OSSR: Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand

[Username17]

Ancient History had a pretty good piece on Clanbook: Baali, and it got me thinking (and drinking) about the truly messed up sourcebooks that White Wolf came out with over the years. And so, armed with a glass of mead and a bottle from which to refill that glass as needed (and boy is it needed), I decided to plunge into the legendary sourcebook: Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand.

So why is this book legendary? It is the only book that White Wolf ever redacted. They stand by Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom and Gypsies, but Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand had to go. The date is 1994, and Vampire is taking off. They have all these dangling hooks like the Jyhad and Sabbat incoherence, and they decide to put out a book to clarify things. Shit just got real.

Black Pages

Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand (DSotBH) begins with some black pages with just a few hanging quotes. I think this is DRM for 1994 - if you try to copy this book you'll run out of xerox ink. Then you get the Table of Contents. The early chapter titles are basically interchangeable. Some art goes by and we're 6 pages in and have no idea what this book is about.

You Are One of Us Now!

The book teeters wildly between in-game and out-of-game voice. It was the early nineties, and books just did that shit back then. The chapter's hook is that by reading the book you would be tainted by the forbidden knowledge and then you'd be one of them. It's not really a chapter about character creation, it's a chapter about talking up how big the impact of the rest of the book is going to be.

Here's also where they lead up to the big reveal: The Sabbat is also called "The Black Hand". There are a group of enforcers of Sabbat dogma within the Sabbat who are called "The Black Hand". There is a secret society inside that organization who are called, wait for it... "The Black Hand". They are not actually part of the Sabbat. Also they have a secret inner circle who are called "The Black Hand". We are assured that despite these guys being Sabbat members who secretly oppose the Sabbat, they have also infiltrated all other organizations of vampires and any vampire you meet could be a Black Hand member deep mole. Also these deep cover moles have a giant black moon tattooed on their hand - apparently to make infiltrating hostile police states more challenging.

While mentioning the false Black Hand, this chapter focuses primarily upon the real Black Hand. Therefore, when the "Black Hand" or "Hand" is mentioned, it is a reference to the real Black Hand, unless specifically stating the "False Hand" or unless the section is specifically talking about the False Hand.

We are assured that The Hand is only 300 people, and despite this they have literally seven different types of line trooper and many levels of hierarchy. Then they have a text box that disavows any claims that the book you are reading contains facts. I was pretty sure I already knew that considering that the organization chart they just described to me was fucking insane. I need another glass.

There is a segment about paranoid rumors floating in the Sabbat about what the Black Hand is up to. This pretty much flies in the face of the entire nomenclature of the book, because supposedly the Sabbat doesn't even know that there is a True Hand, so I guess that section is about the False Hand? I don't fucking know.

The Black Hand Revealed!

Not actually a chapter, just a subheading in chapter one, but this is where things go full crazy so it needs a section heading just so that I can talk about it. The big reveal here is that the Black Hand is a separate sect that is using The Black Hand in the Sabbat. They also announce that the Black Hand has infiltrated every other group the author could remember. Despite the fact that there are only 200 of them and fully a quarter of them are micromanaging Sabbat hit squads, the rest manage to be Princes in the Camarilla, leaders of Mage Traditions (yes, really), muckety mucks in the Inconnu (back then, they were really trying to get us to care about the Inconnu, it wasn't until much later that they gave up and had them killed off camera), evil werewolves, wraiths, and even a mummy. And they somehow manage to have Justicars as "pawns", though what they could possibly hold over a Justicar is beyond me. Also they have four entire ghoul families despite there only being 200 of them. And they have a presence in the Mortal World, the Underworld, and the Deep Umbra.

Then they contradict themselves announcing that the Black Hand is going to kill everyone and issue in a bloody purge by the Antediluvians and also that they are protecting humanity by fucking over the regular vampire leaders. But that ain't shit compared to the next big reveal: the discipline of Vicissitude is actually a space monster called "The Soul Eaters" that the True Hand collected in the Deep Umbra and then released into the Tzimisce clan so that they can make war on it to drive it back to the Deep Umbra. You may ask why if the True Hand were the ones that brought it here the people who have it are 100% made of people who are not members of and do not know about the True Hand? You might also want to know why the True Hand gave it out in the first place if their intention was just to fight the Soul Eaters. Hell, you might want to know how the fuck a shape changing discipline qualifies as a space virus monster. The answer to this and all other questions is: Fuck You.

Now the origins of the Black Hand are revealed. Turns out they were actually mages who turned themselves into Vampires for eternal life exactly like the Tremere (but earlier and more secret). But they started with Euthanatos instead of Order of Hermes, so they have different and more necromancy themed sorcery. Then it gives a meandering Xena-style backstory where they met every single group the author could think of and learned their ways over a period of several thousand years. In doing this, they give us a few more organizations to worry about - the Tal'mahe'Ra (which is another name for the True Black Hand, but which is only used to indicate old-school traditionalists who were Mages except when they forget), the Western Hand, and the Eastern Hand (because there was a split between the European and Middle Eastern branches of the global multidimensional conspiracy). And all the different overlapping organizations are led by shadowy councils, so by my count the organization is more than 10% central committee. The meandering hubris of this history section is best summed up by the following:

The Tal'mahe'Ra played only a limited role in the forming of the Camarilla

That an event happened in Vampire history that one branch or another of the Black hand was only partially responsible for is supposed to be something of a revelation. The revelation isn't that they were involved, it's that they weren't wholly responsible. But the most brain breaking part of their history is when the Verbena had a falling out with the Hand over the Tal'mahe'Ra in Europe (not to be confused with the Western Hand apparently) having used their hunter pawns in the Inquisition to burn their Verbena Mage pawns at the stake as part of a completely unexplained plan to put pressure on elder vampires (a group which includes the Tal'mahe'Ra leadership, by the way). Considering that Verbena Mages are anti-vampire and could be counted on to put pressure on elder vampires just by giving them an address, this part of the plot makes no sense on any level. I had to read it five times just to be sure it really said that. When I started thinking about it I had a beer in my hand and now I need a new one.

The numbers of Black Hand members infiltrating various organizations keeps getting stated and restated. These numbers don't add up at all. Also they tell you about the Silent Agenda, and the Shadow Crusade. These are different things. The Silent Agenda is where the faction is secretly helping the Antedelluvians, and the Shadow Crusade is where the faction is secretly fighting a war with the Tzimisce to try to destroy the Soul Eaters that they apparently brought in in the first place. But that's not consistent at all, in that the later appendix "The Hidden Agenda" is about the Soul eater thing. This might also be a good time to point out that the Soul Eater plotline is directly contradicted in rules text in the Player's Guide, in that the Tzimisce Antediluvian has a rules writeup for the Vicissitude that he apparently has. Also bonus points for describing the horrible things that The Black Hand will do to people who betray them with the Vicissitude that they discovered but don't actually have any of because they are at war with it.

Then there is a digression about their special secret city in the underworld called Enoch. It is quasi-separate from the other Hand factions, but is still just called The Black Hand. It also has no less than four explicit power structures led by councils of ten or more people plus an unnamed number of people lower in the food chain than the top brass. Of course, the faction's limited numbers are already more than spoken for by the numbers listed for the mortal world branches, so this doesn't work out now matter how ridiculously top heavy you make the Hand in the land of the dead's force org chart.

Chapter Two: Unlife Within the Black Hand

This chapter is mostly apologetics about how the Black Hand isn't really so bad and regular Camarilla and Sabbat vampires are big meanies and Soul Eaters are totally an alien invasion that is super dangerous. There's a nearly full page text box about how the discipline of Vicissitude is actually the space monster from Parasyte. And since Parasyte had been going in Japan for four years before Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand came out, I think that blatant ripoffs are blatant. For those of you who haven't read Parasyte, it's a manga about a guy who gets infected with a space monster that allows him to fluidly warp his body into all kinds of crazy shapes, but the majority of the aliens in question perform their infection by eating the brains of their target, giving them full control over the body. You know, exactly like the souleaters in this fucking book.



Also: for reasons I do not understand, apparently people didn't really do anything about the Souleater menace until 1984. I don't know why specifically 1984. It's awfully specific and recent of a date, but still considerably before the first printing of Vampire. Maybe the author is fapping to the discovery of the AIDS virus?

In order to become a member of the Black Hand, they have to choose you for membership. They only choose low humanity elders of great political power and skill who treat mortals with respect. That might be while they recruit so fucking slowly, because that is a description of like zero creatures of any type or age. Alternately, they have Revenant Families that kidnap orphan children who live in shitty conditions and then train them up to be ninjas and ghoul them and/or embrace them at some point. These two ways into the Hand are completely different and both presented as the only way to get into the Hand. In any case, they rant on for some time about how the Hand has coteries that have a special name. Multiple pages, but as far as I can tell they aren't actually different from coteries or packs. Supposedly they are based on Egyptian Werewolf team structure, for all the difference that makes (which is to say, none).

Much is made about the Silent Agenda (not the same as the Secret Agenda!), which is to help the Antediluvians conquer the planet when they awaken. To this end they have four really old creatures in a vault in their shadow city of Enoch. They do not know what these creatures are or what they want. But they are "pretty sure" that at least three of them are probably one Antediluvian or another. But those fuckers didn't get along when they were awake the first time, and despite the fact that such powers exist and aren't even hard to get, the Black Hand does not appear to have anyone who can just fucking ask these torporic assholes what they want. So apparently, the entire Black Hand is a millennia old cargo cult that has been doing every single thing they have been up to over the last several thousand years under the completely random guess that those activities will happen to be the ones that father will like when and if he shows up.

Most of what you're supposed to do is to infiltrate the other factions and trick them into hurting each other. This is fairly weird, because the other factions in the World of Darkness do not appear to need any help at all from anybody in deciding that they want to hurt each other. And also because if you skip ahead a bit you realize that the Black Hand has no particular way to infiltrate anything. You might think that they might have some sort of thaumaturgical technique to bypass the near ubiquitous magical lie detector tests that both the Camarilla and the Sabbat use on a regular basis to check for traitors - but they don't.

After having insisted for several pages that these guys are the good guys, they then take a few pages to explain how they commit human sacrifices for no tangible benefit and also run around cutting the faces off of their victims so that they can lacquer them and wear them as masks while dancing around pretending to be flesh eating zombies. Finally, they go on about how evil Diablerie is and how when Caine comes back all diablerists are going to be super fucked, and then it discusses when diablery is acceptable to the Hand (any time the target has killed a Hand member and possibly even if they've only attempted to do so, so really it's like all the fucking time) and then they give a full page of alternate diablery rules for getting memory flashes like you'd done a Highlander Quickening. That last bit of hypocrisy is pretty standard for Vampire factions, but coming on the tail of all the other internal inconsistencies, it's wearying.

Chapter 3: The Blood of Our Own

It starts off by telling you the bloodlines that are accepted by the Hand. There are nine. Of those nine, three of them are made up for this book (the others are Malkavians, Gangrel, Ventrue, Nodferatu, Toreador, and Assamite Antitribu). You have the True Brujah (Brujah who suck), the Old Clan Tzimisce (Tzimisce who suck), and the Nagaraja (like Tremere but all Necromancy All The Time). More on those guys when they actually tell you anything about them, for now it's just teasers.

In order to help explain the attitudes of the sect, they split the Hand into four groups: Sabbat, Camarilla, Eastern, and African. Wait, what? There were like five flavors of Black Hand just two chapters ago and only one of them was on that fucking list, you fuckers! So I guess the Camarilla and Sabbat branches are schisms from the Western Hand, and also there's an African Hand. And maybe they aren't listing the Tal'mahe'Ra or the Enochian Hand because they don't have a proper foreign policy to have attitudes about other clans with? And the False Hand and Falser Hand weren't on that list because they aren't really Hand Members, they are just named The Black Hand in order to confuse me personally. Also bonus points for there now being a Sabbat Black Hand and also a Sabbat Black Hand that are two completely different things. Then it gives a rundown on how the sect feels about various other factions. Bonus points: it specifically mentions that there are, for example, Ravnos in the Black Hand despite the fact that they are not on the list of nine vampire types allowed in. Aargh.

Anyway, then it repeats their nonsense history with the Verbena. This looks like copypasta to drive up word count and give me a rage stroke. The Ghoul Families of the Hand are hard for me to wrap my mind around. If they have a ghoul breeding program in-house, why do they kidnap children from the slums of the world to train up as ghouls? Then they give a writeup about the various feuds they have with various factions. These include Sabbat Loyalists, the Setites, Chinese Vampires, and Russia. They note here that the Followers of Set have all the goods on the True Hand and could basically wipe them out at any time by turning state's evidence, but they don't for no adequately explained reason. Also that the True Hand is planning to kill all the Setites including Set, even though he is an Antediluvian and one of less than ten people in the entire universe that their entire Silent Agenda is supposed to be about groveling before. I don't even words.

Chapter Four: Building Better Bastards

Here we are: the crunchy bits!

We get character generation rules. These helpfully inform us that there are only eleven bloodlines accepted by the Black Hand. This is the third time they have described what bloodlines are allowed in, and every time they do it, they add one. If this book kept going long enough, eventually all bloodlines in the World of Darkness would have a place in the Hand. Character generation rules are based on the Elder Creation rules from Elysium, which means that they are broken as hell. There is a background where you get more points, and you can spend some of those points on having more background points if you want. Also, these rules just allow you to declare that you're old and get more points if you want. You can spend those points on the being old background which will give you even more points. I don't know what the point of all that point accounting is if you can just ask for more points.

There's a bunch of stuff about character creation checklists and stuff and even drunk I can't get myself to read that shit. The big things people are after are the new character options. There are three new Bloodlines. The True Brujah are basically unplayable - they are simple inversions of the regular Brujah. Instead of getting pissed more often, they sink into permanent evil depravity much faster. And instead of having Celerity and moving fast, they have Temporis and make everything around them move slow. This is game mechanically inferior to oWoD Celerity, and is only interesting at all to people who already have Celerity, because it stacks. The Old Clan Tzimisce, in addition to having a background that makes negative sense, are also awful. Instead of having an awesome and unique discipline, they don't. They are Animalism, Dominate, and Auspex. Decent enough disciplines, but in no way special and they come with the same crippling weakness. The interesting one is the Nagaraja. They have Auspex, Necromancy, and Nihilistics (more Necromancy) and also have bonus access to all the thaumaturgy that you use to manipulate spirits and the dead. They also have to eat human flesh, which is the most crippling weakness any bloodline has ever been afflicted with.

I think it's important to note at this point that "necromancy" is something that never really worked well in World of Darkness. And because of that, they keep writing up new thaum paths and new disciplines that do necromantic stuff. So if you want to mess around with the spirits of the dead (and I know I do, because that's awesome), you really have to slap together a lot of different sources and pile magic from different shit together. The Nagaraja have three different sources of pushing ghosts around, meaning that they are a platform from which you might actually be able to make "I talk to ghosts" a workable character concept.

There are also some more "Paths". A Path is an alternate score to Humanity where you have some completely random set of ethical guidelines and you only lose out and degenerate if you violate those. Paths are inherently powergamey, since by definition the more of them there are the more likely it is that you can find a path that your character is unlikely to ever break. The specific paths in here are generally fairly shitty, and get extra points for being almost wholly incompatible with the faction whose book they are supposedly in (the Black Hand is supposedly big into honor, the Path of Lilith degenerates you if you help others or keep your word).

The extra skills are pretty lame. Also they come with art recycled from earlier in this fucking book, which makes it feel like more of a fuck-you than recycled art normally does.

The book does come with even newer paths of thaumaturgy. These are totally awesome. The Path of Biothaumaturgical Experimentation is just as cool as it sounds (barring of course, using White Wolf Mechanics). It lets you make Chimera from Full Metal Alchemist. There are a smattering of rituals, most of which are completely useless but a few of which are very flavorful ways of getting into and out of Enoch (their secret base in the Underworld). A for effort here. There are some great Merits and Flaws in here as well. You can own an Airport or an Extremist Group for only 4 points!

Finally, rules for playing as Revenants from the stupid Ghoul Families that the Hand has. They are actually pretty powerful, but you still don't care.

Chapter Five: Enoch, the City Caine Built

The Black Hand has a secret city that is in the land of the dead and surrounded at all times by impenetrable storms of Wraith Tempest. Nothing can get in or out except through teleportation, and the only powers that will specifically teleport you to this place (rather than a co-terminus location in the underworld that you'd have to walk to it from) are in this book. The book spends really a long time hammering that shit home, but it's actually a fairly minor point.

There is discussion of a specific decadent palace that is almost wholly empty and I don't know why they think it needs a whole section devoted to it. The entire population of the "city" is listed as less than two hundred, which is actually less than the amount of people who are listed as having jobs in it, so again: numbers are not this book's strong suit.

Chapter Six: Templates

These are sample characters. Just to drive the point home with how much "largely reprinted from the Elysium book" these chargen rules are, the sample Character Sheets actually have the Elysium logo printed on them. Copypasta fail! The characters are extremely terrible at doing the things they are supposed to be good at. They might actually be OK as low-threat NPCs of various flavors, but it's 22 pages for only 10 characters, so really it's just a colossal waste of space.

Appendix One: Those You Should Fear

Basically an example of the layout the previous chapter should have had. It's only a few pages long, and it has some NPC descriptions and some usable NPC statlines (for different characters). It is only 6 pages and has backgrounds for a couple NPCs and stat lines for like 8 flavors of mook. Not bad.

Appendix Two: The Hidden Agenda

Not to be confused with the Silent Agenda, which is of course something else. This is just half a page of nightmare fuel, ranting about Souleater assimilation failures. Big flesh blobs with brains floating in them and Souleater babies that ripped themselves out of their host in order to attack people or some shit. It's fairly stupid, but at least this appendix is short.

And that's the book.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

<wipes_away_tears> Yeah, that brings me back. The truly terrible thing is that most of that shit managed to get brought up at least once all the way until the end of the game. They even dropped the ghost of a nuclear weapon on Enoch (of course!) You can't get more pure crazy in Vampire unless you bring up Rasputin.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Hmm. Great nightmare recap. Two questions:

What exactly was redacted? Was it the Space Herpes?

Was this the book that had the Path of Thaumaturgical Alchemy, which was the broken-as-fuck-turn-the-air-to-liquid magic?

[Ancient History]

Magical space herpes was redacted as the gibbering of paranoid old vampires, though they kept a version of it into 3rd edition for fuck-knows-why reason. The True Brujah and Old Clan Tzimisce were made bloodlines derived from their clans rather than the "original" clans, and the Nagaraja got their backstories nerfed as well; every single one of the disciplines and thaumaturgical paths were revised or eliminated. Most of the false Black Hand/true Black Hand crap was redacted or simply ignored. Enoch got nuked at the end of Wraith, sparking the Sixth Great Maelstrom and killing pretty much everything else in the book; the surviving ghoul families and sects went off in different directions and nobody knows what the fuck happened to the chatterlings.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So why is this book legendary? It is the only book that White Wolf ever redacted. They stand by Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom and Gypsies, but Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand had to go.

Holy shit, White Wolf stands by Lunars 1E but not this book? What the hell could possibly be in it that's so bad?

*reads*

That did NOT disappoint.

[Josh_Kablack]

And instead of having Celerity and moving fast, they have Temporis and make everything around them move slow. This is game mechanically inferior to oWoD Celerity,

I don't think you're reading it close enough.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Why does White Wolf suck so bad at making sympathetic anti-heroes? They try constantly and repeatedly at this task but never fail at fucking it up.

I mean, I could get behind the idea of a space alien clan whose job it is to protect mortals by infiltrating superpowered sects and causing them to derp out. That kind of thing is pretty cool and is also very in-theme for Monster Mash setups. But... yeah. Just read Frank's review.

[Username17]

Was this the book that had the Path of Thaumaturgical Alchemy, which was the broken-as-fuck-turn-the-air-to-liquid magic?

There were a lot of thaumaturgy paths of varying degrees of ridiculous overpower. The path of Alchemy actually had the vague restriction that you had to do it in a lab, meaning that it had no use on the fly at all, meaning that most of what you wanted to do with it was impossible. At level 1, literally all it did was let you boil water. At level 5, you can boil water down into Plutonium. Totally broken of course, but also mostly useless - especially at the levels you are likely to have. In any case, it is in Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy.

-Username17

[Voss]

Why does White Wolf suck so bad at making sympathetic anti-heroes? They try constantly and repeatedly at this task but never fail at fucking it up.

Because inevitably someone at whitewolf adds some random shit to whichever faction they are working on to reveal that one of the skeletons in the closet of said faction is that they are all secretly at least one of the following: necrophiliacs, rapists, furries, incestuous hookers and/or pedophiles. Or occasionally just genocidal maniacs. And for bonus points or flavor, you can usually tack BDSM on the front of whichever element you choose from that list. Because it is 'dark' and 'trendy.' Or at least was when WW was relevant to anyone.

[Username17]

And instead of having Celerity and moving fast, they have Temporis and make everything around them move slow. This is game mechanically inferior to oWoD Celerity,

I don't think you're reading it close enough.

Here's what it does:

•: Time Sense. Nothing. At one dot, all you can do is detect time distortions. The game doesn't have a lot of time distortions in it.
••: Ramble On. This is a Save or Lose. The target repeats their last action for a period of time that is likely considerably longer than any combat is likely to be. However, it also ends if the target can make a very easy perception check if they are in any situation that appears dangerous. So it's really only good for like confusing guards or something.
•••: Zombie's Curse. One target suffers a penalty in melee combat and has reduced movement speed.
••••: Cowalker. Like D&D Timestop except that you can't cast spells and have them go off when the time bubble ends. Also it costs a damn willpower and all you can do in the time bubble is move and heal.
•••••: Frozen Object. It's temporal stasis, but it only works on inanimate objects. Has a completely incoherent timing issue where it talks about you using it on bullets in the air, but it doesn't actually say it doesn't take a full action to use. So as worded, it just lets you stop one bullet a turn by readying an action to do so. Neo, you are not.

It's actually a really terrible discipline.

-Username17

[JigokuBosatsu]

Hmm, I remembered it being more broken, but we did play a bit loose with some stuff.

Now I need to do an OSSR. Maybe kill one of my sacred cows, like 1E Mummy.

[Ancient History]

WOD: Gypsies, Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah, Clanbook: Giovanni, Clanbook: Giovanni (revised)...and those are just the old ones. I still go into ragefuck mode when I think about the shitstorm that is nWoD necromancy.

[talozin]

WOD: Gypsies, Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah, Clanbook: Giovanni, Clanbook: Giovanni (revised)...and those are just the old ones. I still go into ragefuck mode when I think about the shitstorm that is nWoD necromancy.

I am ... confident that Clanbook: Assamite will have some intensely rageworthy parts, what with the entire fvcking book being basically about Islamic vampire terrorists.

Both editions of Clanbook: Tzimisce are probably overdue for some mockery, as is the section in Vampire Storytellers Handbook Revised where they talk about "how to play the game right" in a manner every bit as pretentious and condescending as you can possibly imagine.

Other good candidates: anything with Samuel Haight, the REALLY early Vampire adventures that were essentially dungeon crawls with diablerie at the end, Ghouls (mostly for the illustrations), literally any single location sourcebook for an area you know well in real life, and the entire Changeling line.

[Ancient History]

Most of the Year of the Ally and Year of the Lotus books, but I'm going to single out Kinfolk: Unsung Heroes and Demon Hunter X as the most batshit.

[K]

Was this the book that had the Path of Thaumaturgical Alchemy, which was the broken-as-fuck-turn-the-air-to-liquid magic?

There were a lot of thaumaturgy paths of varying degrees of ridiculous overpower. The path of Alchemy actually had the vague restriction that you had to do it in a lab, meaning that it had no use on the fly at all, meaning that most of what you wanted to do with it was impossible. At level 1, literally all it did was let you boil water. At level 5, you can boil water down into Plutonium. Totally broken of course, but also mostly useless - especially at the levels you are likely to have. In any case, it is in Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy.

-Username17

The Path of Alchemy has some weird caveat about "Hermetic ideal form" where it said that you couldn't actually use the transmuted items for anything. In fact, it specifically said that you can't turn the Prince's shoes into radium to make a nuclear bomb in that section well before it talks about the Path only working in a lab or controlled environment.

Since it also specifically says that trying to melt down any gold you make will turn it into sludge, I don't know what the Path was supposed to actually do. This means that the proper criticism is "useless" and not "broken."

As for Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, it was the book that hammered home the lesson that there is no true canon in Storyteller games. Each book is just a biased opinion and nothing in any one book can be taken as the truth.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I think this is the one I am remembering. There was some "drop people into liquid floor then let it solidify" cheese in our game, IIRC.

Thaumaturgists who practice this Path can transmute solid iron into a puddle of slag, or petrify wood with a thought. Thaumaturgical Alchemy ignores the laws of chemistry, forcing a change in state regardless of temperature.

System: The player spends a Blood Point. Effects vary depending on the level of the power, but the number of successes determines the number of turns the effect lasts. The vampire can increase the duration of the effect by spending more Blood Points — each additional Blood Point extends the power’s effectiveness by one turn.

1 • Fortifying the Solid Form
At this level, the vampire strengthens the physical structure of solid items. Doors become unbreakable, shields deflect the mightiest blows, and arrows pierce the hardest breastplates. Seemingly fragile items can become deadly weapons in the presence of an alchemist. The alchemist can even make wooden stakes that are as hard as stone.

2 • Crystallize Liquid
Tremere designed this ability to hinder other Cainites from imbibing vitae. Although the effect cannot alter the tissue within vampires or mortals, it can solidify blood as it exits a body. The effect can also freeze water instantly and even turn molten lead to solid metal. The temperature of the liquid is irrelevant — boiling oil or cold water solidifies at the behest of the vampire.

System: Each success changes one Blood Point’s worth of liquid (about two pints) into a solid. The temperature of the substance does not change. When the solid reverts to its natural liquid state, it behaves normally. Vampires cannot consume solidified blood.

3 • Liquify the Solid Form
At this level of ability, the alchemist can dissolve solid objects into liquids. Metal, wood or stone decays at the Cainite’s behest. Swords dissolve in mid-swing and shields ooze into pulp. When the liquid reforms, it solidifies into whatever shape it has taken. Even a finely crafted sword reforms into a useless blob of steel. An object is either changed utterly or not at all; there are no "partial" transformations.

4 • Ethereal Stone
The vampire can transform the very air into a solid prison. Air condenses to form a solid block of ice around the vampire’s enemy. Crafty Tremere have used this ability to suffocate mortals by turning the air in their lungs to ice. The prison is inescapable until the effect wears off.

5 • Vaporous Transformation
Walls and other obstacles no longer hinder the vampire. She can turn stone, metal or any other solid into vapor. Walls vanish and swords disappear into thin air. Recoagulating solids are dangerous to those in their vicinity. Slags of metal or stone that suddenly re-form can crush mortals.

[Prak]

Ugh... so much of that could have worked if, well, if White Wolf was not, apparently, the RPG Industry dumping ground for brain damaged idiots. Hell just a disclaimer for a chapter that said "Here are the rumours that circulate about the Black Hand" because so much of it is classic contradictory conspiracy theorist bullshit.

The merits truly are awesome, however. I mean, I would just get all four mortal ties merits (Airport, Castle, Extremist Group, and University), and instead of spending 7 points on "Capable Assistant" (have a fellow vampire buddy who is your loyal assistant), I'd spend those seven points on "Mage Companion" (3pt), Wraith Companion (3pt) and Student (have a childe who you are mentoring, 1pt). Or hell, I'd just take student 7 times. And they'd all go to my university, and live in my castle, and I'd have a private fucking plane to get my coterie anywhere we needed to go. The Extremists would totally be a Hell's Angels faction that are all bane possessed Fomori, because I'd use my obscene amounts of profit (I own an AIRPORT and a UNIVERSITY. And hell, my Castle would be a historical landmark with tour guides and shit. Who are of course ghouls) to buy them King beer, Dr. Veridian Workout megavitamin supplements that I tell them are steroids or cocaine or something, and all kinds of other bane tainted shit.
Fuck, between owning an Airport and a University, and taking the Entrepreneur merit (all attempts to make money through business deals have -2 difficulty), oh, and being 1000 years old twice over (Maturation and five dots of Age for 180 freebie points), I probably just own Pentex.

(note: I'm pretty sure that maturation and the Age merit were not meant to be taken together, that you get maturation through the age merit, and they just fucked up their numbers. But of course it doesn't seem to state that, nor is there anything about how Age interacts with Generation, though, fortunately, that doesn't also give freebie points, just a larger blood pool)

edit: Oh, also, I swear that the Castle merit references Disney's Gargoyles in it's example explanation for how a character has a castle: "An insane relative had the castle moved from Scotland, stone by stone."

[Username17]

Ugh... so much of that could have worked if, well, if White Wolf was not, apparently, the RPG Industry dumping ground for brain damaged idiots. Hell just a disclaimer for a chapter that said "Here are the rumours that circulate about the Black Hand" because so much of it is classic contradictory conspiracy theorist bullshit.

They actually try that in this book. There is a little subsection on "the most troubling rumors in the Sabbat about the Hand". No one gave a single shit about that section, and hell I didn't really delve into it in my review. There are several problems with that approach: the most damning is that by presenting stuff in the book as having different truth weight, what you're actually doing is presenting the stuff with lower weight as false (and thus a waste of space) and the stuff with higher weight as true (with all the crazy that entails). Readers are really bad at assigning fuzzy logic values other than zero and one.

If you really wanted to present a "choose your own adventure conspiracy" book, what you'd have to do is keep in-character voice the whole damn time and write the book as a series of in-character essays by people with distinct agendas and voices. Then go to the rules section and confirm a small number of facts that are common to several of the presented conspiracies, and let players tear at it. By shifting between in-character and out-of-character voice throughout the book, you just confirm all the stuff. And then you don't have a mix-and-match conspiracy, you have a word salad.

Also, under no circumstances are you to ever have more than two layers of a conspiracy that have the same name. Do not ever try to do that shit.

-Username17

[Prak]

Well, yes. They definitely should have had some idea of what the fuck they were doing. They should have had a better idea of workable numbers. The various conflicting plots and confusingly small number of members and large hierarchy and multiple numbers of "Acceptable Bloodlines" by simply saying that the group is highly fractious, their leader was an antediluvian who is not just in torpor, but was actually killed, and has not been reachable through any number of necromancy powers, so the Black Hand seriously doesn't know what he wants, and a small faction is busy trying everything it can to raise him, bodily or verbally. The rest are a series of overlapping cells which don't worry too much about talking to each other, like High School extracurricular clubs. So you've got Black Hand members who believe the Ravnos are all right, and that the best thing to do is to slay all the other elders, possibly collecting their blood for a giant ritual designed to resurrect their own, while another thinks that Ravnos are dishonorable thieves which are kill on sight, but that making nice to the elders is important.

[kzt]

Also, under no circumstances are you to ever have more than two layers of a conspiracy that have the same name. Do not ever try to do that shit.

And besides, why would someone call their double secret organization something like "The Black Hand"? It's like the allies choosing a cover name for WW2's D-Day like "Operation Bayeux" or calling the Manhattan Engineer District "Project Mega Bomb".

"The Laundry" is the best secret fictional organization name I can think of, as it suggests nothing about what it does or that it has any significant mission.

[Maxus]

"The Laundry" is the best secret fictional organization name I can think of, as it suggests nothing about what it does or that it has any significant mission.

Wheel of Time had a group called the Knitting Circle.

What else is inoffensive?

The Stamp Collectors?

Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club?

The Tuesday Night Bowling Club? (that meets on Sunday Nights)

The Accountants' Social Charity?

[K]

The CIA used to use the name "The Company."

[Username17]

Hmm, I remembered it being more broken, but we did play a bit loose with some stuff.

A lot of people just assumed that Temporis could be used as a free action because it's all about time and it would be fairly shitty if you couldn't. But it does not actually say that. The only useful bits are Ramble On and Cowalker (levels 2 and 4). Ramble On makes you the shoplifting master, because you can make people not notice events around them for a pretty long time as long as nothing is overtly dangerous. And Cowalker does let you win fights, just not the way people think it does.

Cowalker costs an action and a Willpower, which is pretty fucking steep. While in the time bubble, you can heal and move, but you can't actually affect anything around you - not even to open a door. But what you can do is delay your Cowalker action until someone declares an attack on you, then stop time, make their attack automatically fail, walk around behind them, and end your time bubble to take a normal action of sneak attacking the guy in the back. So basically you pay one Willpower to get one perfect dodge and one sneak attack. Good, but it's level 4, and a guy with Celerity 4 is going to rip you in half with the four extra actions he gets that you can't perfect dodge this round.

However, combined with Celerity, it's pretty insane. It only takes one action to Cowalker, and if you have Celerity 4 you can take 4 actions, then stop time, then pop out of the time bubble while under Celerity again in order to take five sneak attacks. Hell, rather than taking the 9th attack you could Cowalker again. As long as you keep spending willpower and blood, your opponents don't even get to act.

But Temporis by itself is severely inferior to Celerity. It takes much higher levels to "get good" and when it does, Celerity is still cheaper and better. The only thing vaguely interesting about it is the way you can use your extra celerity actions to activate Temporis in order to act as a force multiplier on your Celerity.

That all being said, the True Brujah plotline is fine. The Brujah are the "rebel" clan, and the plotline is that the clan founder actually rebelled against her sire. That's very in-character. That the remnant True Brujah are evil dicks who have powerful looking magic that is nevertheless not very good is actually pretty good from a storytelling point of view. They make good villains. The book tries to play them off as tragic heroes or some shit though, which doesn't work at all.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Naturally, when they later nerfed Temporis they made it an "advanced" version incompatible with Celerity - if you have Celerity and learn Temporis, all your Celerity points get automatically translated into Temporis.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Then they give a writeup about the various feuds they have with various factions. These include Sabbat Loyalists, the Setites, Chinese Vampires, and Russia.

Oh, yes. Russia had it's own little personal subplot in the oWoD metaplot. Russia was ruled over by the Baba Yaga, who is in reality a 4th generation Niktuki-bloodline Nosferatu (The Niktuku were the bloodline that was created when Nosferatu looked at his clan, said "Fuck this noise", and started creating children with which to kill his other children. As far as I know, the Baba Yaga was the only payoff to this idea, and since she never left Russia she was a pretty bad payoff). She had figured out a way to inact a mystical Iron Curtain around Russia that she used to keep supernaturals from being able to leave or enter Russia. She also killed off most native Mages, had the werewolves under her boot and kept dragons as pets. (In an interesting and bizarre turn, Koschei the Deathless, instead of being the immortal warrior-sorcerer he is in Slavic Folklore, is actually one of the Russian style dragons.).

As far as I know, this was never put forth in any Vampire books. This was put forth in the Werewolf suppliment Rage Across Russia, which is actually not that bad, but this might be because Russia's fucked up enough on it's own in the real world and therefore doesn't need much more embelleshment beyond what it takes to get it into the metaplot.