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Vampire: the Masquerade
Vampire Storyteller's Handbook
The Final Nights Hid a Million Stories
From the hidden horrors of the Camarilla to the naked fiendishness of the Sabbat, vampires play at the eternal Jyhad. Elders, ancillae, neonates and... others... prowl the nights. Only one individual knows all the secrets of the World of darkness.
And They Must All Be Told
The role of the Storyteller is a daunting one, and this book is an invaluable aid for those who orchestrate Vampire chronicles. It includes a myriad of information, including enigmas best left out of players' hands, to create stories and populate the casts of epic tales. The Vampire Storytellers Handbook revised edition leaves no stone unturned - except those that hide secrets no mortal should know.
Vampire Storytellers Handbook includes systems for rare bloodlines, Disciplines and elder vampires
* Presents a Vampire FAQ, details for the True Hand, crossovers with other World of Darkness games and other secrets of storytelling
* Outlines suggestions for alternate character creatio, historical settings and chronicle creation.
From the hidden horrors of the Camarilla to the naked fiendishness of the Sabbat, vampires play at the eternal Jyhad. Elders, ancillae, neonates and... others... prowl the nights. Only one individual knows all the secrets of the World of darkness.
And They Must All Be Told
The role of the Storyteller is a daunting one, and this book is an invaluable aid for those who orchestrate Vampire chronicles. It includes a myriad of information, including enigmas best left out of players' hands, to create stories and populate the casts of epic tales. The Vampire Storytellers Handbook revised edition leaves no stone unturned - except those that hide secrets no mortal should know.
Vampire Storytellers Handbook includes systems for rare bloodlines, Disciplines and elder vampires
* Presents a Vampire FAQ, details for the True Hand, crossovers with other World of Darkness games and other secrets of storytelling
* Outlines suggestions for alternate character creatio, historical settings and chronicle creation.
204 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
41 people want to read
About the author
White Wolf Publishing
84 books20 followersWhite Wolf Entertainment AB, formerly White Wolf Publishing, was an American roleplaying game and book publisher. The company was founded in 1991 as a merger between Lion Rampant and White Wolf Magazine (est. 1986 in Rocky Face, GA; it later became "White Wolf Inphobia"), and was initially led by Mark Rein-Hagen of the former and Steve Wieck and Stewart Wieck of the latter. White Wolf Publishing, Inc. merged with CCP Games in 2006. White Wolf Publishing operated as an imprint of CCP hf, but ceased in-house production of any material, instead licensing their properties to other publishers. It was announced in October 2015 that White Wolf had been acquired from CCP by Paradox Interactive. In November 2018, after most of its staff were dismissed for making controversial statements, it was announced that White Wolf would no longer function as an entity separate from Paradox Interactive.
source: Wikipedia
source: Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 18, 2017
This book turned out much better than I expected based on my few memories of it. The only things I really remembered were the Baali and the True Brujah and a few other vague bits like the maturation rules. I figured it would be like the Storyteller's Companion, where it was a lot of overflow that wouldn't fit in the corebook, and in a sense that's true, but the Storyteller's Guide is much more focused and coherent than the hodge-podge of material in the companion.
The beginning is basically a FAQ, with popular questions about Cainites. Do vampires leave fingerprints (no)? Do vampire limbs grow back after being cut off (yes, after they heal the damage with blood points)? What's the difference between a Clan and a bloodline (half politics, half lineage)? Can a vampire take elder blood, Embrace someone with it, then diablerize the fledgling (lolno)? Then there's three new bloodlines--the Baali, a group of Satan-worshipping Satanists for Satan who are a lot more interesting if you read Clanbook: Baali; the True Brujah, who claim to be the real descendants of the Brujah Antediluvian and the "false" Brujah are the descendants of the usurper Troile, and also have time-manipulation powers; and the Nagaraja, who are to the Euthanatos as the Tremere are to the Order of Hermes and also need to eat flesh to get blood points. I actually like the True Brujah a lot even though they're really silly, but of course this is Vampire Revised, where fun can only be had in regimented amounts, so the book makes sure to point out how these bloodlines are really rare, like really really rare, rarer than that, why are you even bothering to read this rare. Storyteller's Handbook, right?
The majority of the book is advice on running the game, and much to my surprise, a lot of it is pretty good! I'm used to Revised-era being the time of pulling back on some of the silliness that was evidence in 2nd edition, where it seemed like vampires were behind every major historical event, elders had a double-handful of disciplines, and Sam Haight, so I figured that the advice would be how the GM can lock down their game to prevent the players from disrupting their beautiful plot. While there was a bit of that, it was very focused on fun and how to tweak Vampire to your particular group.
For example, there's a long section on just how much to delve into the horror of the World of Darkness. It starts out talking about horror is necessary because Vampire is a storytelling game of personal horror and the World of Darkness and this isn't a hack-and-slash game, it has real character motivation and pathos, and I figured it was how it's necessary to put in all the torture and degradation to have a real "mature" game. But right after that, the book mentions that this is a game, the point is to have fun, and talking with the players is the best way to determine how much mature content to include. Give content warnings and ask if the players are okay with it, and if not, either work out a way for the player(s) that aren't okay to not be involved in the scene or change the scene. It notably does not say to just go ahead with it because of how sophisticated and edgy you are.
There's another part about properly establishing the themes of the game beforehand. If the GM plans a politics-focused game with shifting alliances, questions of trust, and a lot of talking, then a Gangrel with three dots of Animalism might not be the most appropriate character and the GM should talk it over with the player. But then it also points out that if the GM does allow the character, it's their responsibility to work that character into the story and make sure they aren't always off in the wilderness twiddling their thumbs. That's a problem I had in the one long Vampire game I ran--I wanted a game of politics among the Primogen, a coup against the Prince, and the characters having to pick sides, and one of the characters I got was a Brujah with 5 dots of Melee and the Lunacy flaw. And I allowed it, so everything that came after was at least partially my fault.
There's more I won't go into, like the balance between appropriate levels of betrayal and keeping the game fun, alternate methods of character generation, keeping character sheets secret to encourage roleplaying, the important point that vampires are most based around influence than direct control, running an elders game, setting up candles and music to set the mood, what even is gothic-punk, and so on. I especially liked the repeated notes that vampires don't always hang out in goth clubs and listen to the Sisters of Mercy, because if they did, it would be very easy for vampire hunters to find them.
The ending tackles different subjects. The second-to-last chapter is about crossovers, mostly focusing on situations like Garou using Gifts that target Rage but vampires not having a Rage score and how to deal with that, though it also updates Kindred of the East for the Revised ruleset. The last chapter is about the Black Hand, the uber-secret vampire Illuminati first introduced in Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand. In that book, the Black Hand were the secret masters of all vampiric society from their city in the Underworld and also Vicissitude was a spiritual disease that turned its sufferers into the Thing. The Storyteller's Handbook walks all that back, bringing Vampire up to date with Enoch's destruction in Ends of Empire, pointing out that a group of a few dozen vampires can't really control organizations of thousands of vampires effectively, and killing off the sect through apathy. See, the Black Hand is a Gehenna cult dedicated to preparing the Earth for the Antediluvians, but the Ravnos Antediluvian woke in Time of Thin Blood and didn't even notice the Black Hand. All their dreams revealed to be hollow and their leadership relic nuked into plasm, the Black Hand disintegrates, but there's plenty of playability in its corpse.
I was surprised how much good there was in this book. Despite the bursts of one-true-wayism and airs about how Vampire is a superior game, not like those idiotic dungeon-crawls, it has a lot of great advice inside about keeping a group running, setting the proper mood, and dealing with conflict between players. They should have reorganized that so the FAQ and bloodlines were after, because while those were neat too, the advice is the core of the book and is worth leading with.
The beginning is basically a FAQ, with popular questions about Cainites. Do vampires leave fingerprints (no)? Do vampire limbs grow back after being cut off (yes, after they heal the damage with blood points)? What's the difference between a Clan and a bloodline (half politics, half lineage)? Can a vampire take elder blood, Embrace someone with it, then diablerize the fledgling (lolno)? Then there's three new bloodlines--the Baali, a group of Satan-worshipping Satanists for Satan who are a lot more interesting if you read Clanbook: Baali; the True Brujah, who claim to be the real descendants of the Brujah Antediluvian and the "false" Brujah are the descendants of the usurper Troile, and also have time-manipulation powers; and the Nagaraja, who are to the Euthanatos as the Tremere are to the Order of Hermes and also need to eat flesh to get blood points. I actually like the True Brujah a lot even though they're really silly, but of course this is Vampire Revised, where fun can only be had in regimented amounts, so the book makes sure to point out how these bloodlines are really rare, like really really rare, rarer than that, why are you even bothering to read this rare. Storyteller's Handbook, right?
The majority of the book is advice on running the game, and much to my surprise, a lot of it is pretty good! I'm used to Revised-era being the time of pulling back on some of the silliness that was evidence in 2nd edition, where it seemed like vampires were behind every major historical event, elders had a double-handful of disciplines, and Sam Haight, so I figured that the advice would be how the GM can lock down their game to prevent the players from disrupting their beautiful plot. While there was a bit of that, it was very focused on fun and how to tweak Vampire to your particular group.
For example, there's a long section on just how much to delve into the horror of the World of Darkness. It starts out talking about horror is necessary because Vampire is a storytelling game of personal horror and the World of Darkness and this isn't a hack-and-slash game, it has real character motivation and pathos, and I figured it was how it's necessary to put in all the torture and degradation to have a real "mature" game. But right after that, the book mentions that this is a game, the point is to have fun, and talking with the players is the best way to determine how much mature content to include. Give content warnings and ask if the players are okay with it, and if not, either work out a way for the player(s) that aren't okay to not be involved in the scene or change the scene. It notably does not say to just go ahead with it because of how sophisticated and edgy you are.
There's another part about properly establishing the themes of the game beforehand. If the GM plans a politics-focused game with shifting alliances, questions of trust, and a lot of talking, then a Gangrel with three dots of Animalism might not be the most appropriate character and the GM should talk it over with the player. But then it also points out that if the GM does allow the character, it's their responsibility to work that character into the story and make sure they aren't always off in the wilderness twiddling their thumbs. That's a problem I had in the one long Vampire game I ran--I wanted a game of politics among the Primogen, a coup against the Prince, and the characters having to pick sides, and one of the characters I got was a Brujah with 5 dots of Melee and the Lunacy flaw. And I allowed it, so everything that came after was at least partially my fault.
There's more I won't go into, like the balance between appropriate levels of betrayal and keeping the game fun, alternate methods of character generation, keeping character sheets secret to encourage roleplaying, the important point that vampires are most based around influence than direct control, running an elders game, setting up candles and music to set the mood, what even is gothic-punk, and so on. I especially liked the repeated notes that vampires don't always hang out in goth clubs and listen to the Sisters of Mercy, because if they did, it would be very easy for vampire hunters to find them.
The ending tackles different subjects. The second-to-last chapter is about crossovers, mostly focusing on situations like Garou using Gifts that target Rage but vampires not having a Rage score and how to deal with that, though it also updates Kindred of the East for the Revised ruleset. The last chapter is about the Black Hand, the uber-secret vampire Illuminati first introduced in Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand. In that book, the Black Hand were the secret masters of all vampiric society from their city in the Underworld and also Vicissitude was a spiritual disease that turned its sufferers into the Thing. The Storyteller's Handbook walks all that back, bringing Vampire up to date with Enoch's destruction in Ends of Empire, pointing out that a group of a few dozen vampires can't really control organizations of thousands of vampires effectively, and killing off the sect through apathy. See, the Black Hand is a Gehenna cult dedicated to preparing the Earth for the Antediluvians, but the Ravnos Antediluvian woke in Time of Thin Blood and didn't even notice the Black Hand. All their dreams revealed to be hollow and their leadership relic nuked into plasm, the Black Hand disintegrates, but there's plenty of playability in its corpse.
I was surprised how much good there was in this book. Despite the bursts of one-true-wayism and airs about how Vampire is a superior game, not like those idiotic dungeon-crawls, it has a lot of great advice inside about keeping a group running, setting the proper mood, and dealing with conflict between players. They should have reorganized that so the FAQ and bloodlines were after, because while those were neat too, the advice is the core of the book and is worth leading with.
September 16, 2022
Vampires never have to complain of a living a dull circumstances, so let's all pretend that we are undead" -Le Velo pour deux, the brobecks
July 6, 2015
Not completely useless but this thing is dripping with condescension. Made it rather tedious to read.
Also has some very bad art.
Also has some very bad art.
January 12, 2017
Reseña en proceso
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews