Demon the Fallen was printed in 2002, so this is fairly an Old School Sourcebook review. But here we get the first problem. White Wolf games are often initialized, and Demon the Fallen initializes to "DtF."
Which of course is much more frequently used to mean "down to fuck." And Google tells me that this term can be found as early as 1968, so... Demon the Fallen wasn't really a great name for the game, but also I must admit that while "Down to fuck" seems to have existed nearly as long as my parents, I never really thought about this until the recent years, where "dtf" and "down to fuck" has become more widely known.
Anyway.
Demon the Fallen
or, "Hey, it's been about thirty years since the general public thought RPGs were satanic, maybe we can write about demons now?"
Demon the Fallen was published in 2002, which makes me a bit sad, because it means I have to wait another six years before I get to see if they're going to do a D20 kickstarter. On the other hand, it gives me six years to get a job so I can back it. Yes, despite there hardly being a need, I do actually kind of want a 20th anniversary Demon book. Like I said, I love this game.
Anyway, you kind of already know what this book is like, just from the name and a basic knowledge of White Wolf. It's about playing a demon, it's about personal horror, and it's about how White Wolf basically wanted to make RPGs about philosophy but couldn't even do a bad idea well.
To set the mood, right before the introduction we get the first of many RK Post illustrations of disturbingly scantily clad celestine figures-
![Image](http://orig12.deviantart.net/6460/f/2012/160/7/2/726594ff12ffe4ce7557b4774a67545d-d52w4h1.jpg)
your guess of what's going on here is as good as mine, but that strap between her legs looks really inconvenient and uncomfortable
Looking at the first couple of paragraphs of the intro, I'm wondering who wrote it. It's very "you know what demons are, or at least what the bible says..." and literally ends with "Now (you are) about to hear the other side of the story."
The author credits are a bit weird- William Brinkman, David Carroll, Michael Lee are primarily notable for not having any other apparent game writing credits online, and the latter two for sharing names with (or being) musicians. On the other hand, the book also credits Steve Kenson, who also wrote Mutants and Masterminds, Joshua Mosquiera-Asheim, who currently is the game director for Diablo 3, Patrick O'Duffy and Adam Tinworth are common enough in WW products, Greg Stolze, who also wrote Godlike, a WW2 Supers game, and the novel trilogy for Demon the Fallen...
and LUCIEN SOULBAN.
Yes, that's actually his name. He was born in Saudi Arabia, but is Canadian, and says that Soulban means "Holy Crosses." He got his first name because his mother refused to follow family tradition (alternating Moussa and Shukri), and instead turned the choice of first name over to his maternal grandmother who suggested "Lucien or Christopher."
Apparently Lucien also worked on Silver Age Sentinels, which, of course Kenson also worked on, so I can only imagine that White Wolf reached out to Kenson, and Kenson said "Oh, a game about demons? I know exactly the guy who you should also hire, his name is LUCIEN SOULBAN." But apparently he actually wrote for WW as far back as 1996, so maybe one of the execs just said "Hey, Soulban, how'd you like to write about demons?"
I'm waiting for him to respond on twitter about how much he thinks his name had to do with being put on the project.
Probably most notably, the Dot is only credited with creating the World of Darkness, not with any writing of this book. So.. that, and Achilli's absence from the credits, probably amply explains the relatively low amount of christian repentance bullshit in this game, and the fact that it's more or less playable.
The book then goes into the standard "What is this thing called roleplaying/s]storytelling?" section, that I really think was completely unnecessary by 2002. It definitely didn't need more than a page devoted to it and "Players and Storytellers," which provides an example of what constitutes play in an RPG. After this, we get a description of the World of Darkness and the Gothic-Punk genre.
By 2002, White Wolf could have had a boilerplate introduction that provided a rundown of what roleplaying is, how you do it (preferably without telling you that not using the rules is preferable...), what the World of Darkness is, and what Gothic-Punk is. The fact that so many of White Wolf's books start this way, and it could be just a set thing that gets copy-pasted into the intros, really speaks to putting out a core book before you get into your game lines. Dungeons and Dragons doesn't waste two pages in every setting book with this kind of thing, it puts it in the PHB, and then uses the intros to talk about stuff specific to whatever world book is for. Now, that said, I really don't think that the NWoD core book is the way to go, either. A core book that talks about roleplaying, the setting, and the genre you're emulating is good, and putting your core resolution mechanic in there is even better, but there's no reason to make it a 200+ page hardcover. Especially when you're going to follow that $25 book with $35 books for your game lines. What a company could do, however, is publish a small, maybe 5x8", 10 page pamphlet for that kind of stuff, longer if they want to actually make it the character creation book, and give it away (or sell it for $5 or so), to drive interest in their now svelte $15 or $20 game line books. I could see a $5 or $10 World of Darkness paperback that gives rules for making mortals, some mortal campaign styles based, say, on The Wire, Sopranos, and I don't know a grim and gritty police procedural, but I'm sure one exists. You could also drop some pointers for something like Supernatural, but you'd want to provide some basic antagonists for that.
But I digress.
The introduction has a sidebar explaining that Demon is an urban game, like Vampire, and then gives a moderate length lexicon that... How necessary have these ever been? There are 34 terms in the Demon Lexicon. 14 of those are just names for the houses of the fallen, five are fallen factions, and five are various terms for angels and demons. Which leaves 10 for basic setting terms like "The Abyss" and "The Pit" and game terms like "lore," the term for Demon magic. Basically, this lexicon is entirely unnecessary. The same information could be delivered much better in text, rather than having this chunk of dictionary.
What follows is White Wolf's classic "how to use this book" which wouldn't be fucking necessary if they named the fucking chapters less floridly and more descriptively. At no point should you ever name your character creation just "Feet of Clay," and then use a line and a half to tell people "that's the character creation chapter" in your introduction. If you really must indulge your high school mopeot, then name the fucking chapter "Feet of Clay- Character Creation" in the table of contents. There is no fucking good reason for this fucking introduction to exist and I'm starting to think about whether I have any mixer for the bottle of SoCo by my feet.
After all of that bullshit, they take a moment to flog their hard on for the entirely fucking pointless live-action roleplaying. I've done a live action vampire game. You know what my take away was? "Why the fuck did we stand outside a college at 10pm in January freezing our fucking hands off for something we could be playing around a table with drinks and dice!?" I mean if nothing else, tabletop at least has the possibility of getting an under-the-table handy from the Malkavian clan symbol-wearing goth chick you're there to hit on. That would just be awkward in a LARP.
We finally get the first thing to actually have a reason to exist in this chapter with the Source Material list. Which is actually really damned sad, because the list of Source Material is just "here are some books and movies vaguely related to the game, some of which we'll actually describe, others we'll just say are hard to find!" Source Material lists could be great assets, as they can provide a better insight into what the authors were thinking, but this one ranges from Paradise Lost (makes perfect sense) to THE FUCKING SCREWTAPE LETTERS, which is a book written by CS Lewis that basically is collected letters from a shoulder devil to his boss, and has fuck all to do with Demon the Fallen except for both things being about demons. There is absolutely no time spent in Demon on sitting on someone's shoulder and trying to convince them to eat the whole cake or fuck the secretary.
So, it's a thoroughly unsurprisingly bad start for Demon the Fallen, but White Wolf introductions suck, and we all know that. Those five pages could be whittled down to a single page of source material with real descriptions as to why they are good inspiration for the game with more entries, and then lead into the in-character first chapter that does a much better of establishing what the game is.
Chapter One will be the next post.