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Prologue: Color Blind is a story about a couple of hunters’ encounter with the mage known as Purple. This is the same Purple that Bookworm55 befriends in previous sourcebooks. My one gripe with this story is we are yet again introduced to a slavering psycho of the Avenger creed. Maybe it’s me but a majority of Hunter fiction that I have read seems to draw a very fine line between an Avenger and a Wayward. Or perhaps Deborah in this story is supposed to be a Wayward?
Chapters 1 & 4: Is a story about a hunter that encounters a young boy who is just beginning to Awaken as a mage and how the hunter becomes convinced that the boy has recently become Imbued instead. I found this story to be interesting and well written and even though the hunter is well intentioned (Redeemer) he ends up causing much more harm than good as well as causing hunters to become investigated by a particular group of mages in Chapter 4. During the later chapter one of the mages that encountered the hunter in Chapter 1 tries to find out more about hunters and begins to piece things together through various e-mails from other mages. We get more news about famous (infamous?) hunters as a mage relates an encounter with God45 and Peleus in Boston where several mages were slaughtered. We also get an idea of what hunter-net’s defenses are like especially to those mages who excel at computer-based magic.
Chapter 2 & 5: This story arc bugged me for several reasons. Unlike the previous this story is split in half without any change of perspective and the intermission certainly didn’t help the pacing. The majority of character development is spent on the individual hunters who are all portrayed through journal entries, hunter-net posts, or audiotape memos. The problem I had was never sympathizing with any of the characters for various reasons and the main point of the story seems to be lost. My biggest gripe is the section with one hunter who is gay (Boi341) and has a crush on another (Soldier91) that then causes a personality conflict with a third hunter because he uses the edge that heals through kissing someone. What we want to see is how these hunters feel about mages and their powers and how they are perceived in the conflict with them. I am still uncertain if the mages in this story are a group of Marauders or something else. This is undoubtedly the weakest part of the book.
Chapter 3 & 6: The third story was also quite good. The first part of the story details the encounter between a hunter and a couple of Technocracy mages. It is easy to identify with this hunter who comes to the aid of the young attractive female mage and then tries to help her out of a very bad situation. The second part of the story is from the viewpoint of the Technocratic mage who is sent to clean up the entire mess and another hunter who was pretending to help the first hunter while trying to kill the female mage. Altogether a very interesting story with one weak spot. Once again we have another slavering psychotic Avenger who just happens to also be a reverse racist and Native American. I am hoping at some point White Wolf gets away from trying to represent every last percent of the minority/political group pie as a hunter.
Chapter 7: The meat and potatoes of the book resides in the last chapter. This is by far the best rules section out of all the enemy books yet put out by White Wolf for Hunter. The first section details a mages Awakening and how a hunter using second sight and certain edges such as Discern and Witness might perceive such a mage. The sections on the various factions of mages seemed to have one glaring omission in my opinion. That omission would be the Nephandi and Infernalists, which to me would be perfect adversaries for a hunter group. This fact is acerbated by the gray box Mages as Monsters section that tells the Storyteller to go ahead and make mages Pure Evil if that’s what they want in their game. Even a blurb on the Book of Madness for Mage: The Ascension could have put this criticism to rest but hey I didn’t develop the book. I would have also liked a little extra information on how hedge magicians are different than True Mages. The rules section, which details the mages different abilities and specific spells they might use on hunters, is excellent. We also get an explanation of Bookworm55’s ability to see Purple’s aura with the Illuminate edge as well as the various colors other mages might have based on their highest-ranking magical sphere.
The artwork is a mixed bag; the art in the rules section particularly is really uncomplimentary to the rest of the book. The beginning chapter full page pictures seemed too dark, almost as if they weren’t meant to be grayscale and the front cover picture looked like it was meant to be black and white and not colored over very well.
All in all I would highly recommend this book to any Hunter storyteller that wants to use warlocks in their stories. Especially those who don’t already own Mage: The Ascension.
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