This trip, it was like traveling back in time. They had pristine warehouse copies of the last half of oWoD - Vampire 3e clanbooks and supplements, Werewolf (Kinfuck! I mean, Kinfolk: Unsung Heroes!), Demon: the Fallen, Mage, Hunter, all sorts of crap. Literally a dozen copies of everything on the shelf, not even wrinkled. Most of 'em were marked as $2.99, but they had a dozen copies of Clanbook: Baali at only 99 cents a piece - and something in the withered black organ that pumps fluids through my body grabbed it and headed to the door. The nice lady that broke my twenty reminded me that all of the proceeds from the stores go to cancer research.
So of course I have to review it, and see how it stands up after fourteen years.
The first thing you really notice about Clanbook: Baali is that it's by Black Dog Game Factory and is labeled "For Adults Only." Considering that regular White Wolf books are about casually murdering people and incest to various degrees, and have never shied away from tits and ass in the artwork, it's always been interesting to see what they consider is the next logical step beyond. Mostly, it's disappointing (Charnel Houses of Europe: the Shoah, WTF?) But this book - this is the one with the lady with bugs coming out of her crotch! Let's begin.
First off, I refuse to believe the authors Sven Skoog and Lucien Soulban are real people. I don't care what RPGGeek claims, real people do not have names that sound like Magic: the Gathering cards.
Then, on the inside with the credits and the humongous trademark list is this note:
Fucking pussies.Clanbook: Baali is intended for individuals over 18 only, and even then we want you to think twice about playing one. White Wolf in no way condones any of the practices ascribed to the Baali herein, and wishes to make it perfectly clear that we don't encourage anyone to emulate anything that these guys do. The Baali are evil, vicious, sadistic, demented, twisted, hateful--and completely fictional. If you want to add a Baali to your chronicle, here's everything you need to do so. If you want to play a Baali, be very, very careful that you separate in-game and out-of-game attitudes, and that the other players in your game are OK with what you're doing here.
There is undoubtedly content in this book that many people will find offensive. Remember, it is the in-character narrator espousing those views, not White Wolf or anyone else associated with this project. Relax, enjoy, and if you find the book problematic, PUT IT DOWN. No one's forcing you to read it.
There is a table of contents. I miss these. A good table of contest does more than expand the page-count, it lets you know where things are in the book. Unfortunately, like most White Wolf/Black Dog products, the chapter titles are so fucking meaningless they are useless.
Then we get two facing pages of solid black. On the left page is a grey marker-squall of what I think are two corpses that just got done with a 69. On the left is a quote from C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia.
Chapter One: The Opening
The main illustrator of this book is Guy Davis, who has gained fame for his own series The Marquis and some latter Hellboy/BPRD comics, and Vince Locke, whose first and last names both end in an 'e' and does covers for Cannibal Corpse. In this book they just let him go batshit insane, so there's a full-page black-and-white of a naked twelve-year old boy sitting on a naked, fat old man's stomach (yes, we can see the wang; this is not the last wang you will see in this book) and stitching a pentagram in the bastard's chest; bugs assail the man's face and crawl all over the naked kid, apparently swarming from the boy's crotch; the background consists of two pillars of corpses and is kind of ill-defined; there's a high-up barred window like a dungeon and the old man is lying on a kind of bridge over water...and the best part is, the picture is actually relevant because it goes with the fiction the opening fiction:
Johnathan, half-lost in the bliss of intercourse, smiled stupidly at the naked youth straddling his manhood.
Seriously, Fifty Shades of Grey aside there'd be a fatwa over this before anybody got past sentence one on page seven. Black Dog, I take it back about being pussies, I'm proud of you for doing your damnedest to be transgressive by being colossal perverts.
"Chapter One" is seriously only three fucking pages long, and tells you nothing about the Baali. So I'll tell you something about the Baali!
Once upon a time, in Vampire: the Masquerade, the Camarilla were the bad guys and the Sabbat were the really bad guys - the anarchists, the infernalists - read: devil worshipers - and somehow even the communists. Then they got their own sourcebook, and lots of people wanted to play the Sabbat, so they couldn't be badder guys anymore. The situation was even worse in Vampire: the Dark Ages because there were no monolith blocks and it was all every-vampire-for-him/her/itself. So they created the Baali - the one clan/bloodline that everybody (Christian vampire, Islamic vampire, Jewish vampire - fuck you pagans) could hate, because they worshiped the devil, and made pacts with demons! Naturally, this didn't last forever either.
This is also the end of pretty much anything meriting an "adults only" warning in the book, unless you count a couple dry accounts of atrocities and the occasional nipple offensive, or if the whole demon-worshiping bit grips your shit as blasphemous like Optimus Prime taking it up the tailpipe from Megatron and Starscream at the same time.
Chapter Two: Dissonant Echoes
This chapter starts out with a full-page cutout of eight symbols with overlapping paragraphs on a blotchy parchment background - this is essentially DRM for 1998, when shitty black-and-white scanners would render the page an unreadable cross-hatched grey blob that would drive people on alt.vampire.share blind trying to read.
There are a couple important things in this chapter.
First, the entire book is openly contemptuous of Christianity/Judaism/Islam but still feels the need to go back and make it clear that fundamentally they got it right. So it's a bizarre mishmash of realizing that the Bible isn't 100% historically accurate and Christianity is derivative of older religions, and basically conforming to the same us-vs.-them mentality that Christians imagine Satanists to be about. Imagine if Margaret Murray's Witch-Cult had been all about worshiping pre-Christian demons and you've about got the early history. Making it even more funny, somebody involved in the writing had obviously read Anton LaVey and poked fun at every little sect that worshipped "Satan" or some other specific demon or devil as having missed the fucking point.
Second, the truth behind the creation of the Baali is supposed to be a Big Fucking Deal. Turned out it was Saulot. Which made as much sense as anything in WoD. Nobody cared.
That out of the way, the chapter is basically a history of the Baali, which mostly takes place in the ancient Middle East, centering around the oldest Baali on record (what? Devil-worshippers hated by everyone can't keep millenia-old records? You just hold on man, these guys have devil-worshiping librarians!); old-school WoD players can merrily fap their way from Mesopotamia to the fall of Carthage and then through the birth and spread of Islam. The Baali, without an Antediluvian backing them, basically get their asses kicked and bicker like feuding, devil-worshiping children down the centuries.
Chapter Three: Descent Into Darkness
This chapter opens with the infamous picture of a naked woman squatting over a pile of crawling bugs, her genitalia concealed by strategically-placed swarming bugs, one of which appears to be dropping from her snatch, with more bugs being vomited forth from her mouth onto her chest. You just know some poor bastard lost his left-hand-virginity to that pic. On the next page is a quote from Dr. Faustus.
This chapter describes how the Baali get along in the world of Dark Ages Europe. Which is to say, they really fucking don't. The way the Baali make new vampires breaks the rules. The Baali themselves can't operate openly, or all the other vampires, the Church, and everyone else will fucking murder them. Getting Baali to work together is a dark miracle, because there's a bunch of different sects and groups, some of which worship insect-demons, Lovecraftian demons, sleeping-beneath-the-earth-demons, old-pagan-god demons, Satan...and so on, and so forth. There's a nominal ultimate evil lord, Ba'al, that every Baali is supposed to defer to, but nobody's heard from him in fucking forever, so everybody just does their own thing.
A lot of things in this chapter are...counter-intuitive. Are the Baali a clan or a bloodline? Well, they have no overall clan-structure beyond devil-worshiping, and they can't even agree on that, and any regular interaction with vampire society is nil because, again, murdered on sight. They're nominally all one bloodline, but broken up by different practices and ways of behavior. As might be expected, there are snippets tying the Baali in to most of the other Vampire devil-worshipers - yes, there are non-Baali infernalists - and unlike them, the Baali generally don't go in for demon investments (read: pacts with demons, trading your soul for Demonic Powerz!) Why? Supposedly the Baali know better. Really, it just seems like this would be the perfect place to talk about Dark Thaumaturgy, demonic investments, and other such things, but the writers barely mention it.
They do introduce the D'habi, though, my very favorite ghoul family. They're inherently gimped with only two Disciplines because any D'habi showing any use of Daimonion is immediately killed. There's natural selection for you. Still, I like an entire ghoul-family of devil's librarians.
The mechanics section is bad, even by White Wolf standards. Two useless skills (Demonology and Plague-Breeding), some talk about Roads, a generally crappy selection of Merits & Flaws - actually, I want to talk about this for a minute.
One of the things that sets the Baali apart is that they can "adopt" vampires from other clans. These characters take the 2-point Apostate merit, and switch out one of the Baali's non-Daimonion Disciplines for one of their old clan's disciplines. This is actually really cool, because it means you could potentially have an entire group of characters of the same clan but with a diverse range of talents and experiences - and they might not have a reason to immediately kill each other! Granted, every other vampire will probably wonder why the faux-Tremere and the faux-Setite are getting along so famously and where that virgin they were saving for the feast went, but it's more than can be said of the traditional Vampire group.
Of course, Daimonion powers suck. The higher-up versions even more so. Never fucking mind that by the very history given, none of the Baali n history should even qualify for the highest powers just by dint of generation.
Really, I'm disappointed. This would have been THE logical book to do Infernalism for Vampire: the Dark Ages - fuck, Vampire period. They could have reprinted all the crap about Demonic Investments and Daimonion and Dark Thaumaturgy in this one book and it would have been an okay start, but to have nothing attractive or fucked up or powerful about the Baali insults my inner power-gaming munchkin character-creator. I'd have to go and buy a fucking Mage supplement to get anything worthwhile out of making deals with demons in 1998.
Chapter Four: A Hideous Throng
These are sample characters. Most of them suck, but I enjoy the artwork. Except Brood Mother:
Now, here's the big problem with the bug-worshiping Baali - who are more than well represented throughout the fucking book - there are no stats or mechanics that reflect this kind of thing, aside from one crappy flaw.
Appendix: To Reign in Hell
Prominent Baali. While more gender-balanced than you might expect, this is still just a three-page chapter covering four people without stats. Lame.
Appendix II: Of Interest to Scholars and Chirurgeons
This is two paragraphs and two sentences long. HALF A FUCKING PAGE. HALF. ONE COLUMN, and it doesn't even reach the bottom of the page! They had to stick in some guy's head with a four-forked lamprey-tongue to fill in the white space!
The last three pages are a Vampire character sheet, which you are allowed to photocopy and use for creating your character. The problem being that they say "Clanbook Baali" at the top of the elaborate border along each page. And the rest of your mates at the table are presumably not-Baali, and Baali are to be murdered on sight, so this is basically giving them a perfect excuse to fuck with you at will.
