(V:tM) Clanbook: Tremere

Clanbook: Tremere (Jess Heinig) is about the most overtly fantastical of Vampire: the Masquerade's thirteen clans, and as such, it's the clanbook that feels most like a functional rpg supplement. This can be something of a mixed blessing - it has the longest powers section of any of the clanbooks I've read so far, but these new rituals are largely bland utility spells that help round out the power curve (you'd be a fool not to take "Ritual's Recognition," the spell that lets you know when your other spells succeed or fail, but you could be forgiven for forgetting it exists mere minutes after reading it for the first time).

I think this book's greatest weakness is that it doesn't have a clear handle on its intended genre. It's made for a horror game but is largely about rank and office politics. You might think that as the sorcerers of the vampire world, the Tremere could support a more urban fantasy brand of horror, but there was little of that in evidence. By wordcount, it was mostly about navigating an expectation towards obedience, and the rewards of breaking the rules without getting caught. There's a bit of a creep factor, because vampires, but this is by far the most bloodless (both a literal statement and a pun) of the vampire clanbooks so far.

But it's also among the most useful, as both a player and a GM resources. It does an effective job at communicating a culture. When you're playing as a Tremere, you're going to find yourself asking "who's ass do I have to kiss and/or who do I have to kill to get a promotion around here" and this book will help you to quickly identify them. It's also the only clanbook I've read which spares some space to explore what a one-clan-only game would have to look like, and frankly it's bizarre to me that this wasn't standard practice (it's funny, it's only been a couple of years since I read the mage traditionbooks, and I seem to recall them occasionally doing stuff like that, but aside from Traditionbook: Dreamspeakers, concrete examples elude me).

The history section was . . . fine. I appreciated that it dealt with specific events, happening recently enough in history to have some level of documentation, but I have to confess that I'm now seeing the upside of just picking a random historical figure that seems like they'd fit the clan's vibe and then giving them a ridiculous World of Darkness alt-history. Without at least one or two of those guys to make me go wtf, you wind up with precisely one line in my notebook, "narrator doesn't know what happened to medieval mages."

Which I suppose brings us to the crux of the issue. Clanbook: Tremere doesn't do horror very well, but it also doesn't do much with the clan's fantasy elements. I remember the early 2000s as a period when White Wolf was especially down on cross-overs, and perhaps the book fell victim to a new policy (I can only assume that this is the reason the events of Blood Treachery get no mention here, despite Jess Heinig being the developer of that earlier book). Certainly, they're the only one of the clans whose "external relations" section claims that mages are entirely extinct.

So, what we've got is a clan where a lot of its identity is rooted in this Order of Heremes backstory that goes all the way back to when White Wolf controlled the rights to Ars Magica, but very little of that backstory is actually used. Thus, instead of having an identity as wizards whose hubris led them to believe they could conquer the Kindred (there's some of that here, but it's dilute), they're kind of just left with the stuff that's unique to their Vampire: the Masquerade context - they're the vampires who are really into hierarchy and sometimes act like they have a stick up their ass.

I think, to be really effective, what a Tremere clanbook needed was more of a sense of transgression and outrage. The Tremere have so many enemies because they usurped the powers of better, more worthy vampires. Funnily enough, their ideal energy is probably pretty close to Samuel Haight. 

Wait . . . do you think that maybe the reason they got such a workhorse of a book is because this is right around the time White Wolf turned Samuel Haight into an ashtray?

Ukss Contribution: You know, for a book about undead sorcerers, blasphemously twisting their unholy curse into a source of occult power, I've actually got surprisingly little inspiration for an Ukss entry. The part where some vampires will breastfeed their homunculi was kind of creepy, I guess, but is that really a thing?

I think this time, I have to go with something from the art, rather than the text.

What is even going on here? There is absolutely nothing in the text to give this even the slightest bit of context. It belongs in a better, more bizarre book.

(D&D 3e) Epic Level Handbook

It's rare that the first page of a book will tell you everything you need to know about it. But the introduction to The Epic Level Handbook (Andy Collins and Bruce R. Cordell) wastes no time in revealing the book's greatest weakness. "The difference between epic magic items and artifacts is that artifacts are unique items generated by a one-of-a-kind event or forging. Many epic magic items are just as powerful as artifacts, but epic characters know how to make them."

This profoundly misses out on what makes epic tier play appealing, and it kind of sets the tone of the whole book. Artifacts are magic items with a deep connection to a setting's lore, created by powerful beings who are more myth than history, and at no point in the entire text does it seem to realize that maybe that's a niche for characters who have transcended the core book's standard level 1-20 progression.

There a planar metropolis, called Union, that acts as the centerpiece of an epic level mini-campaign. The description of its police force gives the stats for a typical guard patrol - two level 14 fighters accompanied by a level 23 sergeant. And if those guys can't do the job, they can call in a back up team . . . 2-5 level 31 characters!

That's the sort of game this book expects you to play. You're level 21+, but you still have to worry about city guards. Never mind conquering the universe, you can't risk being caught shoplifting.

And the level 31 town guards aren't a thing in the setting, either. You might think it could be played for parody, but it isn't. Chapter One gives a list of characters that represent the benchmark for epic level: "Baba Yaga. Conan the Barbarian. Cu Chulainn. Elminster of Shadowdale. Elric of Melnibone. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Gandalf. Gilgamesh. Hiawatha. Odysseus."

Now, aside from doing a terrible injustice to levels 13-18, imagine picking 1d4 + 1 people from that list and paying them 155 gp per day (the canonical wage of a level 31 Union Sentinel) to patrol the marketplace and apprehend pickpockets. I mean, in a multiverse setting I suppose you could have an entire city that was populated by nothing but people who would be culture heroes in their worlds of origin, but something like that would be a lot weirder than the fairly conventional trading town presented in chapter 6. The closest thing I've ever seen in fiction is probably the Citadel of Ricks from Rick and Morty, and that had two whole episodes that went into detail about how unworkable the concept would be.

But that's this book all over. Sometimes, it gets close to an epic feel, but mostly it's committed to telling the same types of stories you had at levels 5-9, but with bigger numbers and with martials being even more of a sidekick to the casters.

Oh, fuck, now I'm remembering it. The Epic Level Handbook has a good idea - allow characters with high skill levels the ability to transcend the possible and perform feats out of legend. If you roll well enough with the Tumble skill, you can safely fall from any distance!

Perfect. Except that "well enough" in this case is DC 100. Just a reminder, the maximum skill rank is your level +3, so that's level 97. Except that you'll probably have some ability to take 10 on Tumble checks, so that's 87. And then maybe Epic Skill Focus, for an extra +10, so 77. Also, attribute bonuses, and other magic item bonuses. Let's say it's an even level 50. To do a feat you could replicate with a level 1 spell!

Oh, I suppose a level 1 wizard could only shorten their fall by 60 feet before Feather Fall wore off, and if I'm extrapolating correctly from the chart (which shortens a fall by 20 feet at DC 30, 30 feet at DC 45, and 40 feet at DC 60), then that would only be a DC 90 check. But a level 2 wizard doubles that to 120 feet. A level 20 wizard gets you approximately a quarter mile (assuming you wouldn't just cast fly or polymorph in that situation), So, I guess there are situations when having inhumanly perfect mastery of a skill might beat out low level magic, but maybe before I make any judgements, I should double-check the new epic spellcasting system and see what a Spellcraft roll can do at a similar DC . . .

Ah, here it is, DC 97 to cast Damnation, a spell where you "send your foe to hell."

Okay, maybe that isn't the best example because it's an inefficient use of the spell creation system (for example, with a similar DC, you could create an instant death spell with a +25 save DC), but the contrast is palpable. Casters get much nicer toys than non-casters.

Not just with skills. Feats as well. Buy a feat that reduces the level adjustment of all your metamagic feats by one or a feat that increases your weapon focus bonus from +1 to +2.

Some of this I have to attribute to inexperience with the 3rd edition rules. When characters advance past level 20, they continue to increase the strength of their class feature and get bonus epic feats. And so, the rate at which you get epic feats depends entirely on how many class features you have. Fighters continue to get a bonus feat at every even level, because that was their level 1-20 pattern. Barbarians get one bonus feat every 4 levels, because their uncanny dodge and damage reduction continue to improve (one point every three levels, staggered so that you only get one bonus at a time). Now, keep in mind, Damage reduction is an epic feat that gives you 3 extra points of damage reduction. And it's on the fighter bonus list. So if both the fighter and the barbarian were investing every available resource into damage reduction, then the fighter would have better damage reduction at level 24 (DR 10/- vs DR 12/-). Which isn't to say the Fighter is overpowered or anything. The fact is, the gap only exists because of the rapidly diminishing returns from advancing low-level abilities (what's one extra point of damage reduction, that only works against physical attacks, going to do for you at level 29? what are you going to do with 8 rages per day that you couldn't do with 7?), and the non-magic feats merely have a slightly slower rate of diminishing returns (because the three points of DR you get from the feat is scarcely better at these levels).

What makes it an absolute shitshow is that mage feats do not have these same diminishing returns. The Automatic Quicken Spell feat applies the core book's most expensive metamagic to all of your level 0-3 spells. Buy it two more times and you'll Quicken all spells on your standard advancement list, even ones that are too high level to cast with metamagic (you'd have to buy 4 levels of improved spell capacity to get the 13th level slot to Quicken a level 9 spell, and you could only do it once per day).

It's probably not a coincidence that every single one of the Forgotten Realms epic characters had multiple caster levels (and all but one was in the double-digits). The meme of "Linear Fighter vs Quadratic Wizard" predicts a widening gap between casters and non-casters, and this book is determined to prove the meme correct.

I guess, overall, I just found this book to be incredibly disappointing. This was an opportunity for the game to really cut loose and indulge in the impossible, but it kept wanting to wrestle the characters into the same old roles. I haven't even addressed the monster design, where they pitch a perfectly fine level 10 creature like the brachyurus, which is essentially a bigger, meaner dire wolf, and then inexplicably give it 38 hit dice. Yes, I suppose this mostly mundane beast is a CR 23 encounter, given that you made the numbers so much bigger, but it's still only a Large creature, same as an ogre or a horse. I refuse to believe that this is a more legendary fight than going up against the Terrasque.

It's funny, but I don't remember being so upset about this book in 2002. I must have had the ability to notice its terrible math (possibly the worst I've seen, only Initiates of the Art comes close) because this was the same year I was acing combinatorics (yeah, it's a brag) and I've only gotten worse at math since then, but in those days, I don't think I scrutinized my games so closely. I never asked myself how many levels my characters would need to deliver on the promise of the back cover, or what it would be like to run every class in the same party. I think it's because I was deep into Aberrant at this time (talking about terrible math) and so I wasn't really invested in having D&D that could work at this power level. I think I just bought the book because I approved of its concept. Maybe I'm lucky that I never got to use it in a real game.

Ukss Contribution: There's only one thing that could go in this space. An idea so distinct and memorable that it stuck with me for 20 years, even though I've only read this book once or twice. I knew, even as I was picking the book off the shelf - "the Ukss contribution is going to be the atropal." It's super edgy, but also one of the few things in the book that felt like it belonged in an epic story and not just a high level campaign. They're the undead fetus of a stillborn god. The idea is creepy. The art is creepy. And the description is creepy: "It constantly drools stinking ichor as it mouths obscenities."

Baby, no!

For all of my frequent complaining that I'm not a horror guy, I've got to recognize when someone does horror right.

(V: tM) Clanbook: Toreador

I have to repeat my conflict of interest disclaimer here, because Greg Stolze worked on this one as well. I would have spaced them out better, but how was I to know?

Anyway, after reading Clanbook: Toreador (Heather Grove and Greg Stolze), I've developed a theory about Vampire: the Masquerade's clans - they can basically be divided into two types: clans based on lore and clans based on vibes. The lore clans are the reason you read the books, but the vibes clans are the reason you play the game.

Broadly speaking, of course. Occasionally, this book will offer a tidbit of canon that makes for fascinating reading (Mozart was made into a vampire! And then immediately diablerized by an Assamite named Muhannad Muzabir, whose description still circulates among clan Toreador to this day!), but mostly the Toreador are at their best when they're communicating a feeling.

Where it gets tricky is that Toreador have both a lore definition (they're the "artist" clan) and a vibes definition (they're the clan you choose if you want to be sexy at the LARP) and sometimes those definitions work well together and other times they clash.

What I think is happening is that the Toreador fell victim to the palpable theater kid energy that sometimes creeps into White Wolf products. To a theater kid, there's nothing sexier than an art nerd, and thus this, the sexiest of all the vampire clans, winds up accidentally getting portrayed as a bunch of total nerds. The opening fiction has a vampire talking about the maps he draws, saying "this one was painted on my most expensive canvas."

Is that a thing normal people care about? Is it even something art enthusiasts would care about? Like, obviously the differing types of canvas have an effect on the final piece, and the comparison of these details can put the work into a historical and cultural perspective, but it's also something that only a nerd would ever think to say. We're nodding along because you're a sexy vampire, but you're not sexy because you know a lot about art, you're sexy because you have no visible need for a job.

(Although, let me say that on a personal level, I get it. I'm enough of a nerd myself to understand the appeal of someone who will blather on about trends in modern art for four pages of a 30-page history chapter. It's the same thing that gives my blog its intense erotic energy).

However, this repeated insistence that the Toreador are really into art, and recruiting artists, and debating the meaning of "art" (Is a serial killer a form of artist? Is it true that "military strategy can be an art?") kind of misses something essential about the Clan - the art is a prop. It's a tool for hunting human prey. You draw them in by waxing eloquent about the power of beauty and intimating a deep and unspoken passion . . . and then you kill them and drink their blood. Or maybe just drink a little bit of their blood over the course of a years-long relationship. But the endpoint is the same - you are a predator and you are relentlessly objectifying that which you claim to love. The exquisite beauty of your mortal lover is reduced to the same level as grading livestock. And the art is just bait in your trap. The spider is in the worst possible position to recognize its web is beautiful.

And I think the weakness of a vibes-based Clan like the Toreador is that it's easy to mistake an aesthetic for a culture. That's how you start with a group of sexy vampires that wears nice clothes, hangs out in high class surroundings, indulges in arch conversations and high-handed gossip, and just generally spends every night of their eternity in soap-opera mode, and then wind up with a group that will chew your ear off explaining the difference between baroque and rococo. What are those rich people chortling over at their elite cocktail parties? Must be something expensive that us plebs are too poor to relate too . . . um, art?

Which isn't to say I'm down on the connection between Toreador and art, but rather that I don't think the book quite manages to convey the psychology at work here. It says that many Toreador vampires are tragic figures because they were artists when they were alive, but being made immortal robs them of their creativity in some vague way, so that they have limitless time, but not inspiration. That's a compelling story when it happens once, but it's unsatisfying as a pattern. I think, if you're going to turn a one-off plot into a whole family of vampires, you've got to understand that you're not dealing with a collection of individual preferences, you're dealing with a cycle of abuse.

A vampire doesn't lose their creativity because creativity is a mysterious and transcendent product of a living soul. They don't even lose it because they are impossibly old and jaded to the turning of history and lost to the small moments that make up a life. No, they lose their inspiration because they are constantly hurting people.

Now, goodness knows that the question of monstrous wrong-doers creating worthwhile art is a whole conversation all on its own, but what I'm really trying to get at here is more akin to the malaise that seems to afflict many creators who become rich off their art, the reason "selling-out" is such a common pejorative - the transformation of art from an end-in-itself to a means to an end. It's a microcosm of what vampires do to people. What they eventually do even to themselves. Everything is a performance. Everything is an affect. Your reward for art, for maintaining relationships, for grooming and taking care of yourself and being sexy, it's just that you get to continue your immortal life. Art is a prop. Human beings are food. And you must maintain the Masquerade.

Where the psychology comes into play is that this process is not instantaneous and never 100% complete, so you can be long tormented by the memory of authenticity. Toreador are drawn to art and artists not because they are nerds, but because they are soul-sick and compelled to poke and prod the one thing that still has the power to hurt them. They are people who have lost art, and over and over again, throughout the centuries, they cause other people to lose it too. That's how Clan Toreador perpetuates itself, just a chain of wrongs going all the way back to the goddess Ishtar.

Clanbook: Toreador is at its best when it captures that sickness. It's intermittent, but it's there. Like, if you take the narrator as being full of shit when they say, "the true horror is boredom," then it's pretty obvious that it takes a lot of horror to get someone to the point where they'll say something so off the mark (I'm pretty sure the true horror is all the death and killing). The best part of the whole book is the "Toreador of Note" section at the very end. It tells three quick horror stories in the form of vampire biographies, and art is only a peripheral theme in any of them. They are about people who came of age in terrible situations, clawed their way up through oppressive social hierarchies through violence and treachery, and then became the very monsters that once tormented them. (Or, at least, two of them are. Enver Frasheri is just this reckless and remorseless killer who gained a reputation as a composer by murdering and plagiarizing promising young musicians, 42 over the course of the centuries, ironically making him the most platonically perfect Toreador imaginable.) And I think the reason these stories work is because they are rooted in specifics. They don't need to talk about art in the abstract, or artistic trends as a historical force. They can just talk about it as if it were a vampire's hobby. Which is all it ever really needed to be.

In the end, I'm left with my original ambivalence. I really like the Clan Toreador for its overall vibe, and I think they are at the heart of what makes Vampire: the Masquerade great as a game. When I think of this game, the one persistent image is going to be that single rose against the green marble background, in lieu of the busier and more grotesque covers of its various supplements, strangely perfect in its simplicity, and what better representative of the game itself than the group known as "the clan of the rose?" However, I'm not sure this book really adds anything to that. Everything appealing about the Toreador is inherited from Vampire: the Masquerade's "urban fantasy meets personal horror" premise. The Clan ranks as one of the greats because its the one that deviates least from the game's overall themes. Additional lore only serves to complicate that.

Ukss Contribution: The soul-painting power. Go into a trance and allow your vampire aura-reading ability to guide your hand as you draw someone's portrait. When you come to, you will have a painting (or sketch or doodle, depending on your level of artistic skill) that captures the subject's true essence, revealing the strengths and flaws of their overall character (in-game, their Willpower and Virtue ratings, as well as their Nature and Demeanor).

I like this because it's mystical, and easy to imagine in the fiction, but not easily operationalized outside of game mechanics. It sounds a lot like the plot to a Twilight Zone episode (in fact, I'm imagining something very similar to The Masks, which still gives me chills just to think about).

(D&D 3e) Enemies and Allies

I'm going to try and make this brief, not just because if I finish this post in less than a half hour, I'll have managed to technically do two posts on consecutive days, but because Enemies and Allies (Bruce R. Cordell, Jeff Grubb, David Noonan, Skip Williams) is a short, 64-page booklet that is at least half-filled with dry, impenetrable stat blocks (read that 15th-level wizard's complete allotment of memorized spells, I dare you).

The most intriguing part of this book was a bit in the introduction: "In this book are some of the most helpful and notorious NPCs that we've created for our home campaigns." That's a really fun pitch, a chance to see how the pros do it. And some of the characters here really do feel like campaign in-jokes pulled from someone's home game. There's a djinn that's a "pacificist," but what that really means is that he relies on hirelings and summoned monsters to do his dirty work. Or "The Claw," a mercenary, but non-evil adventuring party made entirely of monsters (an ettercap, a phase spider, an umber hulk, a pseudodragon, and a troll who rides an elephant). There were times when I really felt the touch of a designer at work - a sense that you could use the published material for more than what was strictly written on the page (we even get a Dwarf Necromancer, in blatant defiance of The Hero Builder's Guidebook).

However, I think the overall project was undermined by being Enemies and Allies and not a chummy, informal zine where we get a peek behind the scenes to see snippets of the writers' home games. That's something that could have been a franchise. You could publish a book like that every year, and they'd all be great (though, maybe it's lucky for me that they didn't, because they'd also be a nightmare to try and collect, and you just know that there'd be one or two really wild ones that go for like a hundred dollars on the secondary market). What we got, instead, was something that was terribly constrained by a mandate to be functional. There's a chapter for criminals, a chapter for religion, a chapter for mages, and a chapter for law enforcement, and while the book is too short to have much cruft, there's also the sense that maybe some of these guys were being included purely for the sake of the theme.

Also, the rules stuff was kind of a drag. Every chapter starts with generic character stats, for people like town guards or back-alley muggers, and maybe that's helpful, but it's not particularly entertaining. And every single entry in the book is accompanied by a "Tactics" section, which sometimes offers a bit of auxiliary characterization, but mostly just tells you which spells they like to cast. The introduction explains it thus, "Enemies and Allies intentionally avoids long NPC histories and intricately detailed descriptions . . . We don't want to cramp your style."

Way to get the vibe exactly wrong, guys. This book would have been 1000% better if they'd just given each of the four authors 15 pages to obnoxiously tell us about their characters.

But the biggest disappointment was the D&D signature characters. I was so excited when I looked at the table of contents and saw an appendix titled "Iconic Characters." I thought I was finally going to see the canon histories of these guys who are always showing up in rules examples and character art. I thought I'd stumbled upon a real treasure - an overlooked supplement from early 3rd edition that would put almost every other book into a new context.

Sadly, what I got instead were three stat blocks each - at levels 5, 10, and 15. Because apparently the only thing these guys were used for was internal playtesting. No flavor text at all. I guess, if you're playing a preconstruct, you kind of want the freedom to create your own backstory and personality, but it still made me sad. I was hoping to get some material for exciting new fan-fiction.

With all that said, I still really enjoyed Enemies and Allies. Like Hero Builder's Guidebook, I only bought it because it was abnormally cheap (I actually got it for less than its year 2000 MSRP even when you factor in shipping), but unlike Hero Builder's Guidebook, when all was said and done, I felt like this was a book I might theoretically use (in the unlikely event that I ever ran a 3rd edition campaign).

Ukss Contribution: I really like The Claw, maybe more as an institution than a particular group of characters, but I think it's a concept that could definitely anchor a series of comic books or tie-in novels - a squad of monsters that decided to adopt the adventuring lifestyle, morally ambiguous, but only in the same way as a typical party of PCs. Also, anything that makes alignment less of a direct setting element is highly appreciated.

(V: tM) Clanbook Giovanni

First off, I have to declare a conflict of interest - I worked on a project with one of the authors of this book. Greg Stolze contributed a short story to my Creative Commons anthology, Tales of Clickbait. Now, this isn't something that's going to make me a ton of money (last time I checked, it had sold a total of 3 copies - out of the 600 I need to break even), but I do technically have a financial stake in going easy on this guy. To be absolutely above-board (and because some talented people did some good work on this project, and they deserve to be seen), I am going to include a free download link to the book.

There, now that that business is out of the way, I can tell you that a large portion of my experience with Clanbook: Giovanni (Greg Stolze with John Chambers) was waiting for the other shoe to drop, re: disgusting depictions of necromancy, and it never did. I realize now that what happened was that I mentally grouped together Clanbook: Giovanni with the description of Giovanni necromancy in Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy. So I was remembering that the Giovanni were really gross, and when I read that previous bit of extreme grossness (a detailed description of surgically-augmented necrophilia), I thought, "whoa, if it's this gross now, in a book I remember as being relatively benign, what is it going to be like when I reach the book I remember as being really gross?" And the answer to that is just that I got some wires crossed. It turns out I'd already passed the thing I was dreading.

Which is not to let Clanbook: Giovanni entirely off the hook. It had its moments of grossness. There's something like half a page (page 26, to be exact - I wrote down the page number in my notes because I really didn't want to transcribe what I was reading) where it talks about the Giovanni indulging in the decadent pleasures afforded by extreme wealth and I'm sitting here thinking, "you know that these guys are supposed to be player-characters, right?"

I could spend several paragraphs harping on that half page, and it would all be entirely earned. It's got that weird, somewhat leering portrayal of incest where it pretends to be a consensual breaking of taboo instead of a monstrous abuse of familial trust. And it rattles off a list of the fucked-up shit the family gets up to and includes (slur words) gays and lesbians alongside rape and pedophilia. Some of that can be laid at the feet of the narrator, a conservative vampire gangster, who realistically would have that kind of attitude, but it was a real human being who chose that narrator, so it's only a half pass.

Though I don't want all of you to think I'm some kind of prude. I get that there's a genre thing at work here. "Depraved aristocrats, so far divorced from consequences that they lose sight of all morality and human dignity" definitely has a niche in horror. A good niche, even. If I think of the Clan Giovanni as a story, where a naive young scion gets ensnared by the "family business" and then gradually discovers layer upon layer of unspeakable family secrets, each more unspeakable than the last, then that's something I could see myself watching. I watched Game of Thrones up to season 6, so I don't have any call to be getting up on a high horse here.

It's just that roleplaying games feel a bit different from other forms of entertainment. You're encouraged to identify with the characters to a much greater degree than you would in more passive forms of media. Cersei Lannister is a compelling villain, but how are you supposed to feel when someone hands you her character sheet and tells you she's your PC for the upcoming campaign?

Conflicted, that's how. Just like I'm conflicted about Clanbook: Giovanni possibly being the best of the clanbooks I've read so far. It's not purely down to the quality of the writing (sorry, Mr Stolze), even though the narration does have an easy conversational style and distinctive voice. Rather, I think the Clan Giovanni was just an easier assignment than the Gangrel or the Brujah. Clanbook: Giovanni is the best for the same reason Clanbook: Assamite is almost as good - it is about a specific group of people, with a specific history, who did well-documented things for knowable motives. The Giovanni don't embody abstract and primordial principles like "rebellion" or "the animal nature of the predator." Their antediluvian has a street address.

And that makes it easy to immerse yourself in their history and culture. It's kind of absurd when the narrator declares his descent from the Roman Emperor Flavius Jovianus (and, also, the most clever of White Wolf's in-canon retcons - "Giovanni" is a conspicuously bland Italian surname because it wasn't a real surname at all, just a pseudonym, chosen for its superficial similarity to a real, but infamous name - "Jovian" becomes "Giovanni" and preserves most of the phonemes), but it's absurd in a way that makes sense. It doesn't take any great leap of logic to believe that these wealthy Italian vampires are descended from ancient Italian nobility. 

The only part that really lost me was when it started talking about the Giovanni's grand plan: The Endless Night. The Clan believes that if they can gather up 100 million ghosts, they can use that stolen spiritual energy to merge the worlds of the living and the dead, making their skill at necromancy the most powerful force in the universe. As a supervillain plot . . . it's fine. And if I were reading about it for the first time in Gehenna, I would have no complaints. It's just, in the context of a typical game of Vampire: the Masquerade, it's a bit too long-term and grandiose in its scale. I was actually kind of fine with the Giovanni being gross aristocrats who use their necromancy to gain wealth and power.

Overall, I'd say that I'm relatively satisfied with Clanbook: Giovanni. Reading all these Vampire: the Masquerade books has reminded me why I stopped playing the game and why I'm not particularly interested in going back, and this book did nothing to reverse that trend, but it paints such a clear picture of who the Giovanni are and what they do that my reasons for not playing the game feel similarly well-articulated.

Ukss Contribution: The narrator says that Augustus Giovanni killed his sire because that ancient vampire wanted to "diablerize God" and that was clearly a sign of dangerous megalomania. I thought it was such a fun turn of phrase that I was tempted to try and come up with a plot where someone actually tries it. Unfortunately, neither diablerie nor God are relevant concepts in Ukss (the setting has religions, but nothing analogous to Abrahamic monotheism). 

After that, all of the book's strongest impressions are things that I have no interest in replicating. So I think I have to go with something silly. The Shadow Walker flaw. Take it and you physically exist in both the living world and the Shadowlands, meaning random ghosts can attack you and you're constantly in danger of running into the ghost of a wall that was torn down years ago. Awkward, especially since the flaw gives you no way of seeing into the Shadowlands. A vampire that has to carefully tiptoe around their environment, lest they smack their face on an invisible obstacle is kind of a hilarious image . . .

Which is why, for the sake of tone, I'll probably just give Ukss' shadow walkers the ability to see the dead as well as interact with them. That's spooky, this strange group of mystics with one foot in the land of the living and one foot in the land of the dead.

(D&D 3e) Hero Builder's Guidebook

It's good every once in a while to be reminded of my potential for hubris. Why did I buy Hero Builder's Guidebook (Ryan Dancey, David Noonan, John D Ratecliff)? What was I hoping to get out of it?

I'm not sure. There was something like a week and a half where the D&D 3rd Edition books on my Amazon wishlist were a little lower priced than usual and I had the wild idea that I could potentially collect the whole set. So I started with the cheapest ones and then by the time my next paycheck came around I realized that I was not willing to commit the time, money, and shelf space to this particular collection.

I think on some level, I must have known that I was not the target audience for this book. If I was, then it would have been much more expensive, because it would have been the sort of book that people like me (i.e. collectors who are willing to pay a premium for out of print roleplaying books, provided they have interesting rules or lore implications) would have bought and held on to. However, it's one thing to suspect something intellectually, and another to have those suspicions verified.

As near as I can tell, the purpose of the Hero Builder's Guidebook is to indoctrinate new players into the "mainstream" D&D mindset. I mean, I'm sure the authors and developers wouldn't have put it in such stark terms, but it's the only thing I can think of that would explain why this book straight up lied about Dwarf Wizards.

You see, the book as a whole is supposed to walk you through the character creation process, offering setting details and roleplaying advice that aims to turn the bland stats on your character sheet into a vibrant and interesting character. And half the book (30 out of 64 pages) is taken up by a long chapter that systematically goes through every combination of race and class, giving advice about traits, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Some of that advice is good. Some of it is bad. And a few examples, most notably the Dwarf Wizard, but also the Halfling Monk and Elf Rogue, are so bad that it's unclear whether the author actually read the core book.

The Dwarf Wizard lists its racial advantages as "none," which of course is simply not true. The Dwarf Constitution bonus gives a significant increase to the Wizard's d4 hit dice, their bonuses to craft and appraise are good for both assessing spell components and magic item creation, and their save bonuses give the class some much needed defense. Plus, from a roleplaying perspective, their long lives give them plenty of time to study.

And the other half of it, the racial disadvantage, is completely confabulated. The book says, "Loss of the +2 saving throw bonus against spells is just the beginning of the drawbacks for dwarven wizards." Except you don't lose your save bonus for being a wizard. I have no idea where they're getting this from. Maybe a previous version of the rules, one with a bunch of annoying fiddly bits.

The key probably lies in the entry's wrap-up. Instead of the usual "variant" class (for example, the Human Rogue has a "Spy" variant), the end section is labeled "uniqueness." And it tells us, "Your choice to be a dwarven wizard is a choice to violate some of the most deep-seated assumptions in the game."

That rings true to me. That there are some deep-seated assumptions at work here. So deep-seated, in fact, that they couldn't see the actual rules of the game. If you're coming in from AD&D 2nd Edition, then obviously dwarves are an anti-wizard race. They can't even take the Wizard class at all. And Elves are a pro-wizard race, because they've got a high racial level limit for the Wizard class. And when those arbitrary rules were removed, no one really bothered to check if the rest of the races' mechanics supported the old lore.

It's a particularly poor mark for Hero Builder's Guidebook, because without someone coming out and reiterating that bit of lore, no one would have inferred it purely from the PHB. 

That's really just me picking out an example and then harping on it though. This book will often run into trouble when it tries to get mechanical (it suggested that a good way to build a swashbuckler character would be a fighter/monk multiclass!), but when it's not, there's some useful stuff. There's a whole chapter's worth of useful tables to help you flesh out your character's backstory (though, since the tables do not influence each other, it's not properly a life-path) and a cute little quiz to determine your character's alignment. 

I'm pretty torn. Hero Builder's Guidebook has a lot to offer brand new roleplayers, who may have trouble connecting the rules to the fiction, but it's bundled with plenty of bad mechanical advice, which is likely to hamper the process of building a really effective hero.

I can't say whether or not it's worth it. I haven't needed a book like this since 1996.

Ukss Contribution: Gnome barbarians follow the Way of the Badger. Cute.

(V: tM) Clanbook: Gangrel

I enjoyed reading Clanbook: Gangrel (James and Ellen Kiley), but even though I just finished, without looking at my notes, I'm not sure I could tell you anything about it.

The Gangrel Clan is really more of a general feeling than it is a series of compelling events and characters. Every single one of them could be anonymous, and I'm not sure anything would be lost. These are the wilderness vampires, the ones that can shapeshift into animals and are maybe just a little less bad for eating human flesh, if only because they embody the natural principle of predator and prey.

They're probably one of the game's best clans when it comes to their overall pitch. I'd go maybe - Ventrue, Tremere, Gangrel, Nosferatu, if ranking clans by their high-concept or Toreador, Lasombra, Nosferatu, Gangrel if ranking by their general vibe, but then if I were ranking on the strength of their associated lore, I'm not sure the Gangrel would even make the top ten. Which makes Clanbook: Gangrel the least essential of the three Clanbooks I've read so far (although put an asterisk on that because Clanbook: Brujah was highly necessary, but in the end failed at what it needed to do).

There is a thing that happens, though. The Gangrel have left the Camarilla and become an independent clan!

This is not the first I'm hearing of it, because it also showed up in Guide to the Camarilla. But while we get a little more context here (a high-ranking Camarilla Gangrel may have been spooked by an antediluvian vampire), it's still one of those plots that feels like motion for the sake of motion. We now know that this is part of setting the stage for Gehenna, but not much more about what Gehenna will actually be. I don't dislike it, because "why are these crude, animal-like vampires hanging out with the fancy conspiracy vampires" was always one of those things that was not quite a plot hole, so the change feels very natural (or, at least, only feels unnatural in the sense that it was long overdue). However, I'm not sure I'm invested enough in the Vampire: the Masquerade metaplot to have an appropriate reaction. I guess this could have made things awkward in long-running Vampire games, but from my perspective, it's long been the status quo. There's been very little Storyteller advice in this series of splatbooks, but I think I would have appreciated guidance on how to run the Gangrel defection as an adventure.

Other than that, there's not much more about this book that I feel compelled to comment on. Most of my notes were about the history chapter, but like I said, "Gangrel" feels more like a general vampiric archetype than a specific family of creatures, so a lot of the history was like "this is a famous Viking vampire, that is a famous Scythian vampire, also, there used to be a bunch of Mongolian vampires, but they were killed by the Chinese vampires we're inexplicably choosing to call 'the alien Asian vampires'." 

I will give it credit for being the first WW book I've read to acknowledge that antebellum America was pretty much an ideal society for vampires (and please, understand, I say this because "you've created a society best fit for vampires" is pretty much the worst political insult I can imagine), but it loses points for me when the narrator then says, "I find the practice of slavery repugnant and the practice of feeding on slaves or prisoners downright repulsive."

It's not that I particularly want to read about a vampire's nostalgia for the old South, but coming from a literal anthropophagic predator, the sentiment rings a bit hollow. And that sends me spiraling on all sorts of world-building and philosophical tangents, trying to figure out how this abolitionist vampire fits into an ethical framework centered on human dignity, and the very weirdness of the question manages to focus me on how gross I was expecting the vampire to be about it, and I'm not sure I was actually spared enough grossness to make it all seem worthwhile. On the other hand, you may also have people reading this book who would be made uncomfortable by the objectification of their ancestors, and that's a valid thing to try and avoid. I guess the way to do it is to tackle the issue head-on and make it a central theme, with the aim of just brutally satirizing white people ("OMG! The Confederacy has been infiltrated by vampires!" "How can you tell?"), but this is not the place for that sort of thing, and WW was not the sort of company you'd want to do it (I have to figure the use of "the war between the states" was an intentional stylistic choice that merely wound up contributing nothing).

Overall, this book was not quite surprising or challenging enough to capture my imagination, nor was it filled with the kind of Gangrel-specific nerdery that would help me create diverse Gangrel characters. But it was pleasant enough to read, and that's enough to bank at least a little goodwill for the upcoming Clanbook: Giovanni.

Ukss Contribution: Gangrel get a custom power that allows them to store their vampiric essence inside a living animal, slumbering through the day as this creature goes about its business. While they're inside, the animal gains sinister features like glowing eyes or iron horns. Furthermore, the animal does not age while it's possessed by a vampire. Wounded vampires may rest inside a single creature for decades or centuries, awaiting the human blood necessary to revive them. Such creatures can enter into local legend.

That's my kind of sinister. My version will probably be a unique antagonist rather than a power possessed by many vampires, but I really like the narrative.

(D&D 3.5) Savage Species

Oh, Savage Species (David Eckelberry, Rich Redman, Jennifer Clarke Wilkes), I love you, but I wish I could change everything about you. I've got a ton of notes about this book and almost every single one is a complaint, and yet . . .

The book's central concept is one that I desperately want to make work. I believe in its vision, 100%, no reservations. And the mechanical framework that it chooses to execute that vision is inspired - allow players to play creatures from the Monster Manual by making up a custom class that doles out the monster's special abilities over the course of its level progression, thus ensuring that a level 15 djinn (or what have you) is balanced against a level 15 Fighter and a level 15 Wizard.

And I think you may now be seeing where the problem comes from. This product comes late enough in 3rd edition's life cycle that they know to wallpaper over the cracks, but not late enough to actually benefit from the design experience that would lead to Book of Nine Swords or 4th edition. So you can simultaneously have a prestige class chapter that says, "prestige classes aimed at casters should be particularly attractive" (because losing caster levels outweighs nearly any ability imaginable, especially at high levels) and an Illithid class description that suggests they would make good wizards because of their Intelligence bonus, but which doesn't actually let you multiclass into Wizard until level 15 (giving you a really high save DC on your 5-6 1st level spells per day). 

Funnily enough, this means that the strongest classes in this book are the ones geared towards eventually multiclassing into a Fighter, because Fighter abilities don't scale, so you get just as much taking your first Fighter level at level 10 as you would taking your 10th Fighter level at level 10.

Assuming, of course, that the monster levels 1-9 were equivalent to a Fighter in power, which is honestly pretty hit or miss. The giant classes were probably fairly close, with their high bonuses to Strength compensating for a lagging Base Attack Bonus, but even they'd cheat you out of hit points, skills, feats, and savings throws. 

Which brings us, finally, to the book's fatal flaw. The thing that is the essential and primordial cause of its incurable balance issues - its bizarre fixation on allowing (forcing?) you to recreate the exact stat blocks from the Monster Manual. So many of the dead levels in this book are caused by weird and unnecessary stat increases. Because monster Ability adjustments are all based on the assumption that the Monster Manual stats came from a PC who rolled straight 10s, so if you're playing an Azer (fire dwarf, basically), you wind up a level 6 character with 2 hit dice because you need an extra +2 Str, +2 Dex, +2 Int, and +2 Wis, and none of that would be necessary if you just assumed that the NPC Azer possessed a Standard Ability Array. You don't play an Azer because you want to be slightly smarter and wiser than an average human (and a dexterity bonus doesn't fit into the archetype at all). You play an Azer because you want to be a dwarf who is constantly on fire. Ditch the superfluous stat increases, rein in the natural armor to a reasonable level, get rid of the :snicker: 13 spell resistance, and get this shit done in 3 levels, with 3 hit dice, so we don't actually have to break out the abacus to calculate this guy's feats.

This whole thing could have been an absolutely amazing supplement with just a little bit of fudging. There is absolutely nothing about the grig's power set that requires they have half a hit die at level 4. Stagger the spell-like abilities a little better, ditch most, if not all of the Ability increases, and nobody at all is going to complain about this guy having 4 levels of Bard hit point, attack, save, and skill progression, even if the MM Grig is half-HD creature.

Although, honestly, the progression of spell-like abilities is another case of the book writing itself into a corner by trying to emulate the Monster Manual. Some of the 20-level classes can sort of work as a wizard stand-in, because 12d8 is relatively close to 20d4 and +12 BAB at level 20 is close to the Wizard's +10, but the need to match the exact list with the exact frequency, winds up leading to some very eccentric builds. An efreet gaining Wish one time per day at level 18 puts it in line with a sorcerer, as do its 1/day 4th level spells at level 8 and its 1/day 6th level spell at level 12, but it misses out on the rest of the power curve in exchange for some physical abilities that would be impressive if they were not diluted by being spread across 19 fractional hit dice.

And the Efreet was one of the best classes in the book. In some cases, you have attack, durability, and spellcasting all lag behind the sorcerer's progression, all for the sake of wedging in things that players aren't really going to want, need, or even necessarily notice. The Ettercap gets a +3 BAB at level 9, for crying out loud. You'd have to really work to get a character with such low accuracy (it's not actually possible without multiclassing three times into classes with a slow BAB progression) and what you get is more webs than you can reasonably use in a day (eight) and an admittedly nasty poison that is still somehow not as effective as casting polymorph other once.

My quick fix for this is to just strip out all spell-like abilities and replace them with levels of sorcerer casting, with your known spell slots being filled with the monster's spell-like abilities, that way a creature like the green hag, who wants to be a spellcaster after her monster level progression, can slip into a level appropriate role, lagging behind only a little thanks to what basically amounts to a Fighter multiclass. And for a lot of creatures, you wouldn't even need to prefill the slots, as only a few of their spell-like abilities are actually iconic. As for creatures that gain single orphan abilities, but no real caster progression, just fudge it with a feat. Prerequisites: Monster Type, 2x spell level HD. Benefit: cast this spell 1/day as a spell-like ability. Not necessarily "balanced" per se (mainly against the crap that high level martials would otherwise get), but good enough.

Because what this book really needs is more design. A lot of these monster levels are filled with cruft that is only tangentially related to the reasons people want to play the monster in the first place (the giants' rock-throwing is barely an ability, it's more a natural consequence of being huge and having high strength, combined with early AD&D's first draft attempt at modelling that one passage from The Hobbit where giants throw rocks at each other.) They really should have focused on stripping down the monsters to the most basic reason people would want to play them (i.e. a Medusa turns people to stone, a grig is a cute little guy with a cute little fiddle, a hound archon is a furry paladin), give us just enough levels to get to that concept, and then let regular class levels fill in the rest, because the PCs will be playing unusual monsters, just like they play unusual demihumans.

Ooh, I got deeper into the mechanical weeds than I really wanted to, but in my defense, this is a very mechanical book. On the flavor side, it's got a less-severe case of the malaise that affected 2nd edition's Complete Book of Humanoids, where it's never entirely clear what a "monster" is actually supposed to be, so it kind of just treats the whole gamut as one interchangeable mass and can sometimes get problematic as a result (goblins are, at one point, referred to as "a lesser race"). However, while it fails to imagine some of the more appealing niches for monster PCs, it does at least treat them as viable characters, and that's something.

Overall, I can't say I recommend this book. I really, really want to play a game that realizes its potential, but in order to do that, I'll pretty much have to rewrite it from the ground up.

Ukss Contribution: The "gelatinous creature" template (one of 17 available in this book, more than doubling the number of published templates) use a grizzly bear as its example. Now, I can't be certain that whoever wrote that template was deliberately trying to sneak a giant gummy bear encounter into the game, I can be certain that when I put it in Ukss, I will be.

(V:tM) Clanbook: Brujah

Once more, one of these White Wolf books roasts itself more thoroughly than I, as a critic, would ever dare - "Without an authority against which to scheme, the Brujah are just agitated, meaningless vampires."

That's what Clanbook: Brujah (Justin Achilli) is about - agitated, meaningless vampires. It's funny, though. I only just now looked at the author credit, to see that it was written by Mr. Achilli himself, and that puts the book into a whole new context. Many times, throughout the text, I thought to myself, "man, writing this must have been a truly thankless job." And every time I had that thought, I banished it as unnecessarily mean. But now that I see that the book was written by the lead developer for the entire edition, I have to wonder . . .

The thing about the Brujah is that they are an idea that must have seemed sensible in the writing of the 1st edition core, but which ran of gas almost immediately. They are the punk vampires, the outlaw bikers, the street gangs, the petty hired muscle, the rebellious youngsters . . . and they trace their lineage all the way back to the mythical Caine, some 10,000 years in the past. You obviously need some guys like that, but you don't need a whole Clan's worth of those guys, and you especially don't need 500-year-old versions of those guys. They are tied to a particular time and a particular mode of cultural expression, and there is simply not enough depth to their high concept to support an epic ancient history.

Yet Clanbook: Brujah tries. They started off as "the Learned Clan" and were philosophers, poets, and historians as well as warriors." Which I guess is kind of a thing. The warlord-poet or warrior-sage is one of those fantasy archetypes that sometimes real people will try to be, so it makes sense as potential inspiration for Vampire: the Masquerade characters. But then, the book tries to project this forward in time as "a clan that makes challenging the status quo a badge of honor," who are drawn to "causes" in the abstract, and that's nothing.

Literally. Here's how the intro to the sample characters sums up the theme: "Brujah, then, are the Kindred who make their havens in the horror of the conscience. Let that be their common thread." And translated from purple to English, I think that means, "Brujah are the vampires that have moral opinions about things." Like, they want to change things, because they have an idea about how things can be better (one recurring idea is that many, but not all, Brujah succumb to utopian thought) and that's what they all have in common.

But then the sample characters include "the harpy-to-be," "the digital musician," and "the small-town sheriff" (which also treats us to old WW's charming habit of using slurs, in-character, to indicate a bad attitude, only this time it's in a rules-legal starting character, implied to be suitable for use as a pre-constructed PC). Some of them have far-reaching political ambitions, to be sure (oh, I have so many notes about "the Confederate," but ultimately I'm not going to talk about him because, hey, fuck that guy), but as a group I didn't particularly catch a "horror of the conscience" vibe.

Although, maybe with the way the Clans are set up, that's not especially a weakness. Unlike Mage's Traditions, a Clan isn't a group you voluntarily join. And unlike Hunter: the Reckoning's Creeds, it's not something you were assigned by a celestial intelligence. A Clan is more of an accidental association - which lineage of vampires is the one that just so happened to choose you. Maybe it has a culture. And maybe that culture encourages certain preferences. But ultimately, it's happenstance. Vampires Embrace new vampires for all sorts of reasons, and "preserving the clan culture" probably doesn't even break the top 5. Outliers are probably common.

Which would make it pretty darned silly to treat them like RPG classes and then write sourcebooks about them, purporting to tell you more about their unique psychology and mechanics.

Anyway, this book is a mess. It never quite finds its footing. It doesn't have any shocking additions to the lore. It doesn't even make me consider clan Brujah in a new light (not unless "utterly generic" counts as "a new light.") It wasn't badly written, and except for two of the sample characters, it wasn't offensive, but it also . . . wasn't. It so successfully dispelled stereotypes that it was left entirely without a thesis.

I hate to be so negative, so let me wrap this up with an alternate pitch for Clan Brujah. They're warriors. Full stop. Granted, this has the disadvantage of being almost as boring as "the vampires who want things to change," and as an rpg-class equivalent, it broad enough to step on a lot of other clans' toes, but at least it's a concrete thing that people will consciously and deliberately choose to identify as. We may all roll our eyes at "the international brotherhood of warriors," but it has its provenance in history.

Although, I wouldn't want to leave it at just that. I'm actually taking my inspiration from Vampire: the Dark Ages lore, where the Brujah were one of the "high clans" (i.e. Clans that moved among the aristocracy, rather than the peasantry). And, if you view the modern Brujah, Toreador, and Ventrue as the three Camarilla Clans that trace their lineage back to medieval aristocracy, certain things start to fall into place. Because you can view the medieval aristocracy through three different lenses - those who make laws and wield legal authority (the Ventrue), those who enjoy the luxuries of wealth (the Toreador), and the strong arms that enforced the aristocracy's military rule (the Brujah).

So, the Ventrue were princes and nobles who adapted to the modern day by following the center of power into corporate boardrooms. And the Toreador were courtiers, socialites, and matchmakers who adapted by embracing high fashion, culture, and the arts. And the Brujah were knights . . . who failed to adapt, because in the modern day, a knight's skillset is worth precisely jack, except maybe in the ranks of a street gang, where complete fearlessness, a hair-trigger temper, and strength in hand-to-hand combat are seen as leadership qualities.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that the Brujah's lifestyle leads to a much lower amount of elder Brujah. They're warriors. They don't run from a fight. So they're much less likely to live to an advanced age. Part of their whole deal is just that they're the Clan with the youngest average age.

And that filters down to the modern nights in a variety of ways. They don't have much of a culture because they don't have a long line of elders to preserve this history. Instead, what they've got is slogans - "we're the badass clan," "we're the clan that doesn't back down from a fight," "we are modern-day knights and we protect what's ours," and that can occasionally be corrupted into "we're the clan that sticks it to the Man."

It also finds expression in the Brujah's relationship to the other surviving "high clans." As much as their cold hearts are still capable of such things, Toreador and Ventrue elders hold a sentimental attachment to Clan Brujah, but it's the kind of attachment you feel for your friend's children. The Prince remembers the Brujah when they were glorious - towering over the field of victory in gleaming metal, standing astride the broken bodies of their enemies. Kingdoms were won on their valor and their great deeds have earned them debts that can never be repaid. And it's still possible to see something of that glory in their distant progeny, but this damnable modern world squanders its knights. Even the organizations with an analogous social role - the police and the military - seem to value political and administrative skill over a warrior's spirit.

And thus the Clan Brujah is a decaying hulk of its former self. Much as an elder Kindred is individually stuck in time, the Brujah are a Clan that is organizationally stuck in time. "Change" is part of their theme, but not in the nebulous sense of them valuing change for its own sake. Instead, they are part of something that has failed to successfully change, and this sense of being incomplete and out of place is what drives them to seek change. The archetypal Brujah is someone who had the conviction to fight . . . and in the modern nights, they have nothing specific to fight for. Thus they mostly wind up fighting against the strictures of the Camarilla, the very organization that their predecessors were instrumental in building. The elders tolerate a certain amount of this, out of nostalgia for a bygone age, but even for such as they, patience is not in infinite supply.

Or, at least, that's my take on them. I wish I could say that all of the above was inspired by Clanbook: Brujah, but that would be at best a half-truth. Mostly, it's just my attempt to make sense of the questions the book failed to answer.

Ukss Contribution: The Brujah call their social gatherings "raves" (oh, yeah, I forgot to mention - the other thing about the Brujah is that they are embarrassingly late-90s), but one of the specific types of raves that they have is a celebration when one of their number graduates out of the vampire apprenticeship stage. They are described as "elaborate release galas." And while I didn't much care for the one that was presented as a literal rave, the stuffier, more subdued example did hit the right spot. I could definitely get some mileage out of a debutante ball for new vampires.

(D&D 3.5) Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords

What's this? Dungeons and Dragons . . . but with fantasy?

Ah, no, that's unfair of me. I don't want to do The Complete Necromancer's Handbook all over again. The Book of Nine Swords (Richard Bake, Mathhew Sernett, Frank Brunner) is a book published for the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, and therefor it is part of what D&D is. I don't need to go making snarky comments about how surprised I am that it's a vision of the game that includes heroic warriors doing awesome feats of valor and skill beyond the capabilities of normal human beings, nor do I need to smugly say that this feels like a departure from the tone set by Dungeons and Dragons thus far.

The Introduction does that for me.

If I were inclined to waste space, I would just quote the entirety of the "Behind the Curtain: Blending Genres" sidebar for you now. It's an absolutely wild ride through the hang-ups and prejudices of the early 2000s D&D scene:

Thanks to the influence of Japanese anime, Hong Kong action movies, and popular video games, the notion of a fantasy setting has grown very broad in the last few years. Fantasy gaming isn't just about knights and castles and dragons anymore . . . More than any other, this book represents "culture-blind" D&D: fantasy gaming in a world where silent ninjas and wandering kung-fu masters live side-by-side with noble paladins and fearsome monsters. Tome of Battle isn't your parents' D&D - it's bigger, bolder, and more fantastic than ever before.

Also, it's much better for "traditional" fantasy. Want to play as mechanically-distinct Knights of the Round Table? Book of Nine Swords. Want to play a leader of men, tactically cunning and peerless on the field of battle? Book of Nine Swords. Want to play a determined survivor, who can get the absolute shit beat out of them and still rise to fight against impossible odds? You can see where I'm going with this.

Book of Nine Swords isn't notably East Asian in its aesthetics (except for a couple of outliers like the Jade Phoenix Mages or the Shadow Sun Ninjas) - it just makes warriors impressive. Conceptually, Warblades are just the Fighter class (their niche is that they are warriors who are skilled with weapons), but they are allowed to do cool shit. By 2006, organized HEMA had been around long enough that it shouldn't have really seemed all that shocking to have a "western fantasy" book about legendarily effective martial arts.

And yet Book of Nine Swords does manage to feel thrilling, even today. It presaged fourth edition, and in many ways failed to reach the heights of 4e at its best, but also, because it was explicitly an experimental book, it was allowed to be bold in its flavor. It knew the hidebound elements in the D&D fandom would never accept it, so it didn't have to try and be "generic." You could have the Ruby Knight Vindicators, dark paladins of the Witch Goddess Wee Jas, who hunt down and slay those that would threaten the faithful, and it's a weird, highly specific thing. But also, it's undeniably European, undeniably fantasy, and undeniably something that D&D has always implied that you could do. 

In case you couldn't tell, I love this book. It's got the self-conscious swagger of someone who has just knowingly and deliberately pulled the stick out of their ass. Maybe it can be a little awkward at times. The Sun Shadow Ninja class has an unnecessarily defensive bit of DM advice - "the word 'ninja' strikes many DMs as an anachronism, or at least a misplaced cultural element" (come on, just own that shit already). But it's earned the right to flex a little. There's an elf prestige class whose power is basically having Navi from Ocarina of Time. Okay, we can get a Fine-sized flying, incorporeal familiar who "appears as a mote of white energy" and shows us enemy weak points. I see what you're doing, Book of Nine Swords . . . and I'm totally on board.

Maybe it's because this book is as close as D&D ever gets to being Exalted ("Oh really? Can you play a reincarnating warrior-mage with a sacred mission that spans multiple eras of history?" "Yes."), but I wish I saw more stuff like this - non-caster classes designed around a principle other than "numbers get bigger." That's what fantasy is to me - a world of grander scale, where wonder and spectacle can be found in anything. My only real complaint about this book is that there's not enough out-of-combat utility. I love the idea of swording so effectively that you can just start cutting away peoples' souls and shit, but I kind of want to take the other arenas to the same level - silver-tongued diplomats who can confound with carefully-chosen words, epic feats of strength like tearing down a stone wall or diverting a river with a hurled boulder, stealing a well-guarded treasure in broad daylight and then revealing that the real heist happened 20 minutes ago. Magical and fantastic characters that aren't tied to D&D's highly idiosyncratic spellcasting system.

Book of Nine Swords doesn't quite get us there, but it's a start.

Ukss Contribution: This is another one of those books where I'm spoiled for choice. I kind of want to pick the Jade Phoenix mages, but they are literally just D&D's take on the concept of celestial Exalted. I've also got a few standout maneuvers that I really enjoyed, but they aren't so much "distinctive setting ideas" as they are "things you should always have been able to do" like throw an enemy into another enemy or jump on a big creature's back and just go absolutely berserk while it tries to wrestle you to the ground.

So I'm going to go with something that was suggested, but not fully developed. The Eighty Empresses. We don't know much about them, other than the fact that their leader was fond of insufferable riddles ("How does a sword mean?" Really? Blech Forktongue was right to start tearing apart the furniture), but we do get their initiation ceremony - "The masters bring each young lady separately into the Dressing Room of Opala I, whose walls, mirrors, incense lamps, pots of rouge, and songbird cages are draped with 1080 gold, pink, orange and fuchsia silk ribbons . . . After she leaves, one ribbon is removed from the room. . . If she can name the color of the ribbon that was removed, she is accepted."

I can't say with certainty, but I don't think that D&D has done anything so unapologetically feminine, either before or since. Whatever "genre-blending" they did to get to this point was obviously good for them. I want to honor that by putting the Eighty Empresses in Ukss.

(V: tM) Clanbook: Assamite

You ever walk into the middle of an interesting-sounding conversation, pick up enough contextual clues to understand that it is indeed interesting, and then feel a sinking disappointment as you realized it would have been a lot more interesting if you'd been there from the beginning?

Yeah, Clanbook Assamite (by Clayton Oliver) has a lot going for it, but it never actually explains who the fuck Ur-Shulgi is supposed to be. Like, okay, there are facts - he is an ancient vampire, who lived thousands of years ago, and he was directly Embraced by the Assamite clan founder, so he was privy to a lot of the clan's mythic history, and he was apparently asleep for a long time, until quite recently, when he woke up and tore the clan in half, as he demanded obedience to his archaic ideas about its intended mission and values.

And that's technically enough. I can understand the Assamite Clan's internal conflicts, and the stakes of the schism in these dangerous final nights. It is meaningful to me when the book explains that the clan's formerly leading sorcerer, al-Ashrad, is leading the schismatics to join the Camarilla, even as Ur-Shulgi is driving the loyalists to new heights of anti-vampire fanaticism. And I can appreciate the unique social dynamic that comes from a largely Muslim organization (according to his book, Islam has a plurality of Assamites at approximately 33%) having to deal with a new leader who was born thousands of years before the creation of Islam. That's a tricky thing to navigate, what with vampires mostly being sacrilegious by nature (pretty sure that blood-drinking, specifically, is haram), but it's also an interesting thing to navigate - you don't instantly lose your faith just because someone turns you into a vampire.

I picked up on all that. I liked most of it. But I still don't know what Ur-Shulgi looks like or where he was born, or when he first fell asleep or how he's adapting to the modern world. And I couldn't help but come away with the feeling that I would know all of this, if only I'd been keeping current (retroactively, in the late 90s timeline) with all of White Wolf's various supplements.

I should probably just look it up . . . It took some doing, because the White Wolf wiki cited the reprint, but I guess I was only missing out on one relevant book: Clan Novel 7: Assamite, but maybe a lot happened there. In any event, the sensation I got from reading this book was that big events were happening and I had to jog to keep up. Unlike Time of Thin Blood, this doesn't feel like a virtue. It's definitely not a fatal flaw, but it is a flaw.

I also suspect that this clan book shares an agenda with many of Mage's revised tradition books, and that it's course correcting on an overly-simplistic presentation of the clan in previous editions. It's supposed to be really surprising that the Assamites have "viziers" who study science, technology, history, and the arts and aren't assassins at all (why they're called "viziers" and not "scholars" I can only speculate). The book actually calls the stereotype that all Assamites are warriors and assassins "the Great Lie," attributing it to propaganda from their enemies. That's a classic White Wolf move, making something kind of dumb and racist and then trying to cover by saying "no, it's because our characters were dumb racists). But unlike Mage, I wasn't actually here for the earliest part of the conversation, so I'm really just relying on pattern recognition.

Whether Clanbook Assamite got out from under mid-90s orientalism or not, I can't say. I mean, I literally have no idea. It seemed fine to me, but my knowledge of this subject is incredibly shallow.

So let's move on. I kind of wish this book was dumber (but only if it could do so without being more racist, obviously). The best thing in the entire book was the story of Zev Bennison, a Jewish vampire who, in the late 40s, led a team of vampire assassins to hunt down and slay Camarilla vampires who collaborated with the Nazis. And while that's not, strictly speaking, "dumb," on account of being awesome, it is indicative of a dumb tendency that I wish would have gotten more attention. The Assamites think they're better than other vampires, morally, and that they have a mandate from their founder to act as guardians for mortals (you're allowed to drink their blood, but not abuse them), and so they'll often act as judge, jury, and executioner for out-of-control vampires.

That's the sort of comic-book story that I'd want to see addressed head-on as a campaign model. Heroic vampire assassins, who hunt vampires. Maybe it shouldn't be Clan Assamite's whole thing, and maybe you'd want to relegate it to an alternate character interpretation, in order to stick to the dark and gloomy vibe of Vampire: the Masquerade as a whole, but it's undeniably the most fun it's possible to have with these specific guys, so it was kind of a shame that it only showed up by implication (I actually get the feeling that this book was written specifically to stop people from playing their Assamites this way).

Overall, a decent book. It didn't have anything to shock me (except one line about Hitler that was . . . hard to parse), but it also didn't bore me. I think the occult conspiracy and millenarian aspects of the Ur-Shulgi plot would have worked better if more of the pieces were present, but it worked fine as a political problem. I'm fairly sure I bought these clan books purely because they were on the shelf of my local bookstore, but I'm not feeling any particular buyer's remorse. 

Ukss Contribution: Once again, the best thing in the book requires real-world context that I'm not eager to import into Ukss, so I'll have to do something a little unconventional and just take vampire-hunting vampire assassins as a general concept. I'm thinking less Path of Blood and more Blade, though.

(D&D 3e) Defenders of the Faith

 Dungeons and Dragons has traditionally been bad at depicting religion. This should come as no surprise to those who have been following the series, but it's necessary to restate it, in order to put Defenders of the Faith (Rich Redmond and James Wyatt) into context. There was no way it was ever going to be "good," because in order to be a good roleplaying book about adventurers who wield the powers of the gods, it would have to ask difficult questions about spirituality and tradition and community and metaphysics. It would have to depict people who surrendered themselves to powers beyond death and who act as a vessel for a mystery beyond words. And it could never do that, because D&D Clerics are mostly just Heal Technicians. Their religion is basically just medieval Catholicism, stripped of all purpose, complexity, and substance, distorted by a pop-culture mirror that ensures it can never rise even to the realm of the controversial. An order of sacred knights guards their Holy Grail - a chalice which caught the blood of a solar avingion as it dueled a tanar'ri. Because the paradox of the crucifixion, the holy inversion, where love defeats power, is too subtle a concept. Better to just be literal.

And I'm being something like 80% non-sarcastic here. You could maybe have a roleplaying game that dug deep into Christian theology and made it a key aspect of gameplay, but it wouldn't be Dungeons and Dragons. It probably wouldn't even be fun. And maybe that's just my bias as an atheist showing, but I'm pretty sure that the hypothetical audience for Aquinas: The Epistolary RPG of Scholastic Monasticism would not consider "fun" to be an appropriate goal. There's a spectrum here, is what I'm saying. D&D as a whole gets its place on the spectrum wrong, probably since at least the early 80s, when the Cleric class went from "thinly-veiled Van Helsing knockoff" to "key part of the campaign world's religious expression," but the worst thing you can say about Defenders of the Faith is that it doesn't move the needle significantly in either direction.

The book works well when it's ticking along inside its wheelhouse. It describes the way a "church" works - with its Services and Rituals, Expenses and Income, Charity and Advertising, and Adventurer Support and Adventuring Priests (because, oh yeah, this is an adventure game) - and if you're dealing with the deities that quite clearly take after European Jesus, it works. Pelor, Hieroneous, Saint Cuthbert - okay, this makes sense. You could probably even make Hextor work as Confederate Jesus (though, it's hurt by the fact that people in D&D world self-identify as evil, and Wizards of the Coast was not prepared to take the artistic and political risk of making a Lawful Evil religion that identified as good and valued an outward appearance of chivalry . . . you know, like the Confederacy).

However, what the fuck is supposed to be going on with the "Church of Nerull?" It's kind of a universal worldbuilding question to ask, "what are the parishioners getting out of this church," but for a neutral evil religion that explicitly only cares about cruelty and personal advancement, the question is doubly important. Are the followers propriating the God of the Undead? Are they bargaining with him to be undead themselves? Isn't that what the priests are doing? Is there a lay congregation that is hoping to one day get divine powers for themselves? How often are they successful? What's the bait on this particular hook?

These aren't impossible questions to answer. Most specific D&D settings even try to take a stab at it (with varying degrees of success), but it's incredibly out of place in this book. It couldn't even really handle the Chaotic Good and Chaotic Neutral religions. A God of Thieves is a fine concept, but what does religion even mean to a thief? Whatever it is, it probably has more to do with the tenuousness of their lives and their precarious liberty in the face of a law that wants to destroy them, and less about going to consult a priest and tithe their income to a church (even if the shrines are usually secret). You could probably take inspiration from the Mafia's weird relationship to Catholicism and talk about a thieves' guild that devoutly attended the church of Hieroneous, but that's what I mean when I say D&D is bad at religion - there is absolutely nothing in its narrative or mechanical framework that could handle that all-too-human paradox.

The Cleric class winds up having the same basic problem as the Wizard class - it's too broad a concept. It's not quite as bad, because "magic user who gains their powers from pacts with otherworldly beings" is technically a narrower niche than "magic user," but not by much. From a historical perspective, it's actually really odd to even make that split at all. So if you arrange Clerics on a line from "theurgists who serve the community in a capacity resembling medieval clergy" to "diabolists and necromancers, aesthetically indistinguishable from a dark wizard" Defenders of the Faith does well with the first type, but for the second, Tome and Blood would probably be the better resource. 

Overall, this was a fine book. I enjoyed reading it. But ideally, I'm building my fantasy world in a way that renders it largely obsolete.

Ukss Contribution: I'm going to do something I don't ordinarily like to do and pick something the book explicitly says not to do. "A Paladin with scores of scrolls stuck through her belt and bandoliers of dozens of potions just looks silly."

Speak for yourself, Defenders of the Faith. Speak for yourself.

(V: tM) Time of Thin Blood

Once again, I'm in a bit of a pickle. Time of Thin Blood (Dean Shomshak and Sarah Roark) is the worst kind of rpg supplement, but as an actual book, it may well be my favorite one in all of Vampire: the Masquerade (it definitely is so far). Like, I should, right now, be outraged on behalf of the c.1999 White Wolf fandom, for this optional supplement that shakes up the metaplot and creates a narrative rift between the 2nd edition and Revised settings, which can only be bridged by assiduously collecting all the new splatbooks, whether you want them or not. However, what I'm really thinking is "Damnit, White Wolf, you've done it again! You've pitched half the CW's fall lineup and somehow they're all shows I want to see."

"Vampire Dad," the innovative horror sitcom where a suburban real-estate agent is turned into a vampire by a bloodthirsty cult, only to have his new dark mistress perish in a well-timed garage door opener accident. Can he use his new powers to keep his secret, keep his job, and keep his family together? No, he cannot, but the ever-deepening spiral of chaos and despair, as he uses the Dominate Discipline to correct the thing that went wrong the last time he used Dominate, is sure to inspire both existential dread and twisted dark humor.

I mean, as a character concept, it's a bit solitary, but I would watch that show (actually, I may already have - it's called Santa Clarita Diet). However, I'm not sure the Vampire Dad template would even make a good NPC. How would the player characters even get involved, and if they did, would that not just completely disrupt the very dynamic that made him interesting? He's only really useful if you don't take him as a literal game resource and instead view him an example of Time of Thin Blood's intended vibe.

Which I would characterize as "yeah, there are vampires, but nobody knows what the fuck is going on." The world of the occult is gripped by millenarian fever. Vampires and the psychically sensitive are having strange visions. New supernatural powers are emerging, that no one can categorize. And a few things are happening that are completely unprecedented, even in the long lives of the vampire elders - a sinister red star, vampires whose curse is so weak that they cannot create childer, but can endure the sunlight, and the emergence of the strange half-human/half-vampire dhampir. Nobody knows what's going to happen, but the signs point to the end of the world.

It's a unique take on the urban fantasy genre, especially if you're reading it twenty-four years after the fact and know that they're not bluffing about the incipient apocalypse (although, as someone who remembers WW's vociferous denials of the very possibility of a book like Gehenna, I wonder how much of that was bluffing and how much of it was just them changing their mind).

There's only really one obstacle to getting involved in this chaos-mode interpretation of the Vampire: the Masquerade setting - and I'm using the word "obstacle" very deliberately here, because it's not even a flaw or a shortcoming or even an impediment, just something you'll have to stop, take a beat, and then choose to embrace - and that's White Wolf's weird insistence that playing a weak and ordinary character is somehow good for the soul.

This isn't like Initiates of the Art. The suggestion that you play at the very bottom of the vampire power curve is not something that breaks the game. I'd even go so far as to say that playing 14th and 15th generation vampires (the titular "thin-blooded," measured in degrees of separation from Caine, the mythical 1st vampire) is a good idea. It's the only way you'll ever get anything close to "Vampire Dad," for example. 

However, it is annoying. Because Vampire is genre fiction, and scour the genre all you want, but there's nowhere else where "easy to kill and bad at their job" is treated as a synonym for "compelling" (I was going to point out that Wolverine is immensely popular for being the exact opposite of this, but I couldn't think of an elegant way to say that the thin-blooded are the worst at what they do). Sure, the bildungsroman is a popular genre structure, and its main character usually starts off callow and vulnerable, but they don't often stay that way, and in any event, the structure is really just a pragmatic choice for fantasy because it allows you to explain the world and its rules to the reader through the guise of educating the character (also, many genre readers happen to be "coming of age" themselves, so it's just savvy marketing).

So Time of Thin Blood makes this great pitch "enter this world of confusion by playing a complete naïf that doesn't know what's what," but then it uses the word "kewl" again and says things like "lazy players define their characters by their Clans or Disciplines." Was 90s White Wolf just not capable of being normal for, like, five damned minutes? The place this book really needs to go is in the opposite direction - once they've shown us the cool and compelling concept of being weak and confused, they need to expand it so that you can be confused at every part of the power curve. Show me how to be confused while I turn into a wolf and hypnotise the media. Help me set up a game where the player characters are low-generation elders and still terribly confused. That's what gives Time of Thin Blood its horror and excitement - the world is coming to an end and old certainties no longer apply.

But, like I said earlier, I very deliberately didn't use the word "flaw," because while the book doesn't quite hand you the full range of campaigns on a silver platter, it does give you plenty of tools to build them yourself, and so this is really just an old White Wolf quirk, like their love-hate relationship with angst (seriously, the section titled "Angst" is accompanied by the parenthetical "You know we couldn't get away from it.")

Moving towards a wrap-up, I'll close with a couple of observations. In the course of trying to no longer be weird about the Roma, this book gets weird about the Roma. The G-word gets tossed around a lot, and not always in that innocent US way where you think maybe they don't realize it's a slur (also making an appearance, the N-word, in a passage explain that "caitiff" is a comparable insult among vampires). Also, I kind of thought that using a hurricane in Bangladesh as cover for a fight between vampire gods was in poor taste. I did an internet search, and I don't think it fictionalized a real event, but the Week of Nightmares hurricane had 6-figure fatalities, putting it in line with historically deadly Bangladesh hurricanes and . . . I don't know, it just made me uncomfortable.

Which is a shame, because the rest of the Week of Nightmares stuff was pretty cool. In fact, references to this book's appendix in Mage are the whole reason I bought it in the first place. Put some blame right here for the heroic Technocracy:

>>Code: Ragnarok

>>Operations Budget: Unlimited

>>Permissible Weapons: Unlimited

>>Permissible Casualties:

>>Local Inhabitants: 100%

>>Associate Personnel: 100%

>>Enlightened Operatives: 100%

Chilling, but awesome. Say what you will about the Technocracy, but they're willing to put it all on the line when it counts . . . and that's really not something you should be saying about sci-fi fascists, so something had to give. You can only keep one half of the characterization, which half do you choose? I know what choice my younger self made, and I don't know. I'm still quite a big fan of awesome things, but I'm also more highly motivated to take a hard stance against fascists, so I refer you back to the bulk of my output for the year 2020 (oh, shit, has it really been that long) wherein I have complicated feelings about Mage: the Ascension.

Overall, Time of Thin Blood was almost all upside for me (except the damned FONTS!!! The narrator saying "It has been pleasant . . . to imagine you squinting with your weak eyes at my terrible handwriting" isn't really cute when it happens to you in real life). It's probably more enjoyable as a piece of fiction than as a campaign guide, but basing campaigns off of enjoyable fiction is something like half the hobby.

Ukss Contribution: The "Hemetic" flaw. Take it and you're so disgusted by blood that you can't keep it down unless you're maddened by hunger. Pretty awkward for a vampire. I probably won't introduce the flaw as a general thing, but it might be fun to have an NPC vampire who's afflicted with it.

(D&D 3e) Tome and Blood

Tome and Blood (Bruce R. Cordell and Skip Williams) puts me at war with myself. My favorite part of any fantasy setting is its magical elements, and many of my favorite characters in both fiction and gaming have been spellcasters. But the D&D Wizard (and to a lesser, but similar extent, the Sorcerer) are some of my least favorite classes, purely from a design perspective.

I'm currently making an effort to soften my pop-culture opinions, so I can acknowledge that there is a certain strategy to playing them, one that many D&D players find appealing. Manage your limited resources, think ahead and plan your spell loadout based on your anticipated challenges, collect new and more powerful spells. It's something of a puzzle, and puzzles can be satisfying to solve. However, if you're like me and you don't enjoy the puzzle, then all that's left is a class that is aggressively bland.

No, that's not right. The Wizard is hegemonically bland. It is the imperialist monarch of bland, leading an ever-expanding empire of bland, that threatens to swallow up everything non-bland about D&D and convert it to bland. And I am here to identify the source of this all-encompassing blandness and place the blame exactly where it belongs: on Specialist Wizards.

Or, more accurately, on what the mechanics of Specialist Wizards say about the construction of the D&D world. A Specialist Wizard gets one extra memorized spell per spell level per day from their chosen school of magic and they are forbidden from using one or more other schools of magic. Which means that every specialist is just shy of being a generalist. They don't need to follow a theme. They don't get any special benefit or drawback from the magic they wield. They don't even really need to do more than take their school's best spell at every spell level and then just continue to be a regular Wizard. And the schools themselves . . . blech.

Necromancy? Okay. Illusion? Okay. Enchantment and Divination? Yeah, those are still something. But Conjuration? Abjuration? Transmutation? Those aren't even a theme. They're just verbs that summarize things more interesting magic can do.

I wish I could say that Tome and Blood avoided the speedbumps, but it really didn't. It hit every single one. It gave us advice about what spells to learn that included "some fight it, but eventually, every sorcerer and wizard picks magic missile." And it broke down the different possible specialties with suggestions about which schools to skip, and somehow it always seemed to come back to Divination, Illusion, and Necromancy. Better to lose three full schools than even one of Conjuration, Evocation, or Transmutation. It's just a bad divide.

The strategy advice also wound up breaking 3rd edition's already tenuous game balance, though perhaps that wouldn't be obvious for some time to come. It suggested making scrolls of your less commonly-used spells and wands to let you keep casting once your daily spell roster was used up. We can now officially say goodbye to the Rogue. It was nice knowing you.

Wizards bug me, is what I'm saying. Having a "magic user" class in a fantasy game is as bad as having a "fighter" class in an action-adventure game. Give me classes that approach the game's fundamental activities in a unique and interesting way.

For all my griping, you might be forgiven for thinking I disliked Tome and Blood, but really I only disliked pages 4-9, 20-21 (maybe, if you have to ask what the difference is between Spellcraft and Knowledge [Arcana], that's a clue that you have one skill too many), and 81-83. That's only 10% of the book, pretty consistent with the series' track record. Once Tome and Blood gets past the questionable mechanics of the Wizard (and to a lesser extent, Sorcerer) class, and into actual fantasy flavor, it has a lot going for it.

Certainly, from a world-building perspective, this book's Prestige Classes are the best in the series. I especially enjoyed the transhumanist ones like the Dragon Disciple, which allowed a sorcerer to turn into a dragon-human hybrid, the Acolyte of the Skin, who replaced their own natural skin with the flayed hide of a demon, and the Elemental Savant, who demonstrated such profound elemental mastery that they became an elemental creature.

Mechanically, they have their flaws, what with the Dragon Disciple gaining abilities best suited to a front-line fighter, the Acolyte of the Skin losing five caster levels for some flavorful, but limited use abilities, and the Elemental Savant only benefiting from using elemental attack spells (though that's just as much a problem of the spell list as anything else). Given the edition's notorious caster/non-caster divide, it's probably a good thing that many of the Prestige Classes are weaker than just taking 10 levels of Wizard, which makes it a real shame that they won't see much use . . . due to being weaker than taking 10 levels of Wizard.

The rest of the book is also solid, if not quite as inspired. I liked all of the magical organizations, even if they were a little basic (though we covered this ground with Sword and Fist - the basic stuff needs to be written down somewhere, so why not here). My favorite was the Arcane Order, but only for an absolutely ridiculous reason - their leader is named "Japheth Arcane." That made me laugh ("No, no, you see it's the 'Arcane' Order, as in the Order that follows a guy named 'Arcane.' The fact that it does arcane stuff is just a coincidence.")

Overall, I'd say that this is probably my least favorite book in the series so far. Its high points were among the highest, but I feel like when all was said and done, the wrong side won my internal war. After reading the book about Wizards and Sorcerers, I was more convinced than ever that their cool stuff should be divided up and given to the game's other classes. "Magic" is simply too broad a niche.

Ukss Contribution: I really liked Phantom Ink, the special alchemical ink that could be made to only show up under certain predefined lighting conditions. Writing a note that's only visible in moonlight is pure Tolkien, and I'm here for it.