death; intellectual, quiet and spiritual. They have to drop a point of Vitae to be able to use Disciplines during a scene, and their blood isn't as efficient at healing damage. But their discipline, Memento Mori, more than makes up for it – as a matter of fact, I'd say that it's overpowered.
Specifically, Memento Mori does a lot of really, really useful stuff. The first level, Twilight SIght, lets you see ghosts even if they're invisible, making them talented exorcists. The second, Consult with the Dead, allows you to ask questions of dead bodies, which makes them excellent private detectives. Brush of Death is where it starts getting nuts; not only do you do aggravated damage with a successful unarmed combat attack, you also force them to lose a Willpower point on a successful opposed roll; that makes them combat monsters. It gets worse. Blood From Bone allows you to steal skills from a single dead body and add them to your own for a single roll, which makes them talented generalists; even worse, on an exceptional success, they gain a point of Vitae from it. Weirdly enough, Blood from Bone's description seems to describe it entirely as ripping Vitae from dead bodies, while the rules description describes it as pulling skills from the dead, with extra Vitae being a fortunate side effect. Pumping up your Resolve and Investigation means that you can reliably drain dead bodies; work in a morgue, and you've got a constant, guilt-free source of Vitae, as well as access to whatever temporary skill boost you might want. (You can only steal one skill at a time, but the book seems to suggest that you can grab as many dice as the corpse had. Drain a doctor, pick up five dots of Medicine; grab a boxer, you've got five dots of Brawl.)
Finally, Necrosis allows you to roll Intelligence + Medicine + Memento Mori, minus your target's Stamina, with every success granting a point of lethal damage or a lost Vitae point. They don't even have to touch their victim, just see him. So – let's see, Intelligence 3, Medicine 4, Memento Mori 5 – let's say an average level of Stamina 3...you'd be rolling nine dice, with each success doing a point of lethal damage. All that it costs is a Willpower point. So, besides the skill-boosting, corpse-questioning, free Vitae and ghost-spotting, the Osites can also fire invisible lightning bolts at a glance that can kill the living shit out of anything they see.
There is no way that a single discipline should be this powerful. On top of that, the Osites are largely supposed to be spiritual scholars, not combat monsters, and their discipline seems to make them everything but quiet scholars of death. I mean, Jesus Christ.
Scourge is the discipline of the Mortifiers, allowing you to regain Willpower in exchange for self-flagellation, transfer wound penalties to other vampires, automatically ignore wound penalties at all times, boost other people's wound penalties and, at the highest level, inflicting huge dice penalties by transferring a Mortifier's pain onto his target.
There's also a discipline called Nahdad, which gives wandering vampires – the Nephehsim – various abilities that makes it a lot easier for them to wander without having to worry about the sun ashing. They're actually pretty useful – you only get three powers, and they only improve by one dice with each level, but they allow you to do stuff like finding a haven on short notice, allowing feeding on animals without regard to blood potency and so forth.
Theban Sorcery: I have never understood why vampires are able to do magic. It just seems...wrong, like werewolves who can fly, or ghosts who gain the supernatural ability to play the ukelele really, really well. Theban Sorcery is supposed to be the product of various angelic visitations, found in odd locations – remember how you'll get people who claim they see Jesus in a taco? The Lancea Sanctum finds rituals all over the place; on the sides of chapels, in the shattered windshield of a car, in the ice of a frozen pond, etched into a skull and so forth. No rituals in a taco yet, but I'm still holding out hope. (Despite the joke, I think that it's kind of keen – you don't develop it by yourself, it's revealed to you in the oddest spots, usually in locations where it's in danger of being destroyed. A lot of good opportunities for adventures there.)
The rituas are pretty outre. For instance, Hauberk of Blood uses vitae as armor, blocking wounds for the same vitae cost as healing them – but somebody else can do it to you, so you don't have to burn your own vitae on it. Crown of Thorns temporarily forces spikes of bone from the target's forehead; Bird of Sin creates a spectral bird to attack a target; Blood Fire causes fires to spurt from a vampire's wounds, backlashing on anybody who launches a close-combat attack. They're actually quite interesting, covering various supernatural effects that would be too difficult to represent with regular Disciplines.
At the higher end, you're blotting out the sun, or inflicting supernatural damage based on the target's sins – yell “Murderers!” and everybody who's a murderer catches on fire if they don't resist. (Weirdly enough, this power costs Humanity, which seems to trivialize it – it's not just a resource to be spent, it's a function of your character's personality. I suppose they gotta charge high for the power.) I'm also confused as to why the example cites a Sanctified Bishop using it on three vampires in a hotel room – the example depicts them taking less damage than they would have if the Bishop had just had his goons bust in and beat them up with baseball bats. That kind of power demands to be used on a crowd, you know?
Imprecation of Sin seems like the kind of power that I was looking for earlier, imbuing a building with a particular sin, which in turn encourages all the humans within that building to commit that sin. But it doesn't make sense; the Lancea Sanctum wants to make life a living hell for humans so that they'll go to Heaven, not so that they'll fall into sin and damn themselves. The book describes the purpose of the ritual as “testing” the will of the faithful, but the ritual itself seems perfect for Belial's Brood, rather than the Lancea Sanctum.
The art throughout the book isn't bad, but nothing particularly stands out.
Overall, it's a book that's not really worth your time. If you're running a Lancea Sanctum game, you'd be better off just grabbing A Hunger Like Fire and The Marriage of Virtue and Viciousness – and World of Darkness: Chicago, for the description of Solomon Birch and his church – and deriving something from those.
-Darren MacLennan
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