[OSSR]Ghouls: Fatal Addiction

[OgreBattle]

Since WW goes for anything goes punk, are there any undead associated with abortion. Can an abortion produce a ghost? Can a fetus be ghouled?

[Prak]

Can a fetus be ghouled?

Conceivably... maybe? If you gave a pregnant woman vampire blood, I would say there should be some non-zero chance of the blood affecting the fetus as well. Come to think of it, it should be possible--if highly impractical--to embrace a fetus. I now have visions of vampires with long straws and fetal blood sampling kits...and a calculator and data to find out when you can consider a fetus to have "ingested" what it's mother ate.

I don't know if there are any abortion based undead, but again, conceivably, sure. I could see it being a spirit thing rather than an undead, but I don't know.

Edit: Ok, according to my VtM playing friend, no, you can't ghoul a fetus, because it is in constant contact with the mother's blood stream, and so it's first drink never really ends, until the mother's blood bond is broken, which breaks the fetus' bond as well. I still think it's conceivably doable, by bonding the mother, then cutting off circulation between mother and fetus, re-initiating circulation, cutting it off again and reinitiating, but you would really need an extremely good reason to want a ghouled fetus to go through that amount of trouble. (except that apparently drinks have to be 24 hours apart) Maybe vicissitude could help, but you're still at the "you might as well just wait for the infant to be born" because even your plan to start an ultimate baby fighting league doesn't actually gain anything from ghouling a fetus.

[norms29]

Can a fetus be ghouled?

I don't have access to the books from my 'white wolf phase' but I remember a line in 'Time of Thin Blood' (which, admittedly, came out two years and a new edition of the core book after Gouls: Fatal Addiction) wherein we are told it's apparently "common knowledge" in the Camarilla that ghouling a Pregnant woman immediately causes a miscarriage, and they still can't figure out how the Sabbat got around that problem when they created their families of Hereditary Ghouls.

[hyzmarca]

Edit: Ok, according to my VtM playing friend, no, you can't ghoul a fetus, because it is in constant contact with the mother's blood stream, and so it's first drink never really ends, until the mother's blood bond is broken, which breaks the fetus' bond as well. I still think it's conceivably doable, by bonding the mother, then cutting off circulation between mother and fetus, re-initiating circulation, cutting it off again and reinitiating, but you would really need an extremely good reason to want a ghouled fetus to go through that amount of trouble. (except that apparently drinks have to be 24 hours apart) Maybe vicissitude could help, but you're still at the "you might as well just wait for the infant to be born" because even your plan to start an ultimate baby fighting league doesn't actually gain anything from ghouling a fetus.

Fetus and mother do not share a blood supply. That would be fatal to both of them in many cases, since there is no guarantee they'll have the same blood type. The placenta allows oxygen and nutrients to pass from mother to child without and direct contract between their blood supplies. If there is any mingling of their blood something has gone terribly wrong.

[TheFlatline]

Sort of. You get a revenant that way after a long time. Which makes no sense because revenants age to a certain point and then stop, when they should stop at the latest at birth.

This is also the kind of shit that gives me a headache in White Wolf games, because inevitably there's some sick fuck out there who wants a ghoul fetus or to play a ghoul fetus and hours of game time are pissed away examining the metaphysical nature of feeding vampiric blood to a living creature.

On a related note but closer back to the subject, Nosferatu frequently ghoul entire packs of vermin by keeping a pool of their blood nearby for the ghouled rats and centipedes and cockroaches and shit to drink out of. It's why one of the dots of animalism if memory serves is to communicate with animals.

Though that sets up another fucked up precedent. Depending on where you read it and when you read it, Vampire blood either can be stored in a cup or has to be drank/sucked directly from the vampire's body to have any supernatural properties. I believe in core revised they blatantly state that once it leaves the vampire's body it reverts back to normal, non mystical blood. But then the Sabbat guide comes out and the Vinculum involves everyone bleeding into a cup so the entire pack is blood bound to each other. And the Nos/vermin thing. And a bunch of other official contradictory bullshit.

[Ancient History]

Ghouls: Fatal Addition: Most of the book: Chapter 2: Masters and Servants?

The theme song to this chapter is I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges


Some ghouls are treated better than others.

FrankT:

Clocking in at 31 pages, the Masters and Servants chapter is considerably longer than all the others. It also is pretty dense with text and has less white space and bullshit than the other chapters. It certainly has almost all of the content of the chapter – over fifteen thousand words and almost all of it is topical. This is the chapter that actually talks about how Ghouls are treated and what they can expect to accomplish in the various cults and factions of the vampire world. And there are a fucking lot of factions in the vampire world. This chapter does its level best to cover all of the factions, and I'd say it gets coverage out to about 80%. No mentions of the True Hand, or Daughters of Cacophony, but you get all the major independent clans and the Camarilla and Sabbat. You even get little snippets about the Anarchs and Inconnu.

Honestly, if you wanted to give someone a rundown of what the world of Vampire: the Masquerade was about, you could do worse than having them read this chapter. I'm really not sure you could do any better. A ghoul's eye view of the different factions is about as good a viewpoint as you're going to get, and it covers all the factions people really care about.

AncientH:

We've mentioned this before, but Vampire had a shitload of factions and subfactions and bloodlines. Aside from the gross political divisions (Sabbat, Camarilla, Independents), and minor political divisions (Oreada League, True Black Hand, Icconnu, etc.), you had 13 Clans, and each clan could have its own internal divisions and bloodlines, and antitribu, and then you had "clans" and bloodlines that weren't tied to any of the major 13 clans, and then there were revenant families that were like little bloodlines...

So for example, the Brujah were maybe the simplest clan, and they were still split into the Brujah, the True Brujah (bloodline), and the Brujah antitribu, and that's before you bring in the Mafia sourcebook. The Followers of Set had the Serpents of the Light (antitribu/bloodline) and kinda-sorta the Children of Osiris. The Tremere were supposed to be the 13th clan because they fucking ate the Salubri, but then you had the Salubri split into healer, warrior, and middle paths in the Dark Ages, the modern nights saw the Salubri (healers) and the Salubri antitribu (warriors) and the fucking Wu Zao hanging out in Asia, and no one was quite sure where the Baali fit into the picture.

It gets silly because I'm pretty sure there were more people playing Vampires than there were supposed to be vampires in the entire World of Darkness at any one time...but I digress. The point is that Clans and whatnot was supposed to be political as well as supernatural, to help determine your character identity and powers and affiliation all at one go. And pretty much everybody that could use ghouls did use ghouls, because if nothing else they needed the numbers.

FrankT:

The actual chapter begins with an in-character diatribe about life as a ghoul that is again typed up onto sheets of paper and then pasted in onto the pages at angles. It looks like ass and is hard to read. It wasn't a good typographical stunt the first time they did it in the book, and it didn't get any better the second time. At least this time the mini-page at the front of the chapter is a mini-letter that is a stand-alone in-character introduction for the rest of the piece (which is a transcript of a person listening to a tape recording). So at least the short page length of the first typewritten page isn't completely out of place. I would say that when your book has a fictional scrapbooking into it of a fictional letter containing a fictional transcript of a fictional recording of a fictional meeting of someone playing a fictional recording of someone repeating a set of fictional instructions, that perhaps the rabbit hole has already gone unnecessarily deep. But at least it's consistently voiced.

AncientH:

The characters dealing with these documents are Beckett and Lucita.




These two, along with the Malkavian Anatole, were supposed to be a big deal in late-era V:tM, as the trio was working to figure out all this end-times stuff and showed up/starred in various video games, novels, and associated merchandise. Ghost alone knows why, because they're all terrible MC-penis characters.

The assumption of the tape is that it's an introduction to a "free" ghoul to an association of other "free" ghouls, who band together for mutual support and hunting vampires to drink their blood. It doesn't really help that this is like a bunch of junkies in Miami joining forces to go raid the latest cocaine delivery from Colombia. Also, the guy narrating the tape is an asshole.

FrankT:

The claim that the Camarilla and Sabbat are equally bad really doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Hell, the Sabbat doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Like, not even a little bit. The Sabbat are bad. They are every single bad thing the authors could think of, rolled into one. They are inhuman monsters having a rampaging party, are unconcerned with hiding themselves from mortals and openly flaunt their power – yet they have somehow managed to be a secret Christian religious cult that no humans know about. They live like animals without paying any reverence to human societies, yet somehow manage to own things (note: ownership is a social contract enforced by human society and has no meaning apart from that). It's all crazy, all the way down.

When this chapter talks about the Camarilla and the Sabbat, the weasel words come out hard and fast. The opening section refers to them as “drunken frat boys” whose political ideals “don't mean shit” because they “don't even need an excuse to feed you to german shepherds” and “diplomacy is all but useless.” And yet, they feel compelled to claim that neither organization (Camarilla or Sabbat) is better. The fuck? What the..? You can't claim that two factions are equally bad if one faction has some positive and some negative traits and the other has only negative traits. It just doesn't fucking work.

The big problem here is that in the original writeup, the Sabbat were just Saturday morning cartoon villains. They did bad stuff and were bad people and had a setup that didn't make a lick of sense because they were the villains and who cared? The only thing that was really weird about the whole thing was how the Sabbat actually controlled all the parts of North America that anyone cared about, which is why Vampire: the Masquerade was asking you to give a shit about places that the authors happened to care about (Atlanta, Chicago, Miami), while ignoring places that were objectively much more important (like New York and Los Angeles). Seriously: nine major US Camarilla cities, and only one of the top three cities in the US were on that list.

AncientH:

We like to kvetch, but while this is the longest chapter at 31 pages, it's actually fairly quick to the point. The set-up for the rundown on the clans is brief and the clan entries themselves don't feel bloated. So hang on, we're just going to dive into it.

There's actually a joke here I want to highlight:

Somebody once told me the Followers of Set were a big fat joke, a cult of bloodsuckers worshiping some dead god who's got PBS picking at his bones.

I can't help but think they mean this.

Jokes aside, the Followers of Set were the silliest of the LOL!Evil clans. The Tzimsce and Lasombra both had cool powers and played to a particular aesthetic; the Followers of Set just had a weird version of Protean (no really, they confirmed that at one point!) and some Egyptian flavortext. Various efforts to make them bigger and scarier just...sortof...didn't work. I think the Tzimsce took all the real fun, because they had a cooler power and a cooler version of blood magic, and Queen of the Damned was the worst of the original Anne Rice vampire novels anyway. The ghoul approach to the Setites didn't help, since their evil plan sounds a lot like welfare as imagined by Republicans. No, seriously, the big scary thing is that the Followers of Set are helping the poor, and that this gives them a tremendous base of loyal voters servitors.

FrankT:

This chapter covers each group it covers three times. The first time in its subjective assessment by a guy who is a member of an independent ghoul faction who hunt vampires for their blood, the second from an omniscient perspective close to ghouls, and the third from an omniscient perspective close to the vampires who have ghouls: called “domitors” in this book. It's a reasonably effective way to get across information, actually. As I said earlier, this is actually probably the best set of descriptions of what the fuck the different factions are about that White Wolf ever made. For some of the groups, that's kind of faint praise – the number of groups that make a lick of sense in Vampire can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. And there are a fuck tonne of groups in Vampire.

By the way, I don't recall the word “domitor” appearing before this book. The internet isn't much help on this, and Vampire had a crap tonne of specialized lingo that was almost never used. The original Vampire: the Masquerade has a fuck tonne of weird bullshit words coined in it, some of which went on to be important and some of which got forgotten. While “Justicar” and “Primogen” certainly caught on, I don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to a sectless Vampire as “Autarkis.” The Inconnu were originally going to be the setting's big reveal, but Rein*Hagen left the company and the country to go write propaganda for the country of Georgia before anything actually got done with that plotline. It was left dangling for a few more years, but no one did anything with it until the line got shuttered. Point is: no one gave a shit about the word “domitor” before this book used it about five hundred times, and I actually can't remember if it was ever used at all before hand.

AncientH:

Hell, I can't remember if it was ever used afterwards.

The Gangrel are given a pass, which is sad because really this is where they should have talked about Kinfolk. I mean, they already talked about how Kinfolk are allergic to vitae and thus make crap ghouls, but everybody ignored that before and after this book. Hell, the best Giovanni minor family were the Dunsirn, Scottish banker-cannibals and Werewolf kinfolk.

Speaking of the Giovanni, they get the short stick from the ghoul's-eye view. Which is understandable, but kind of sad. I like the idea of a runaway Giovanni ghoul who just can't take it anymore.

FrankT:

The Sabbat had a lot of fucking clans in it. Nominally, they invited various people who were nominally from pretty much every clan, including some clans that got retconned out of existence, and some additional made up versions of normal clans. It was weird. But when people say “Sabbat Clans” they mostly mean two: the Tzimisce and the Lasombra.

Each of those little splotches is a Sabbat clan symbol. Yes. Really. It's not even complete.

The Tzimisce were created because the original 7 clans simply weren't Dracula enough, and also the form changing powers of Protean were frankly pretty fucking bullshit. In the original writeup, there were ten powers and seven clans, and the various “Dracula powers” and themes were split up between them. Dracula's alliance with Gypsies and ability to turn into a bat and a cloud of mist was given to the Gangrel, while Dracula's ability to dominate minds and change the weather was given to the Tremere, and so on. The problem of course is that this meant that you couldn't actually make a satisfying Dracula (not that it wasn't tried several times). And there was the secondary problem that the Gangrel were basically shit fuckers who eat shit because their core ability to transform was actually incredibly lame. Beast form and mist form were levels 4 and 5 of that fucking discipline, and starting characters are cockblocked at three. So you couldn't actually turn into mist or even into a fucking bat, and everyone was sad. So the Tzimisce came out, and they were more eastern european than you were and had their own transformation powers that let you actually transform shit from level 1. Because god damnit, no one signed up for “transformation powers” to spend the entire game limited to turning their fucking eyes red. Also, the Gangrel were determined to be “not Gypsy enough” and the Ravnos happened. Anyway, the Tzimisce transformation power is called “vicissitude” and allows you to craft flesh like it was playdoh.


The Vozhd are multiple ghouls patched together by the Tzimisce.

While I could certainly see where they were coming from here, if you were going to make the world of darkness from scratch, these are one of the first messes you'd clean up.

AncientH:

It gets worse: to work in the allergy to garlic, White Wolf actually specifically created a revenant family for Dracula with that weakness, and then told everyone it was extinct. Because fuck you for wanting to play Dracula.

Actually, I like the fact that the Tzimisce get the szlachta and vozhd; they really sell it. The Gangrel, Toreador, and Ventrue never get anything interesting, but the Tzimisce get Vicissitude (except the Old Clan Tzimisce) and Koldunic Sorcery (so they can feud with the Tremere) and they use those to make war ghouls and living books and stuff. It's a bit unfair, but they are cool compared to some of the more boring villain-protagonists of the setting, because at least you can play with posthuman ideas.

Some younger Tzimisce have been exploring new ways to create vozhd, ones that would make the creatures easier to control; however, fledgling attempts to implant computer microchips into lobotomized ghouls before melding them together have caused more chaos than good.

The ghouls-eye view of Lasombra is that they mostly don't use ghouls. Which is boring. Which is a problem for most of these entries, because either the writer couldn't think of anything or...well, they couldn't think of anything, because clan after clan is like "meh, doesn't use ghouls much." You'd think they'd make a thing about Ravnos ghouling gypsies or nomadic types. I mean, wouldn't it make sense if they came into town, ghouled some local to get the low down, then disappeared into the night, leaving a blood junkie behind?


Tzimisce ghouls pose for a photograph.

FrankT:

For independents, we get what I would call the “major” independent factions. You don't get the Samedi (who are the secret bastard byblows of a Turkish necromancer clan that were left behind in Haiti when their parent clan got eaten by a criminal syndicate family of Italian sorcerers), but you do get the Giovanni (the Italian mobster/necromancer/cannibals that ate the aforementioned Turkish necromancers).



Anyway, there really isn't much that can be done with the Ravnos or the Assamites. They are racist caricatures, and that's all they will ever be. The Ravnos are Gypsies, who were made because the Gangrel just weren't Gypsy enough. As Gypsies, they have the power to create illusions and also steal shit and are untrustworthy. It's not as bad as, say, World of Darkness: Gypsies (which came out in 1994), but it's pretty bad. The Assamites are a bunch of Middle Eastern men who are deeply religious, extremely sexist, and spend all their time killing for money. Their clan drawback is that they have a curse on them that makes it harder to constantly murder people for money, but they also have a workaround because it is so fucking important to murder people. For money. You could probably figure out a way to more offensively portray Semitic people,
but I doubt many people outside of Stormfront have given it much thought.

You could certainly argue that the same applies to the Giovanni and the Followers of Set. After all, the Setites are followers of the ancient Egyptian religion of Set and are “snake cultists.” Real followers of Set were not and are not snake cultists. Set is a serpent god in fucking Conan the Barbarian, which is where all of Rein*Hagen's lore of North African comparative religion apparently comes from. The Giovanni, meanwhile, are Italians. They are a “family” and also a sect of organized crime. You godda problem widdat? Yet somehow, it works OK. It helps that neither Italians nor Polytheistic Demotics are particularly oppressed people in this day and age. Meanwhile, a Roma woman was sterilized without her consent in Slovakia in 2011. The government of Ireland kidnapped a Roma woman's baby because they suspected her of baby stealing for no reason in 2013. Abuse of Roma people is a real thing that really happens, and perpetuating racist stereotypes of them is a pretty big deal. A big deal in the way that making lame Goodfellas references about Italians simply isn't.

AncientH:

In general, the vampires-eye view of ghouls is more complete and useful. It still implies that different clan's vitae carries a sort of minor version of the clan curse, but the rules never fucking back that up, and no one really cares.

Tremere ghouls is something that I feel should have had more made of it. The thing is that they sort of infiltrate existing cults, secret societies, and religious orders and merge the ghouling bit into the rituals - which is really a throwback (or, throw-forward) to the Dark Ages blood cults a la Ashen Priest and The Cainite Heresy, which would have been an interesting connection, but is never made...possibly because those books hadn't been written yet.

FrankT:

There's a section about how ghouls get along with and are dicked over by vampires of different age categories. The Inconnu get their snippet in here, despite being nominally a sect and not actually a specific age or generation inherently. Because fuck you. The different categories of ages and blood generations are at times rather silly, but the categories were actually set up long before this book came out. So you talk about the Ancillae (who are defined by age in years) and you talk about the Methuselahs (who are defined by generations from Caine), and these two groups are supposed to have wildly different interests despite the fact that it is entirely plausible for a single character to be both things at the same time. But this nonsense was written in with the very first Vampire: the Masquerade book. There was this whole “Jyhad” deal that was supposed to be this big Anne Riceian war between generations of vampires that all happened covertly and blah blah blah. It never made any sense. The presentation here of different cultural attitudes towards ghouls from vampires who have different amounts of power and grew up in different social periods makes more sense than pretty much any writeup of the concept I've seen in any Vampire book. So... kudos.

There's also a hanging bit of ideas for ghoul roles. This is a page worth of character ideas for various ghoul concepts, split roughly into “vassals” and “independents.” It's not comprehensive, and frankly doesn't especially belong in this chapter. But it's germane to the topic of the book, and that's better than most of the chapters manage. So I'll allow it.

AncientH:

As mentioned, all the bloodlines are rare enough to miss being here entirely, which is a bit sad. It would have been nice to see...well, ghoul culture grown up a bit. A sample Tremere blood cult, a ghoul "brothel/speakeasy" that catered to Kindred on a "take a sip/leave a drip" principle, a ritual so necromancers could kind of "ghoul" ghosts with regular blood sacrifices, Gangrel running with a pack of ghoul wild dogs, that kind of thing. Part of the problem, I think, is that while they want you to have ghouls, they don't want you to have too many ghouls, because ghouls are allies. They're subserviant in the setting, not just in literally serving vampires but serving the concept of vampires as protagonists.

FrankT:

There's a whole page dedicated to fucked up blood sports that vampires force their ghouls to participate in for hilarity. It's basically mandingo fighting as seen in Django, but more imaginative because the masters have actual super powers. The Tzimisce apparently have timed matches where they use their flesh crafting to sculpt humans into hideous beasts and then get judged on the artistic merit of their life ruining torture of their blood addicted slaves. There's also some cheap shots against peoples' moral outrage about vampires being unable to get it up and resorting to S&M to sexually titillate their ghoul slaves.


We have a winner!

AncientH:

"Stuck in the Mortal Coil: The Human Side of the Ghoul Equation" is to remind us that ghouls are still mortal. While your immortal vampires don't have to eat or defecate or menstruate or shave, the ghouls do! What's more, they get horny.

Yes, there's an entire half-page or so here on how ghouls are sexual beings and vampires, sensual corpses that they might be, are generally not. (I say generally because they can spend a blood point to get erect, and the Cappadocians mastered a power to become mortal for a day and could boff anyone they liked, and there's a Mummy spell that lets women boff a corpse and get pregnant, and frankly the Giovanni indulge in quite a bit of necrophilia for magical purposes, I'm not even fucking kidding.) Which is what leads to statements like:

Ghouls who enjoy sadomasochistic activity tend to be the luckiest of the lot.

Yes, I could find you some appropriate description of hot/cold human-on-vampire action, but I'm not going to because just because I have read Anne Rice once doesn't mean I have to read it again.

Really? Oh very well, if you insist: NSFW link.

FrankT:

The last part of the chapter is a couple of “ghoul organizations” who each get a couple of paragraphs. The history isn't particularly deep, and the organizations aren't nearly as important to the World of Darkness as the rest of the material in this chapter – but it's on topic. Some of these guys tie in to other game lines, such as the ghoul gang that works for Pentex.


Basically the villains from Captain Planet, but with more monster dicks.

AncientH:

One of the problems with Vampire is that it didn't handle money well...or, really, at all. So while it was understood that someone was rich, it didn't give actual prices for things, so you ended up trading nebulous favors. Case in point, the "Sanguinaries" organization sells free ghouls vials of vampire blood, but not at a dollar price. Which is too bad, because honestly if you had anybody selling blood by the point, there's not a vampire that wouldn't want to get in on the action. The others are pretty weak - the Disciples of Set are some former Setite ghouls who set up their own cult (having conveniently never known of the Serpents of the Light), and the Sacrament of the Reborn is what we'd call a Cainite Heresy sect, if that was a thing in '92. And if the Cainite Heresy wasn't adopted by Hunter a little while after that, which was terrible.

There's more than a third of the pagecount left to go over, but I'd like to emphasize from a straight fluff-material standpoint, this is the end of the book. From here on it's pretty much all character creation and mechanics and stuff. It really is amazing how short these old White Wolf books were...and how they always left you wanting more.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 3: Character Creation

The theme song for this chapter is "The Man Behind the Star" by Sparky and the Deadbillys


You get to be any of those four humans.

The book is basically over at the end of chapter 2 (which a less White Wolfish typesetter might have labeled “chapter 3” or even “chapter 4”), but there are actually 3 more chapters to go.

FrankT:

At 17 pages, this is not a “short chapter' by the standards of this book. It is however, short on really new information. You could pretty much infer most of this chapter's contents from the character creation rules in the main Vampire book. I can't really fault the authors of the book because the way oWoD was structured you actually needed to do that. Technically, every game line was separate: Vampire: the Masquerade was not the same game as Werewolf: the Apocalypse. They had different cosmologies, different magic systems, and actually different game systems. The rules for skills and actions were written and rewritten in each game line. The exact dice rolled and required target numbers for kicking someone were different in the Vampire: the Masquerade book and the Werewolf: the Apocalypse book. People mostly disregarded that and tried to force all the gamelines into a single world. Heck, even this book has tie-ins to events happening in Werewolf. But the back end never actually supported that, and it was never the intention of the original writers of the setting that they were actually supposed to be writing a setting. Vampire was a gothic horror game, and Werewolf was a savage horror game that happened to reuse a bunch of mechanics and terminology. Like how originally Magic: the Gathering was supposed to be the first of a series of Deckmaster card games (in a series with Jyhad and Netrunner).



This was supposed to be the level of association between Vampire and Werewolf when they were first written.

So if you are thinking to yourself “Hey, couldn't you just make a human character and then make them be a Ghoul instead of a Vampire and call it done?” then the answer is basically yes. But there were complications. Technically, there were no rules for making a human character. At all. Each book had rules for making characters of the type the book was talking about. So Wraith let you make a Wraith, Vampire let you make a Vampire, Werewolf let you make a Werewolf. But there wasn't a generic character generation system that just output people that you could layer a supernatural template onto. It is the kind of thing the game needed, but it didn't exist.

AncientH:

Well, there was Hunter's Hunted. But the game lines quickly run into the GURPS problem, where your character gen for each game line (and each mini-game) might be balanced internally against all options (heh. Maybe.) but nothing was balanced against the other game lines. There was no real baseline. So an entry-level vampire and an entry-level ghoul aren't equivalent in terms of power and abilities, nor an entry-level mage and an entry-level sorcerer, nor an entry-level werewolf and an entry-level kinfolk. That doesn't mean you can't have a ghoul PC in a vampires game, only that the dynamic will be different - a ghoul's abilities might complement a vampire coterie, but it still won't be playing at quite the same level. So imagine dropping a ghoul into a werewolf game, and you'll see how things can quickly go to hell.

And when it comes to crossing material from different books...well, it gets weird and munchkinny real fast. Different splats had merits and flaws, some of which are blatantly better than others, and a lot of the early, poorly-edited books from the first edition of Vampire were still considered more or less canon, so you could do some really insane powergamey stuff if you wanted to. For example, there was a Mage book called Infernalism: Path of Screams with a 7-point merit called "Demonic Heritage" - one of your parents was possessed by a demon, and you were basically born with a free 4-point Demonic Investment (with some drawbacks, admittedly). Except that if you comb through the Vampire books for Demonic Investments, one that you could have gave you a point in a Discipline for each point of Investment. Which is how I started out with a D'habi revenant that couldn't read but had four dots in Dark Thaumaturgy and a free dot in Potence.


My character was basically born a better warlock than the starting Tremere.

That's without even trying too hard.

FrankT:

It's difficult to overstate how clunky Vampire's character generation is. You do it in a specific order, but many things you'll want to choose at early stages are largely dependent on your choices in later stages. It's sort of like a “lifepath” where you make decisions about heritage, then attributes, then skills, but then it's also not like a lifepath in that you have “backgrounds” that affect what you can buy in the previous steps that kick in at step 4. And then you have some extra points to buy things “freely” with that you apply in step five.

The Ghouls are distinguished by having less of everything. They get less attributes, less skills, less magic powers, and their powers cost more freebie points at character generation. There's no pretense of “game balance” here – Ghouls are simply less powerful as starting characters than the masters they serve. Spoiler alert: you're less powerful later because it costs more experience points to advance as well. You don't get different stuff, or some “separate but equal” horseshit, it just out and out tells you that you suck. Your numbers are lower, fucking deal with it.

AncientH:

Step one is the "Character Concept." You're already reading this book, so it's assumed you'll be ghoul, but what kind of ghoul? Playing a vozhd is sadly out of the question, so you're basically asked if you want to be a vassal ("bloodbitch"), an independent ("blood junkie"), or a revenant ("It's in the blood"). Yes there's more to it, like whether you want to be a cable repairwoman or bumfighter or the weird new kid at highschool, but the fundamental question is to ask whether you are someone's bitch already, and to what degree.

FrankT:

The Revenant Families in this book don't cover all the Revenant Families in the World of Darkness. All the families in Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand are just gone – completely retconned out of existence. The four, or perhaps three or five Revenant Families of the True Hand are simply ignored. As if that entire book was just a bad dream. But of course there are also various revenants that were introduced in other books that we don't see. There are no mentions of the D'habi who serve the Baali nor the Ducheski of the Tremere. Even some of the Tzimisce families aren't listed: no Oprinchniki in this book. Dark Ages had its own extra Revenant Families that didn't make it in here, although I think that was eventually explained as those family lines going extinct some time before the middle ages and the modern nights.


You probably didn't want to be in that family anyway.

AncientH:

As I mentioned, revenant families quickly turned into minor bloodlines, most of them full of weirdness and bullshit, and it's the days before wikis were a thing so nobody kept this shit up on a spreadsheet - you'd have fansites and maybe somebody's scrapbook at White Wolf HQ, if they fucking bothered which I doubt. I mean hell, look at the web on White Wolf material today and with two active wikis and a shitload of sites that basically pirate all the information from all the books, they still don't have a single comprehensive guide to the World of Darkness.

This being White Wolf, each "choice" (Vassal, Independent, Revenant) is given a two-page layout like it was it's own frickin' clan or tribe. Also, this is far on the punk edge of things, so instead of this:

You get something like this:

I couldn't find the dude in a trenchcoat or the ghoul-hound, I'm sorry.

One of the biggest problems (to my mind) with the Revenant families is that they read too much like bloodline knock-offs, but their powers and character backgrounds aren't very interesting. I mean, you'd think there'd be rhyme or reason to what disciplines these guys get, but there really isn't. A good default starting point should have been "Okay, these guys are ghouls, so one of their Disciplines should be Potence - which all ghouls seem to have an innate knack for - and maybe the signature clan discipline like Serpentis or Vicissitude, and honestly these guys are supposed to suck anyway, but if you had to stretch it maybe pick one of the other default physical disciplines like Fortitude or Auspex." But what they really did is just pick a bunch of random shit, and you end up with 3/4 bloodlines have Vicissitude and only 1 having Potence.

FrankT:

Vampire: the Masquerade didn't have its skill list hammered down. Like, at all. The basic game mechanics were that when you wanted to do something you described the action you wanted to take, the storyteller chose an attribute and a skill, you add them together and roll that many dice. And after that you have to deal with the fact that the actual numbers on the dice don't have any consistent meaning. But the core system pretty much depends on having the same list of attributes and skills known to the storyteller when he's deciding what attributes and skills to demand for the action of the moment – and the player when they are creating their character and choosing what attributes and skills they have. Vampire didn't have that. Every book might add a new secret skill or two, and when that happened (and your storyteller knew about it) the value of every previously existing skill would go down.

So here's how it works: You make a character and you think you want to do sneaky underhanded stuff. So you take a lot of dots in “subterfuge.” And then it comes time that you want to impersonate a vampire, so you go in all “ho ho ho! I got this. I got subterfuge.” But it turns out that your storyteller has read Ghouls: Fatal Addiction and you haven't. And in that book, there's an extra skill called “masquerade” which is used for impersonating vampires. And you don't fucking have that skill, because the skill didn't fucking exist when you made your character, and now you're doing your whole plan “untrained” with zero skill dice and a fuck-you penalty on your shit cake.

AncientH:

They did this every fucking book, and there was no rhyme or reason to the new skills they added. So you could totally have Occult (Vampire), Kindred Lore, Camarilla Lore, and Vampire Lore and those are all separate skills you can roll whenever you need to know something about vampires in general. Because Vampire had no central planning and couldn't guarantee that you had bought any of the other books, these were almost never used in any other product and just sort of floated out in conceptual space, unknown and mostly unloved.

The other thing was Backgrounds, which was a very hand-wavy thing that could describe personal abilities, destiny, how rich you were, how big your dick was, whether your parents held you too long or not long enough as a child, whether you had the bitchin'-est occult library, whatever. Hell, in most cases the backgrounds weren't even applicable to a wide range of characters - like, in this book, the Domitor background. You take dots in it to show how low a generation the vampire that's feeding you is (remember, generation is like golf scores - lower is better).

If this were reimagined in the contemporary period, it would totally be a stat for online matchmaking.


Sixth generation seeks bloodslave for day time chores. Must take orders well, but show own initiative in defense of haven. Experience with chiropterans a plus.

It's important to remember that like Exalted: Lunars, this isn't a complete character generation system by a longshot - so you're constantly referring back to a better book with more bitchin' character options you can't really have.

FrankT:

The Merits and Flaws were always where things went to crazy fuckistan in World of Darkness. Each Merit and Flaw are given a point value, and in most versions of the setup they have to balance out. Bigger Merits and Flaws do not cost (or provide) proportionately more points. So for one point you can have a “pale aura” (which is about as useful as that sounds), and for four points you can own your own fucking airport or bomb-wielding extremist group. Yes, really. So it's trivially easy to powergame or ruin your character by taking a pile of minor bullshit Flaws to pay for a single big ticket awesome Merit or vice versa.

But it's actually more fucked up than that, because the decisions about what is better than what is pretty much random. Owning your own airport is fucking awesome, and most other 4 point Merits are basically bullshit. There's a lot of weird comparisons, where something was costed at 3 points because it seemed somewhat better than a specific other thing that had been costed at 2 points – but once you pull a lot of those comparisons you end up with things that cost 6 points because they were better than things that were better than things... but are still overtly worse than things that cost 3 or 4 points that happened to be compared to different shit. There was never any real attempt to codify how much a point level of Merit or Flaw was really worth.

AncientH:

Unlike GURPS, there was supposed to be a limit to the madness - you could only take 7 points of Merits and 7 points of Flaws. Not that this helps much, but it does act as something of a limiter.

Some of the merits/flaws are broken, others are just bullshit. For example, there's one called "Kinfolk" that can be a 4-point merit or a 4-point flaw, depending on whether or not your big, hairy relatives want to kill you. However, it says Revenants can't be kinfolk, but they throw that out later on for story purposes. Because this is vampire, dammit, and the fanfiction must flow!



More to the point, in the other World of Darkness games being a Ghoul was a merit. Or maybe a flaw. But probably a merit. Anyway, it says you're a kinfolk, but this is before Kinfuck came out so it doesn't go into any greater detail about what that means.

FrankT:

I had forgotten that there was a tie-in to World of Darkness: Gypsies. That is terrible. Time for another drink.

AncientH:

Yeah, sorry. It's the five-point "True Gypsy" merit, which presumably means you start with Blood Purity 1 and lets you buy points in Affinities. Why you would do that is a viable question considering the abilities in question are, in general, significantly worse than equivalent sorcerer paths, vampiric disciplines, and in some cases other, cheaper Merits and Flaws (it is dead easy to become a medium in WoD). Maybe you just like playing a racial stereotype ironically.



Some of the other merits aren't too bad. You can buy some Vicissitude modifications, though as I pointed out 3/4 revenant families already have Vicissitude so you could totally do it yourself, but they're fun suggestions. "Virulent Strike" is one of those weird, random supernatural abilities that they kept pushing with no explanation; it basically let you do aggravated damage in hand-to-hand combat.


One day.

Just to emphasize how fucked you are as a ghoul, they show you the Experience Point Chart at the end of the chapter. Holy fuck, a new Disciplines is 20 XP! That's like, three really good adventures worth of XP. And a New Thaumaturgy Path (Tremere ghouls only!) costs 20 XP! Fuck that, man. I can't believe I say this, but selling your soul to a demon or buying Sorcerer path levels might actually be a better investment.

Which is ironic, because much later on they let vampires buy Sorcerer paths and fuel them with blood points, and they didn't charge them three times as much for the privilege. But that way lies madness.

FrankT:

For some reason, there is a short rundown on how the ghouling process works on other supernatural creatures from the other game lines in the character creation section. You would not expect to find it there, and the rules presented here are incomplete. I really think this bit is here because the typesetter had a half page piece of box text that he needed to stick somewhere an otherwise there was going to be half a page of whitespace at the end of the chapter.

AncientH:

Yeah, not much to add there except there are a few workarounds lurking in the dark corners of the World of Darkness...and even more questions that arise later on. Really, there are enough routes to supernatural power in the WoD that being a ghoul shouldn't be as sucky as this book presents it.

[Dean]

Wait so can a Mage or Werewolf ghoul themselves? Do they have rules for that? If so how does it work?

[Ancient History]

There are rules for it, but they're spread out and don't always agree. But yeah, you can be a mage and drink some vampire blood and be rocking Potence 1, but if you read some later sourcebooks the more vampire blood you have the more it fucks with your Magick. Werewolves are supposed to be allergic, but can be ghouled anyway, but it really fucks with their Gnosis (if I recall correctly).

For example, in Mage: the Ascenscion (Revised), Ghoul was a merit - I think 5 points? Something like that.

[/edit]Oh, somebody remind me to elaborate on the Infinite Blood Point Hack at some point.

[Prak]

Maybe you just like playing a racial stereotype ironically.

New fishmalk concept: white malk thinks he's black, calls himself Blacula. If anyone says "dude, you're white," he talks about corpse paleness and lack of hemoglobin.

[TheFlatline]

There are rules for it, but they're spread out and don't always agree. But yeah, you can be a mage and drink some vampire blood and be rocking Potence 1, but if you read some later sourcebooks the more vampire blood you have the more it fucks with your Magick. Werewolves are supposed to be allergic, but can be ghouled anyway, but it really fucks with their Gnosis (if I recall correctly).

For example, in Mage: the Ascenscion (Revised), Ghoul was a merit - I think 5 points? Something like that.

[/edit]Oh, somebody remind me to elaborate on the Infinite Blood Point Hack at some point.

By Revised Vampire and Werewolf it was exceedingly difficult to do the werewolf/vampire abomination thing. You have to botch like a willpower roll and a gnosis roll, and then choose not to spend a point of willpower to simply die on embrace. But the genie was out of the bottle by that point.

I remember that Garou would puke up the blood and probably go into an insta-rage on an attempt to ghoul by that point.

Wraiths couldn't be ghouled, Risen were far more badass than ghouls so why would you want to bother, and Fae such as they were lost their abilities entirely and gained banality the longer they had vampire blood in their system.

[Username17]

Turning Werewolves into Abominations required you to have spirit thaum or higher levels of corruption thaum. Despite personally playing a Setite for many years, I can't remember how the Path of Corruption thing worked. The Spirit Thaum thing was shit simple though: at level one you got a curse that let you force people to botch tests (the "Evil Eye" it was called). Basically useless for anything "normal" you'd want to do with it (because taking combat actions to force people to fail future combat actions was generally less good than taking combat actions to take people out of combat). But for the specific abomination creation event requirement of "botch this test and gain a shit tonne of power or die" then it was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Spirit Thaumaturgy was a Tremere thing. Except it was also open to an actual shit tonne of necromancer and shaman groups on the side. Because White Wolf.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Chapter 4: Storytelling

Theme song to these chapters is Man in the Box by Alice in Chains.


As far as White Wolf was concerned, this was every day.

This chapter provides information on running chronicles for ghouls, or incorporating ghouls into Vampire games. It is intended primarily for the Storyteller's use. A few surprises lurk here, so players should avoid reading further.

Wait... was that written in 1997 or 1977?

FrankT:

So if you want to play a Ghoul, the book is already over for you, or at least that's what the book tells you. This chapter is 15 pages long and sort of wanders around a bit. There is some narrative advice, some game-play advice, a set of sample campaign and/or adventure seeds, and a group that was going to be in chapter 2 but got moved here because it was too long for a chapter that was already long. If that sounds to you like a chapter composed of random scraps they had lying around... well you have a pretty good ear for these things I guess.

AncientH:

The chapter opens up with a quotation from the Book of Nod, which is sort of like the Bible As Written By Caine. This was a relatively minor background document which had been lost for approximately all of human history that anyone gives a fuck about, but it attained sufficient popularity in White Wolf imagination that they actually wrote, illustrated, and produced a slim leatherette paperback of the thing.



Which apparently proved so popular that they did it again.


How the fhtagn did that end up in a library?

And just for good measure, they did it again but from Lilith's perspective:


"Revelations of the Dark Mother: Seeds from the Twilight Garden" sounds eerily prescient in retrospect.

FrankT:

We start with a rumination on how to evoke the themes of Ghouldom in a game. Except... it's not. While the first subsection is called “Theme” it's actually just a collection of essays about ghouls. The first one is called “dependence” and is a discussion about addiction psychology. It only makes any sense as a set of roleplaying prompts for ghouls. Why is this in the storyteller's section? Why did the immediately preceding warning tell the person who intended to roleplay a ghoul to not read it? What the fuck?

There are four other short essays in here, which are called “manipulation,” “war,” “romance,” and “mortality.” Some of these are addressed to the storyteller, but few have anything that could be considered a big reveal. In fact, the only thing I think counts as a big reveal is the mortality essay's claim that ghouls can totally die of AIDS or Cancer. And that only counts as a reveal because I'm pretty much positive that the way ghoul powers work they actually can't die of those things. So it's not so much a “big reveal” as a tirade that is directly contradicted in the rules.

AncientH:

I think part of the confusion is that this book is simultaneously trying to sell ghouls as PCs as well as NPCs. Which isn't a stretch, but probably could have been delineated much better in the text.

There's a rather lengthy chunk of the "Theme" section devoted to War - the understanding being that ghouls are often created en masse for the infrequent large battles between Kindred and everything else. This kind of falls down on a couple levels though - for one, mass combat in WoD has universally been absolute crap, and for two the Sabbat just started these mass-embracing tactics which are, technically, probably more efficient and effective in the short run. In the long run, of course, ghouls are more sustainable.


First ghoul regiment reporting for duty, ma'am!

FrankT:

After the “Theme” subsection, there's a “Mood” subsection. This is a list of essays exactly like the previous list except that there are only two list elements. “Horror” and and “ambition” they are called. There really isn't any reason for these things to be in a separate subsection than the previous mini-essays, the format is the same and the content is pretty similar. It's possible that these were written by different people, but I'm guessing they were just written at different times.

The big “winner” here is the book suggesting that it would be totally awesome and horrible if a ghoul woke from a drunken bender having killed his own son in a drug addled haze. And while that would be horrible, it seems like a fantastically dickish move for a storyteller to do. It's one thing to be a vampire and fail a frenzy test or a werewolf to fail a roll to control their rage, but ghouls don't actually have anything like that. If the storyteller determines that your character flipped his shit and murdered his child, it's not because you rolled badly at a critical juncture or skimped on Self Control so you could buy more dots of ass kicking – it's because the storyteller decided to shit on your character for no fucking reason. It's totally not cool, and they just casually suggest violating a player like that as something interesting to do to “set the mood.”

AncientH:

Eh. Point of order: technically, ghouls are supposed to be subject to Frenzy (but not Rötschreck), but the book completely does not include any special rules on on Frenzy for ghouls. So it really is a Storyteller-fuck-you affliction, but nominally you should be able to roll Self-Control or spend a dot in Willpower to not eat your podling.

FrankT:

There are a couple of ways you can use the book. Basically, there are three that they talk about. There's the thing where everyone plays a vampire except one of the players who plays Igor and sucks. There's the thing where everyone plays ghouls and you scuttle around the underbelly of the World of Darkness playing the Xanders and Dawns of the gang while NPCs run off and do the important shit. And finally, there's “troupe play” where players get multiple characters and switch back and forth between the vampire overlords and the ghouled servitors. That last one seems like the most interesting, but the only one that gets much ink spilled is the “everyone plays a ghoul” idea, which is a shame.

AncientH:

At some point in the mid-90s somebody at White Wolf got really excited about the concept of "troupe play," where you the player didn't just play one character, but a couple of characters - a wraith and its shadow, a vampire and it's ghoul, whatever.



While this isn't the worst idea I've ever heard of, having a single player control multiple characters at the table is...eh...a bit like a single player controlling multiple factions in Monopoly or Dominions. Non-ideal. I don't mind PCs having relatively strong control over NPCs they've paid for, but there's a vast amount of wank potential in having one of your characters molest another of your characters on a regular basis.

There is a centerbar (like a sidebar, but floating ominously in the middle of the page and breaking up the two-column format for no good God-damned reason) on playing a ghoul in Vampire: the Dark Ages (which was the precursor to Dark Ages Vampire). It basically suggests that the Dark Ages were a shitty time to be alive, but being a ghoul could be fun, especially if you buy their Book of Storyteller Secrets. I did, for my sins, many years ago, and that is one weird, fucked-up book. Maybe fodder for another OSSR sometime.

FrankT:

The Unmastered are introduced in Chapter 2 as the organization that provided the tape that gave the presentation that got recorded that got transcribed that got put into a letter that got pasted into your book and the cheese stands alone. They were also going to have a writeup in the “ghoul organizations” section of that chapter, but they ended up with far too much material for that already bloated chapter and they just put a page citation there and moved all the text to Chapter 4. There's a lot here, but basically the Unmastered are a group of ghouls that hunt vampires for their tasty tasty blood candy.


Hunting vampires for their blood is difficult and kind of gross.

What I don't get is why they fucking bother. Being an unmastered ghoul shouldn't require you to hunt vampires at all. This book goes into all sorts of tangents about ghouls taking down vampires in order to taste their blood candy, but there's no reason for it. Aside from the lack of blood pressure issues we discussed earlier, that's really just not how blood bonding works. Being blood bound is a one time thing, so once you are bound once (which pretty much every ghoul should be), you're safe. There's nothing unsafe about drinking the blood of anyone after that (unless they have addictive blood or something). But if you're not blood bound, then three drinks and you're somebody's bitch.

So if you just chilled on the periphery of vampire culture, buying a drink of blood every month from whoever wanted to take two sips of yours, you'd be fine. But if you pulled the bullshit this book thinks is so awesome –
being unbound and then taking down a vampire and storing their exsanguinated blood to keep your powers for half a year – you'd end up blood bound to the first asshole you drank from. And then you'd go and turn yourself in to your new master and they'd rip your fucking head off. This book wanks to the Unmastered for nearly five pages, but the whole model just doesn't make any sense. That's not how independent ghouls would – or even could – work.

AncientH:

I'm completely off the grid in terms of blood bond mechanics, but I know that the Sabbat uses the viniculum precisely to get around the entire issue, so I don't know why ghouls don't do it too.



Likewise, there are plenty of work-arounds for clever and knowledgeable ghouls - I mentioned the Infinite Blood Point whatever earlier. See, it turns out that Setites have their own brand of blood sorcery (okay, they have like four, but the main one) and one of it's level one rituals is about brewing magical beer from vitae. If Kindred drink it, they get the blood point back and drunk and they don't vomit it back up like they do normal food and drink. But for ghouls, well, the vitae is multiplied - so one blood point worth of vitae turns into three blood points worth of magical beer!...which they can then use to brew more magical beer!

There are a surprising number of vampire beers out there.

So really, the Unmastered just need a good Egyptian microbrewer and some seed blood, and then the rest of their operations can be a string of minibars.

FrankT:

The final bit is a thing on conflict. Namely, pointing out that pretty much any group in White Wolf has a reason to stab a ghoul right in the face. It's basically 10 potential crossfires that the players could get caught in, with a paragraph or two dedicate to each. Reasonable for it to be included in this book, or even in this chapter – but it really feels like a page and a half that was cut for length from Chapter 2. Apparently, you might get caught up in an auto-da-fe from the Society of Leopold.


The Society of Leopold

AncientH:

I don't like to bring up the Inquisition, because that leads inevitably to bring up Hunter: the Reckoning, and then I want a drink but can't allow myself one because I would never have a good enough reason to stop. You know it's a bad game when you look back at Hunters Hunted with fond memories.


Oh wait, this is a thing now. Fuck, I thought it was Groundhog's Day. 1992.

There are a bunch of non-stated ghoul characters given pages of description at this point, but aside from Fat Goth I don't really care about any of them and neither should you.


Man, the Tzimisce did a number on yo...oh. Fuck, I'm sorry miss. Sir. Goddamit.

Chapter 5: Templates


This is what google gives me when I ask it for ghoul alligators. So whatever.

FrankT:

In a White Wolf sense, the word “template” means “sample character.” So this chapter is just a bestiary. You get stats for street thugs and alligators. The kinds of quick character or animal stats that you might need to throw down at a moment's notice. Really helpful stuff to have, but there's pretty much no reason you'd expect to find that shit here rather than some other book. So it's not really going to help you that much – you're never going to find the stats for a jaguar or an oversized rat because you're not going to remember that the stats are mysteriously located in the back of the book on playing low end blood addict characters. And the other players aren't going to help you much, because they aren't supposed to have read that far in the book. You get the usual stupidity that animal stats tend to bring – large rats will kick the living shit out of human pedestrians. But it's no worse than most games in that regard and it is still a closer fight than peasant vs. house cat in the then-current version of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

AncientH:

The vozhd has social attributes of 0, so technically your Toreador should be able to embarass or fuck it to death; have fun getting that one by your Storyteller.

I would like to remind everyone how crap WW health levels were. For example, said ghoul crocodile has 8 health levels. They could have just said that, but instead the format is a series of tick boxes:

Health Levels: OK, OK, OK, -1, -1, -3, -5, Incap.

Go fuck a vacuum cleaner.

There are a couple sample plots, most of which aren't interesting. One of them is like Wife Swap except with ghouls - a pair of vampires gets bored of the same 'ol, same 'ol and switches ghouls for a bit. Fuck, that must be the start of the scariest key party ever.



Also, there's a picture of a guy with a pair of nails jammed through his nipples. For reasons.

Actual Chapter 5: Templates: For Real This Time

The theme song for this is Closer by NIN.

FrankT:

Yeah, my bad. I started talking about the chapter called “templates” in what was technically the section called “templates” at the end of the chapter right before the chapter called “templates.” Or to put it another way: in this book it announces that they are giving you “templates” and then proceeds to put up sample characters for 14 pages. But the actual chapter break for the chapter named “templates” is on the seventh page of that, and half of the templates are nominally in the Storyteller chapter and not the Templates chapter. Because fuck you.

Anyway, the proper chapter has more than half the page count but only 4 characters because they use an insanely inefficient format where they draw up full character sheets covering an entire page for the character they describe on the facing page. White Wolf pulled this stunt a lot, and you'll note in the Scion review that even a decade later they were doing the same thing. Why not use up two to three pages writing up a supposedly “playable” character who is so badly made that we have to put playable in air quotes? I mean, other than the fact that's a stupid waste of space. The templates that are technically not in the templates chapter show you how it's done, and manage to get four usable beasts on one page including art.

AncientH:

In their defense, this is the same format that White Wolf used in all of its fucking books.

And that's the book. While we might sound a bit harsh, I'd like to reiterate that this is maybe one of the best books White Wolf produced during the period, and was very well received by fans and Mister Caverns everywhere. Even those kids that couldn't afford it but sat around in Walden Books copying out the merits and flaws into a notebook.

What sets it apart isn't its flaws in writing, conception, or layout - every RPG book seems to have those - it's the attitude, and the willingness to indulge in taboo, vaguely altporn-ish material. At a time when D&D still couldn't talk about sex and shied away from nipples on their succubi, these books looked like the fucking Suicide Girls next to a copy of National Geographic. It talked about stuff like having your period and freaking out, getting fucked up on drugs blood and eating someone's face, living in abusive relationships, and body modification as a not-bad-kinda-cool-thing-as-long-as-you-don't-take-it-too-far. Even compared to the Book of Vile Darkness this reads like more of a grown-up effort to show that evil is more than skin deep, life is complicated, and RPG books don't have to cater to 12-year-olds.


Bored housespouses, your time has come again.

We kinda take it for granted today because the Sexy Vampire Cycle has peaked once again - with Twilight and True Blood, fangs and titties are no longer solely the currency of schlocky horror movies and fangbanger genre fiction - it's mainstream. But this is a more raw fantasy, closer to the roots of Gothic punk fiction - a bit more Near Dark than Twilight, more Fright Night (1985) than Fright Night (2011). Not a perfect book, but a solid effort.

[fectin]

What happens if you exsanguinate a vampire for a while to lay in a stockpile, then kill him before drinking any of it?

[Ancient History]

Nothing, but it's hard to "lay in a stockpile." Vitae is supposed to turn to ash or something shortly after you extract it from the body unless you use magic to preserve it. Which they ignored whenever it was convenient for story purposes, but there you go.

[TheFlatline]

What happens if you exsanguinate a vampire for a while to lay in a stockpile, then kill him before drinking any of it?

A far smarter vampire comes along and spikes his blood into the stockpile, because who the fuck can tell one vampire's blood from another? (Official rules: you can't. You can tell vampire blood from regular blood, and elder blood from neonate blood, but that's about it).

In the game I played every fucking vampire who drank "elder vampire blood magically preserved from a dead vampire" was blood bound to me because I ghouled the fucking servant and spiked every drink. So like half the PCs were at least 2 stages blood bound to me and most of the city beyond that.

Ventrue like a motherfucker!

[Prak]

The chapter opens up with a quotation from the Book of Nod, which is sort of like the Bible As Written By Caine. This was a relatively minor background document which had been lost for approximately all of human history that anyone gives a fuck about, but it attained sufficient popularity in White Wolf imagination that they actually wrote, illustrated, and produced a slim leatherette paperback of the thing.

Which apparently proved so popular that they did it again.


How the fhtagn did that end up in a library?

And just for good measure, they did it again but from Lilith's perspective:


"Revelations of the Dark Mother: Seeds from the Twilight Garden" sounds eerily prescient in retrospect.

They did it like five more times, too, it looks like. I have one of the Werewolf equivalents- Chronicle of the Black Labyrinth, which talks about the Black Spiral Dancers (apparently Charlie Manson was BSD kinfolk), but there was also The Silver Record (WtA), The Fragile Path (Mage), Hunter Apocrypha (Hunter), and Days of Fire (Demon).

I actually like the idea, it's a piece of the game world defictionalized. I think there is a bit of a poor choice being made, however, when the book is supposed to be super rare in game, like, I think, Book of Nod is supposed to be.

[Omegonthesane]

The Revised MET edition of Ghouls: Fatal Addiction provides a potential answer to the problem of "free" ghouls being fully bound in the opening fiction, which portrays a vampire whose blood-bound ghoul has gone all creepy stalkery and kept her imprisoned in a coffin with a stake so that she is under his control forever, and how as an act of "love" he gives her some better tasting than usual blood before blowing the whole house up because it's got another vampire in it who wants to get her out.

I'm sure there's some bit of mechanics that that contradicts, because White Wolf, but it reconciles "is blood bound" and "is effectively free" at least.

[Username17]

I'm sure there's some bit of mechanics that that contradicts, because White Wolf

Yes and no. Yes, in that you're explicitly not allowed to harm your blood master without spending willpower, so keeping them trapped for any length of time should be essentially impossible. No, in that all things are possible in that game with derangements.

See, in Vampire the Masquerade you can be forced to follow commands by many, many means. And honestly, sometimes that's OK. But sometimes it's not. And if your character is "crazy" then you always have two options when following orders. You could do what the order obviously means, or you could pass it through the crazy filter and do something else. So if you ran into someone with Majesty, or got blood bonded, or whatever, you couldn't act to harm them, but if you were a Scientology zealot, you could still shoot them with an M-1911.

As long as your character had enough derangements, they could actively misinterpret almost any social or mental restriction.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

I'm sure there's some bit of mechanics that that contradicts, because White Wolf

Yes and no. Yes, in that you're explicitly not allowed to harm your blood master without spending willpower, so keeping them trapped for any length of time should be essentially impossible. No, in that all things are possible in that game with derangements.

See, in Vampire the Masquerade you can be forced to follow commands by many, many means. And honestly, sometimes that's OK. But sometimes it's not. And if your character is "crazy" then you always have two options when following orders. You could do what the order obviously means, or you could pass it through the crazy filter and do something else. So if you ran into someone with Majesty, or got blood bonded, or whatever, you couldn't act to harm them, but if you were a Scientology zealot, you could still shoot them with an M-1911.

As long as your character had enough derangements, they could actively misinterpret almost any social or mental restriction.

-Username17

Assuming Monseigneur Caverne agrees with you, this actually fits the fiction, since the ghoul in question was IIRC clearly meant to be acting like a mad stalker towards his "master".

Assuming they don't, it then becomes a matter of juggling Willpower expenditure. If I recall right it's one Willpower per scene to stand and watch while other people do the harming of your master for you, one Willpower per round to get your hands dirty, and no Willpower at all to merely not save your master when you know he is suffering but he isn't actually present - is this correct, and in either case could you get the required blood for less Willpower than you get in a month?

[Username17]

You don't get Willpower on a monthly basis. You get Willpower back each story (barring some extra weird stuff like how extreme sycophants don't), and then you also get to recover one willpower every time you satisfy your nature to the storyteller's satisfaction. That last one is supposed to be the primary method of Willpower recovery, and is as intensely subjective as it is broken. For example: Mages can check out the nature of "dreamer" which gives them Willpower back whenever they are in a surreal situation (basically all the time for a Mage), or you could pick "martyr" instead and get back a point of willpower whenever you "suffer or even die than sacrifice your values or your friends' needs." which is obviously less good considering the limited number of times you are able to die within the limits of a single story.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

You don't get Willpower on a monthly basis. You get Willpower back each story (barring some extra weird stuff like how extreme sycophants don't), and then you also get to recover one willpower every time you satisfy your nature to the storyteller's satisfaction. That last one is supposed to be the primary method of Willpower recovery, and is as intensely subjective as it is broken. For example: Mages can check out the nature of "dreamer" which gives them Willpower back whenever they are in a surreal situation (basically all the time for a Mage), or you could pick "martyr" instead and get back a point of willpower whenever you "suffer or even die than sacrifice your values or your friends' needs." which is obviously less good considering the limited number of times you are able to die within the limits of a single story.

-Username17

Not surprisingly, my memory of WoD rules may be jumbled up with my memory of WoD houserules implemented by the GM in the name of peace and sanity, since I learned early that the system was unplayable as written and never had to bother to delve into why.

So, basically, no, your character has to be bugfuck insane to be playable. Which sounds a lot like saying "you are playing WoD". Or to a lesser extent After Sundown, frankly.