Well, two weeks and an international flight later, I'm back. Bitching about RPGs seems like a decent source of normalcy after moving to a place where I barely speak the language, and I haven't yet figured out how to meet people who are interested in something other than (1) whether I would like to buy some cocaine, and (2) whether I will share it with them. It's beautiful here though. My new friends will be hermit crabs.
Book II: Crimson Darkness of the Soul
Oh, baby, look at you
Don't you look like Siouxsie Sioux
How long'd it take to get that way?
What a terrible waste of energy
You'll dance to anything by The Communards
You'll dance to anything by Book of Love
You'll dance to anything by The Smiths
You'll dance to anything by Depeche Commode
You'll dance to anything by Public Image Limited
You'll dance to anything by Naked Truth
You'll dance to anything by any bunch of stupid Europeans
-The Dead Milkmen, "You'll Dance to Anything"
There are two reasons to put out a new edition of Vampire. One is to give it a decent system that doesn't rely on a pile of house rules and unstated assumptions to be playable. V5 is very much not that. But maybe you don't care, because you'd already given up on White Wolf games having good rules. Or you're one of the people who likes the rules terrible because it helps them get away with shit, not that those kinds of people ever admit that's their motive. Maybe you just want to see the setting you remember with rosy nostalgia updated into the 21st century. You probably weren't even going to read the combat engine, you flipped straight to chargen to see a fresh-but-familiar take on your favorite clan.
Well, if your favorite clan was one of the "high social status" ones, Toreador Tremere or Ventrue, you're in luck, because that's the only part of the setting the new writers are interested in supporting.
These guys *really obviously* only like one part of the Vampire setting. They like vampires putting on designer clothes and hanging out at Elysium sipping blood out of fluted glasses. Any sect, clan, discipline, or character concept that doesn't fit that, they don't know what to do with it and don't really care. Anything part of the setting that provides contrast to that, the outwardly bestial and violent parts, they actively don't want to be playable.
In Which I Get Pretentious about Vampire's "Themes"
Ok, I don't care about mopey internal conflicts any more than any other RPG nerd does, and I always rolled my eyes at the pages every White Wolf book has to waste on themes and symbolism and all that other high-school-English crap. But I do care about the game's themes. Not the ones the "Storyteller" is encouraged to ham-fist into the game, the basic ones that create the setting's atmosphere and attitude. That baroque gothic more-streetwise-than-D&D horror setting is the one thing Vampire actually does well and most of the reason anyone cares about it.
Gothic horror, and especially the Gothic Punk thing Vampire prides itself on, is about juxtaposing pretentious refinement with ugly savagery. I hate myself for writing that sentence but it's true. Dracula is cool because he's a cultured aristocrat who is also a blood drinking undead cannibal. That contrast fits perfectly with the punks-vs-suits generational conflict Vampire loves so much. The older aristocrats are the "pretentious refinement" side, and the younger more modern vampires are the more brutish and honest side. Those contrasts are everywhere in Vampire:
- Older Vampires vs Younger
Snooty Clan (Ventrue, Toreador) vs Smelly Clan (Gangrel, Nosferatu)
Camarilla vs Sabbat
Mind Control vs Combat
Humanity vs the Beast
The setting needs both sides of the coin to work. Most people have a preference for their personal characters and all, but each side is cooler and more interesting because of the other. You can't be a punk if there's no hypocritical establishment assholes to rail against. Choosing to play a sexy vampire vixen is more meaningful as a choice if you could have been a deformed sewer monster instead.
So if you're a Vampire writer and have a preference for writing sophistication over savagery, you still need the visceral and violent elements of the setting. Let someone else write them, that's fine. What you can't do is go all fucking ascended fanboy and try to force out every element of the setting that doesn't work to the advantage of your personal Toreador fashion model wish fulfillment character.
Mailing the Sabbat to Abu Dhabi
I guess the writers are waffling on this on Twitter, but in the actual PDF the Sabbat have all left for the Middle East. If it sounds cool to play a shovelhead gank squad getting smuggled into Jerusalem to do biblical archaeology and kill any biblical figures who turn out to be ancient vampires, while trying to navigate the agendas of their own elders who see them as expendable catspaws... well, that does sound cool, but this book isn't interested in helping you run it. If we were meant to use this information to expand the setting and run Sabbat games with a new twist there'd be more information. Like "WHERE in the Middle East", it's a big place, or "what are we actually doing there". That's not what the writers intended at all. Shipping all the Sabbat to the Middle East is just a convenient way for them to be "not here". The authors might as well have sent them to Mars.
Nobody expected V5 core to have a full writeup on the present day Sabbat. The Sabbat is a much more fleshed out and complex organization than the Camarilla that would take a lot of text to explain, and Sabbat campaigns aren't really the Vampire's "core offer". If they'd just briefly mentioned the Sabbat in the core book with a vague promise to work on it later if there's enough Kickstarter money, that would be the best we could expect. But these guys are actively committing to NOT writing the Sabbat and declaring that it doesn't really exist in the form you remember and maybe liked. That right there is a huge part of the setting that V5 wants to retcon out of existence.
The central conflict of V5 is supposed to be about establishment vampires vs anarchs. That idea never got much traction in the 90s but let's just keep trying to force it I guess. It's even less interesting this time around. Without being caught between Camarilla sheriffs and Sabbat recruiters there's not much to do as an anarch. You're a de facto Camarilla vampire, you go along on Camarilla vampire adventures you don't have any stake in because what else are you gonna do, but you don't show up to court because you're too cool for school.
The Clans
...and disciplines, because it's hard to talk about one without the other.
Brujah
I didn't realize till I hit Submit that with the fancy font and slightly gothy clothes, this could pass for something related to Vampire. It's not.
The Brujah are the "punk vampires". It's never been much deeper than that. Whenever the old Vampire books tried to explain what older brujah did or how their clan structure worked it was a self-contradictory mess of different authors trying to retcon each other, so I'm not gonna overthink it. It's hard to be punk in 2021. Being into old-school punk now is like being into barbershop quartets in punk's heyday. V5 has examples of things the brujah kids might be into these days, one of which is neo-nazi concern trolling. Fair enough but I hate the 21st century.
In V5 the clan portraits are replaced with literal fashion plates of four women and four men dressed up as representatives of the clan. Apparently Brujah look like rich Eurotrash on their way to retro night at the gay bar.
The brujah discipline package is Potence, Celerity, and Presence. That's 2 physical disciplines and V5 doesn't want you playing a combat character, so let's see how bad they got nerfed. Potence and Celerity aren't COMPLETELY useless, but you need 4-5 dots to do anything that matters. Potence dots add to your damage value (which only exists in the optional Advanced Conflict Engine: Physical Combat) but it's unarmed only so it doesn't stack with the damage value you could have gotten just for using a melee weapon. And it's halved against vampires unless you have a source of unarmed aggravated damage from another discipline. So as far as your combat power goes, all your first three dots do is put you on par with a mortal with a weeb katana. There are a bunch of other powers for special attacks like we're playing 4e D&D but they're not good.
For Celerity, you can get an undefendable melee attack with Celerity 5 or an undefendable ranged attack with Celerity 4 + Auspex 2, which is enough to drop an enemy on an above average roll. Other than that you get a bunch of ways to interact with a tactical positioning system this game doesn't fucking have.
You might be tempted to say, "well these writers like aristocratic social vampires, I'll just take Presence" and you would be correct. Presence 2 isn't enough anymore (other vampires can Willpower through it now) but Presence 3 will SoL an enemy out of the fight and Presence 5 will make most of the room sit down and shut up. No mention of burning Willpower to stop it even. Winning fights isn't even Presence's primary purpose, you get all that in addition to mind control, with no generation limits so you can freely use it on vampires.
Speaking of Presence, here's something the new writers sort of did right. Vampire players used to love to bitch about Celerity because it was what all those immature munchkin powergamers had and why don't they go play D&D which is so lame not like Vampire which is edgy and cool, but the king of all broken oWoD powers is Summon. With Presence 4 you could summon anyone, mortal or vampire, anywhere in the world, and the books painstakingly spelled out how Summon had no cost and spending Willpower to resist it was a waste because the summoner could just cast it again the next round. And again, it works on *anyone*. Want to force the Prince to walk in the front door of your New Jack City gank fortress? Just summon him! GM gives you a mystery plot where you track down the long-forgotten resting place of an ancient vampire? Fuck that, just summon him!
V5 nerfed Summon into uselessness which is better than letting it be setting-destroyingly broken. The new version only works on people you've previously tagged with your Presence aura. No more summoning "the Maeljin Incarna" or "JonBenet Ramsey's Real Killer". It also requires a "critical win" to force the subject to do anything, which is the most awkward possible verbiage for a game term but it means most attempts won't work. And every attempt costs blood now.
Gangrel
Three things to know about the oWoD Gangrel:
(1) They were the only clan popular enough to have a pro wrestler use their name
(2) They used to have an association with gypsies because Dracula, which was offensive and has caused a lot of self-righteous swaying and fainting from certain sectors of the internet
(3) Their discipline list was dogshit.
The oWoD gangrel were supposed to be fighty guys, but they didn't get any of the disciplines that made you better at fighting. It was so bad the Player's Guide to the Sabbat had to divide the gangrel into two barely fluffed bloodlines as an excuse to let them pick better disciplines. You could be a Town Mouse Gangrel and use Obfuscate and Celerity to blender fools from stealth, or you could be a Country Mouse Gangrel and suck just as much as your non-Sabbat counterparts. In V5 the Sabbat are busy terraforming Mars and they took their cheesy bloodlines with them, so we're working with the Country Mouse Gangrel. Your disciplines are Animalism, Fortitude, and Protean.
Fortitude was a trap in oWoD. The new version isn't as bad but PCs still don't get enough discipline dots to want to spend them on better defenses. Some of the fortitude powers interact with the combat system in crunchy ways, which is a problem because this game doesn't even have a set combat system much less one that actually works. One of the Fortitude 5 powers negates wound penalties which aren't even a fucking thing in this edition. Were they supposed to be? Did the writers just forget?
Protean: Ok, credit where credit's due, I think Wolf Claws is actually decent this time. It bypasses vampires' innate half-damage-from-everything defense and it's called out as "unarmed" so unlike melee weapons it stacks with Potence. Well probably. Here's that problem where the game doesn't actually have a combat engine so the combat disciplines can't have coherent rules either. Wolf Claws give bonus damage which isn't even a thing outside of "advanced" combat. Seriously guys, we're gonna charge points for abilities that don't do anything in the default rules?
The rest of Protean actually got nerfed. Seriously. The most notoriously shitty discipline in oWoD and these guys couldn't resist finding ways to make it worse. Instead of getting both your alternate forms at Protean 4, wolf form is now one of two options at Protean 3. It competes with the Backstory Tax power you have to take because you said your character lives in the woods. And even if you did take it, wolf form now is now what I think TGD calls Full Replacement Polymorph. You turn your character sheet over for the duration and just play a Wolf Minion from the back of the book. Wolf Minion has fewer dice than you probably do.
Just as an extra fuck you, there's only one level four power, bat form, and you can't take it unless you took wolf form at level three. They not only split shapechanging into two powers, they made it so taking Earth Meld costs you *both* of them. What, was it "overpowered" that gangrel could sleep outside? Was it not enough to pay all your starting discipline dots and an extra blood point every night for the privilege of living in the woods?
Small silver lining though, you can replace the traditional shitty Level 1 power ("see in the dark", a small part of what Auspex 1 can do) with an ability to not trigger pressure plate traps. Which might come in handy if you fall through a portal to the Forgotten Realms.
Animalism still has the old problem that there aren't many modern problems you can solve by possessing a dog. It also lost the level 3 power that could stop an attacker in a fight. I mean it's still here, but other vampires can trivially ignore it now. Why? There are two Camarilla clans that get Animalism, Gangrel and Nosferatu. If you think these writers don't care much for the Gangrel, wait till you see what they did to the Nosferatu.
Gangrel might be better than they were or they might be completely nonfunctional depending which combat system you use. If you want to play a gangrel who fights with claws, and you can get your GM to agree that you're always using the Advanced Combat Engine, your build is going to be 2 dots in Protean, third clan dot wherever, and then pick up out of clan Potence for bonus damage and/or Obfuscate for undefended sneak attacks.
Oh and we've got another set of fashion plates here. Gangrel women look like Scandinavian folk rock singers in faux-traditional stage costume. Two of the dudes are in overdesigned fake outdoorwear they never let get dirty, a short dude in a fucking cloak trying way too hard to look like an evil wizard (OK FAIR ENOUGH THEY KNOW THEIR AUDIENCE LOL), and, um, Captain Jack Sparrow. So our eight brujah who've never been in a fight are joined by eight gangrel who've never slept outside.
Malkavian
Remember this guy from 1e/2e? Google Translate says this is "tie me up" in Portuguese. Interesting that they replaced the English text and didn't translate it.
Another fashion plate here. One of the women is carrying a teddy bear possibly just to troll Justin Achilli. Apparently Malkavians look like Eurotrash clubkids, except the dude on the right with the straitjacket and the goony stare. 24 attempts so far and is this is the first one where this amateur fashion designer stopped metaphorically jerking off and remembered what he was supposed to be doing, but the one is a good picture at least. The last guy looks like he just escaped from somewhere.
Unfortunately I couldn't find the Malkavian image anywhere. I'm cribbing all these from Image Search and gaming blog reviews. Most reviewers seem to use the Brujah one.
Why do I keep harping on these fashion plates? There's lots of art in this book that's unintentionally funny, but I don't bring it up. Some of it's even *endearingly* bad, like all the photographs of alty art-school kids in studs and leather trying to look tough. This fashion plate shit isn't bad in that way though. They're technically skilled drawings of model-lookin people in fancy clothes. They just completely miss the fucking mark almost every time. These aren't just pictures of random people in the World of Darkness, they're here to communicate what it means to be a Brujah or a Malkavian or whatever. Three clans so far, most of whose members are supposed to look like lowlifes, and the artist wasn't willing to draw that. The defining trait of every V5 clan is "rich kids desperate to look more interesting than they are". This is part of what I mean about V5 refusing to engage with the important parts of the setting that are ugly or savage.
I said before that White Wolf games were written by art school dropouts, and I think we know what at least one of the authors' major was. It feels like Vampire has been hijacked into one person's fantasy world where they made it as a fashion designer.
On to disciplines. I'm skipping Obfuscate until the Nosferatu section because while Malkavians can use Obfuscate, Nosferatu are utterly dependent on it.
Malkavians get Dominate again. Revised and 2e Sabbat Malkavians had a clan discipline called Dementation, which was flavorful but sucked ass. Giving enemies die penalties wasn't worth a combat action and you were better off playing the "bloodline" that hadn't lost their Dominate.
Dementation is now a single alternate Dominate power. You give up the most iconic Dominate power - Mesmerize - to get it, and it sucks even more than oWoD Dementation. Roll dice to drain part of the target's willpower, who cares. If you're using the optional "advanced" rules for Social Combat you can do exactly the same thing for fucking free.
The rest of Dominate is just as baller as ever, except that there's no Generation background so you can't buy yourself down to the point where you can reliably use it on other vampires. Auspex is also still good. The one big nerf to Auspex is completely necessary. oWoD Aura Perception could detect deception, which can't be a thing if vampires are supposed to do intrigues and shit. Trying to have NPCs with hidden agendas was like trying to do murder mysteries in D&D with a paladin, except that D&D never purported itself to be an engine for running murder mysteries. V5 Aura Perception doesn't mention anything about lies.
Nosferatu
Not this guy anymore.
If you were getting bored because this review seems resignedly mixed, don't worry, it's rage time.
Fashion plates first. Fucking what? Ok they're all wearing the Derelicte collection from Zoolander, but there's not a single goddamn Nosferatu on this page. These vampires aren't even *ugly* unless you go by fashion model standards. I came here to see sewer monsters. The defining trait of this clan is looking like Count Orlok or Bat Boy if they're one of the lucky ones. There supposed to be the brutally honest take on what a vampire is that counterbalances the effete overdressed Toreador and Ventrue. The twats who wrote this book basically cut an entire clan, at least narratively, just because they weren't personally interested in playing it.
And just to make sure *nobody* played this watered-down bullshit, the Nosferatu curse is unplayable now. Nosferatu don't look human according to the rules. Could have fooled me, but whatever, by RAW they're still walking Masquerade breaches. So even though they lost the thing that makes them cool or unique they're still dependent on Obfuscate to stay with the party.
Obfuscate costs blood now. One "rouse check" per scene (on average one oWoD blood point plus increased chance of Ass*world bear attacks). You can't sustain that. It's not sustainable. It's not designed to be sustainable. The writers narratively gutted the clan and *also* nerfed them into unplayability just to be sure. The old Nosferatu clan books talk about them trolling the Toreador and fucking up the vibe at Elysium, and in this bullshit take on Vampire built around one fashion student's delusional Mary Sue wish fulfillment we can't have *that*.
Just to rub it in V5 nerfed Mask of 1000 Faces. All it does now, besides costing blood, is make you look a generic person who belongs where you are and isn't worth paying attention to. How that's different than using Unseen Presence to make people not pay attention to you isn't super clear. I could come up with a few cases but I'm not paying a whole nother discipline dot for it. But again, this only matters if you skipped here from the Malkavian section, because once again the Nosferatu are unplayable by design now.
Which brings us to the specialest of all specials, the...
Toreador
Almost certainly the authors' favorite clan. The fashion plates are even less distinctive this time. They look like high fashion Eurotrash clubkids just like every other clan. Or, more like the Brujah, Gangrel, Malkavians, and Nosferatu all look like Toreador. You're supposed to play a Toreador, get it?
Just kidding, that's the Brujah again! I'd link the Toreador if I could find it.
We've covered the Toreador's jack of all trades discipline list - Auspex (still good), Presence (the best combat discipline and not even primarily a combat discipline), and Celerity (useless unless you want to sink all your points into it). There's not much to talk about here because Toreador seems to be the default in this edition. There's barely anything that makes this clan distinct anymore.
Tremere
Tremere are kind of like Toreador in the authors' minds because they're rich and can wear expensive clothes, so they still get to be one of the "good" clans.
The fashion plates are dumb in a different way than I expected though. Elaborate renfaire costumes for the ladies, overdesigned coats and pants tucked into boots for the dudes. Yeah, they look wealthy, like every fucking clan does, but I thought the Tremere were supposed to dress like high status members of human society and save the Hogwart's getups for club meetings. The oWoD Tremere were serious people, "suits", successful types, pointedly *not* your dipshit friend who won't shut up about Alistair Crowley. There's a whole other World of Darkness game that's basically that guy's Chick tract, he doesn't need to take up even more space.
(I can't find this image either. I'll save you a click this time.)
I can't tell how good
Thaumaturgy Blood Sorcery is in this edition, because its strength was always about splatsplosion and expansion material. Cauldron of Blood isn't worth using (nothing new there). The level 3 thing doesn't combo with Dominate anymore, because for some jagoff reason this game has both oWoD Generation AND nWoD Blood Potency. Blood Sorcery raises your Blood Potency, Dominate is gated by Generation. This core book has the full core ritual list though, including the Player's Guide ones so all your old Ward exploits still work.
Ventrue
Wait, shouldn't he be a Tzimisce?
This fashion designer I've been shitting on actually nailed the Ventrue. This is the one set of fashion plates you wouldn't mistake for a Toreador. They look like Cruella DeVille types and dudes with five-figure-a-night coke habits. These authors definitely favor the high society vampires.
Couldn't find the ladies, but hopefully you get the idea. Why do these reviewers only use the dude half of the picture?
And now we've covered all the disciplines so once again there's not much new to say here. Ventrue get Presence and Dominate. And Fortitude but you don't care. You probably want Presence 3 to defend yourself against vampires and then either stay the course up to 5 or start buying Dominate.
The Weird Obsession with Composure
White Wolf has always had a problem with too many fucking attributes and too much overlap. The two biggest offenders in the 90s were Appearance and Wits. Wits was a generic Cool Guy Good At Stuff stat you arbitrarily had to roll for things that could have just as easily been Dex, Charisma, Perception, or Intelligence. It everything from parrying (but not dodging), to computer hacking (but not using a computer in a way that didn't qualify as "hacking", whatever White Wolf thought that meant), to telling jokes at parties, to initiative. Yeah, initiative. You pretty much had to stack Wits unless you thought you could start every combat invisible.
At some point after White Wolf stopped being relevant, Appearance and Wits were replaced with Resolve and Composure. "Mental stamina" and "social stamina". This is in a game that already has a Willpower stat, and a regular Stamina stat it barely knows what to do with. So it's... different? But not better.
V5 reeeeally likes the Composure stat. It won't actually commit to what you roll to shoot a gun, but it's *usually* Composure. If you're using a version of the combat rules where there's such a thing as initiative, you use Composure for initiative. It's even more of a generic Cool Guy Good At Stuff stat than Wits was.
I can see an in-world excuse for this - people who are cool and collected in social situations might also be cool and collected in a firefight - but I could just as easily see Dexterity which is the thing people expect. Specifically people who didn't carefully read the new book and then badger the GM about which part of the rules he was planning to use. The goal of this change is just to fuck with people who want to be good at fighting and put points in physical attributes. Lol surprise, Dex sucks now, my Toreador fashion designer is the best at guns too! I picked a Social Primary which is the best type of character so I should be better than you at everything!
All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go
Every change to the world and every balance decision this game tried to make seems to be about picking a side in in-world conflicts. These authors really like the snooty clans. Rather than realizing that actually *playing* those clans requires conflict and contrast to make them interesting, the authors decided to ride in on their white horse and remove or nerfhammer every part of the setting that opposed their favorite type of characters.
Most of the sources of conflict, the things you'd, you know, run games about, are gone from this book. Sabbat? Gone. Scheming elders? Gone. Nosferatu who wouldn't be popular enough to invite to your party? Unplayable. Angry brujah who might start a fight at the party? Just as pretentious and overdressed as you are now. All these guys are interested in is describing the fancy clothes their characters wear to sit around bored in an art museum after hours. Maybe that does something for them, but it's not much of a game for anyone else.