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Nomads is a very straightforward book, consisting of ideas for how Vampire: the Requiem characters will fare if they hit the road and go travelling instead of staying close to fixed havens.
It begins with the usual in-character fiction, where I almost found a reason to downgrade the Style rating--it's the story of a travelling vampire rock band, and it's done around a variety of concert posters and the like, causing readability to suffer a bit. I'm not usually a big fan of these fiction pieces, but this one piqued my interest enough for me to spend some time thinking about it.
Chapter One, "the call of the road," has a brief discussion of reasons to go traveling and then an extended section on how the different clans and covenants go on the road, including things such as how each clan's favored Disciplines make them well-suited for certain roles and why particular covenants would be more or less likely to travel. Most of this is just loose discussion, but it can provoke ideas if, for example, someone wants a good reason for their Ordo Dracul Mekhet to hit the road. The Invictus and Lancea Sanctum get some official setting material here, as these two covenants are the most likely to send vampires from one place to another on official business, and they have official protocols for doing so.
Chapter Two, "those who wander," covers ideas for nomadic characters and, to a lesser extent, chronicles. What would be required mechanically and storywise for the various sorts of characters is discussed, and the chapter wraps up with general thoughts on how the characters will interact with each other--in both functional and dysfunctional ways.
Chapter Three, "surviving in the wild," covers practical issues of the nomad life: finding shelter and food, interactions with sedentary vampires, dealing with different sorts of environments, and how the nomadic lifestyle can cause additional wear and tear on a character's sanity. This chapter also includes the book's main crunch: new rituals and devotions well-suited to the traveling life. Many of these--nearly all, really--would be of use to a city-based vampire as well, so even if nothing else were to be mined for a more traditional campaign, these could.
Chapter Four, "notable nomads," is a typical collection of NPCs. This chapter shone in my estimation; while I often regard such collections with apathy, a few of these actually got me thinking about how I could use them in the games I'm actually likely to run.
The appendix, "route 666," is a sample nomad adventure. It's clearly designed to be of most use to the person who buys all of the White Wolf products, as it consists of a road trip from one published setting (New Orleans) to another (Chicago). That said, there's essentially no local color involved, so it would be extremely easy to transplant it elsewhere. It feels a little odd here in that it doesn't use any of the really interesting aspects of nomad life touched on in the rest of the book--but maybe that's the point: it's an adventure that gets the most basic aspects of this life (you're away from fixed resources, and must deal with finding shelter and food on short notice, but you've always got the option to run away) in play, so that if the players like it, you can build on it, but you don't hit them with too much at once.
Overall, the book contains the result of a fair amount of basic thought about nomadic unlife. You may disagree with some of the conclusions, or feel that you could come up with the same on your own, but if you want to see someone else's thoughts or think you don't have the time to cover all the bases, it could be very useful.
By the Rospach test ("Does this book make me want to run/play such a game?"), the book gets a very slight positive. I'm not likely to play or run any Vampire game at the moment, but if I did, I'd at least consider a nomad game somewhat more than I did before reading the book.
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