Review of Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners

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In Short

Featuring over twenty detailed NPCs, several scene setups, and a variety of plot hooks, Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners sets out to provide the Storyteller with plenty of material for easy inclusion in any Chronicle. While built with Requiem in mind, the rules addendum at the back does make it work well enough with other lines though for thematic reasons it isn’t necessarily a good fit. The presentation is very pretty, and there are plenty of ideas to work with here, but the bottom line is that many of these entries fail to excite.

The Good: With so many entries every reader is sure to find a few they like that fit well into the current Chronicle. The exceptionally high production standards are pretty to look at.

The Bad: Many of the NPCs just aren’t very interesting.

The Physical Thing

At $32.99 this 160 page full color hardcover showcases excellent production values. The artwork and general presentation are very atmospheric, adding a certain lonely horror feel to the work. As far as enjoying a work for being pretty goes, you can’t beat the combination found here. It is worth noting, however, that the production values feel a little wasted on a book of NPCs most folk are unlikely to make heavy use of.

Under the Cover

Immortal Sinners is neatly divided into three sections that each focus on a different type of legendary NPC. First we receive the standard sorts of legends that can be incorporated into any community. Next a variety of vampires on the wrong side of the undead law are provided to serve as antagonists, rebels, and examples of how much fun unlife can be outside of the rules of society. Finally, ancient vampires are included for all the fun reasons you might imagine. Let’s explore each of these in turn, but first some general thoughts.

I find Immortal Sinners to be a little uninspired. Most of the NPCs here just don’t interest me and I can’t see myself using more than one or two in any Chronicle. While the book is very pretty, I consider it to be far less functional than I want out of a book that will be read once and, at most, periodically consulted during a Chronicle for inspiration. That doesn’t mean they won’t interest you, dear reader, and to help you decide whether they will or not I’m going to present a few entries to give you a better idea of where I’m coming from. The bottom line is that there are a lot of characters here and you’re sure to use some of it, but the question remains how much and whether that’s worth picking Immortal Sinners up. With that in mind, let’s turn to one of my favorite entries: an underwater dwelling vampire.

Billy Reed has it all figured out. After being stuck with a sire who embraced him outside the rules and banished from all the feeding grounds, he quickly decided to say fuck all to vampire society and carve out his own piece of territory. Unable to deal with the Sheriff head on, Billy took to the water and began living where none could find him. With several dens hidden away, landmarks only he can identify, and various physical adaptations to aid in swimming, Billy has a territory he can disappear back into at will and remains a constant thorn in the local Prince’s side.

I like Billy because I feel like there are few underwater dwelling vampires presented in various vampire fiction. While it is seen on occasion, the entry on Billy does a great job of spelling out how much of a pain in the ass a single vampire really good at living underwater can be to the local community. The mechanical change to Protean 3 – gaining a bonus to Swimming instead of Climbing – is elegant but a great idea for characters trying to do something similar.

While Billy shows a well presented but simple idea uncommonly seen, the same isn’t the case for Solomon Birch. Solomon had a rough life and rougher initial unlife before joining the Sanctified and rising through the ranks. His speeches do an excellent job of expanding the flock, and he has become quite the influential street preacher. By pushing at the city to create problems only faith in God can solve his power base continues to expand. Birch’s big secret? He’s not so sure God exists.

I have a little bit of trouble with Birch because I don’t feel like the entry provides anything interesting that a Storyteller couldn’t easily come up with by simply providing a Lancea Sanctum NPC for the group to interact with. He has some interesting potential for drama considering how manipulative he is, but there just isn’t enough here to really make this character stand out. Still, if you need a Sanctum member on the fly then you can do worse than including the clever Solomon Birch.

While boasting fewer NPCs, the second section works a little better for me due to its dedication to outlaw vampires. In particular, Charles and Charlene Greengrass offer a delicious vampiric version of Bonnie and Clyde. Embraced on their (independent) wedding days and living through hell until they found one another, when these two vampires finally came together they hit it off big time. After a new wedding they set out for murder and mayhem. Both serial killers, they normally target couples on their honeymoons but gleefully enjoy other targets as well.

I like this pair a lot because of how unique they are. As far as NPCs go, the pair will be memorable in any game and thanks to their distance from normal vampire society they work very well in non-vampire games. The new devotion introduced here, Bloody Tandem, provides unique benefits to the pair that enable them to be far more deadly while working together. I can easily see myself using this group in almost any Chronicle where I want a dangerous mystery surrounding serial deaths of newlyweds.

With the Greengrass pair offering bloody carnage, it’s worth pointing out that most of the characters introduced here are far more subtle. Take, for example, Jacob Skinner the dark secret of the Ordo Dracul. Jacob began abducting people, embracing them, and then performing experiments on them all without permission. By the time he was found out he had already embraced and killed a great many people, and so he was sentenced to a Blood Hunt. The Dragons secretly took him away and, of course, aided him in furthering his research.

I like Skinner in that I think he’s a good example of what a member of Ordo Dracul is likely to do while uncovering a new Coil or otherwise expanding their knowledge of an aspect of vampirism. As a character, however, he’s extremely bland and there’s little of interest here beyond the base idea of a Dragon hidden away to conduct grisly research in private. As with Solomon Birch, most Storytellers will create more inventive characters just by imagining a member of this Covenant performing research. What makes the entry even weaker is that it is immediately followed by another entry that is far too similar.

The ancient vampires included here have no problem with being too similar. Each one is unique and several simply break setting rules. The one I’m most likely to use in a game is the Butcher Worm, a strangely transformed vampire that now resembles something more like a fat muscular giant worm with rows of razor sharp teeth. He is the current state of a vampire who went through a strange transformation over the years, and he’s far more monster than vampire now. Set up as the Prince of the downtrodden, the Butcher Worm actually works with the Prince of the city in order to increase the Prince’s control by providing those who don’t or won’t follow with a sympathetic leader.

I like the Butcher Worm well enough as an oddity and a neat way for the Prince to exert additional control over the city. As with the other ancient vampires here, however, I don’t find that he fits terribly well. The Devotions included are doing somersaults to make a vampire into a giant worm, and beyond his appearance there’s very little of interest to the character here. For all of these entries more focus on using them in game and more attention to the characterization and less on forcing something non-vampiric into the vampire mold could have made them stronger.

My Take

At best, I may use a few of these in a Chronicle but I find most of the entries to either be too bland or just too uninteresting to make use of. I feel like most Storytellers could come up with better material than what’s here with just a minimum of work, which prevents this from being a resource I can recommend. That said, if you feel a strong time constraint and want a variety of different NPCs to include in your World of Darkness Chronicle then there is plenty of material here to work with. Over 20 characters are included, some with suggested scenes, and the rules summary makes it very easy to transport them to a non-Requiem game. Just don’t go into the product expecting to find characters that will drive your creative energies forward.