Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners

by Joseph D. Carriker Jr. (Developer), Rose Bailey, Benjamin Baugh

So many people wish for fame and renown during their lives — or even for just a little bit of notoriety. But among our Kindred, that’s very nearly a fate worse than death. Don’t take my word for it, though. Go and ask some questions. Find out about who they talk to in the Necropoli of the Nosferatu, and in the perfumed salons of Elysium. Listen to what they say about them, and listen even more carefully to what they don’t say. Then maybe you’ll understand that the worst thing you can do is to stand out in a society of blood-starved murderers, my boy.

The Hungry and the Wicked

Explore the exemplars of Kindred society, celebrities and leaders among the undead, and the monsters that haunt its fringes.
Includes a selection of truly ancient vampires, creatures driven by the madness of eternity and the hunger of ages.
Players will find a selection of new bloodlines, Merits, Devotions and other useful details for their own characters, as well as potential sires, allies and enemies — and the things Kindred say about them.
Storytellers are presented with a complete selection of characters to populate their chronicles with, complete with story hooks and rumors about them.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Vampires

156 pages, Hardcover

First published February 27, 2009

About the author

Joseph Carriker is the developer for Green Ronin’s Blue Rose AGE roleplaying game line. He has been writing in the gaming industry for sixteen years now, and has worked on a variety of game lines over those years.

In 2017, he released his first novel, Sacred Band, and his second, Shadowtide, in 2018. He runs a Patreon dedicated to his Sacred Band world with a variety of short stories, world building and commissioned art.

He is an outspoken queer gamer, having helped organize and take part in the annual Queer as a Three-Sided Die panels at GenCon. Joseph lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner A.J., and likes to believe he does his part in Keeping Portland Weird.

Reviews

[Broodingferret · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more I read of the new World of Darkness material the more I like it. Though the books still have periodic editing errors that make my teeth hurt, the level of emotive and decriptive writing has soared, as well as the sheer creativity. The Vampire stuff is some of the darkest, most twisted, and bizarrly awesome horror that I've come across in a while. This pleases me.

[Andre · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admit I wouldn't have thought that this book would have its main theme be fame among vampires. I expected nothing like that but I think, in hindsight, that it fits really well.
The book is not storytelling of course but gives you certain characters you can use for that purpose and which make the fictional world these vampires live in more real. They flesh the world of vampires out some more and show the different reasons why vampires can become famous and what consequences that has (from rumors and fame to death). And in all three chapters the vampires deserve that. In chapter 1 and 2 already we get a wide range of characters who perform all sorts of functions in the wider vampire society and as such make the world seem as though these vampires are actual beings that have an evolving society. The book gives us among others a teenage Cyber Queen dealing with the information she gathered about vampires, a female vampire legacy that is basically a child but gets paraded around with great pride due to her lineage, a mixture between lone wolf and the monster from the black lagoon who gets lots of copy cats and becomes an urban legend of freedom, a vampire travel agency dealing with incredible efficiency, a vampire artist getting way more fame than he deserves, a vampire being possessed by a demon, a fanatical vampire priest, a cult leader and a vampire Dr Moreau turning other vampires hideous because he believes it will lead them to greatness. In chapter3 we get to the old crowd, the ones that either due to circumstance of creation or own ambition managed to become more than the "run-of-the-mill" elder, like an ancient vampire that has been created in a bizarre fashion that made her truly unique and possibly several beings squeezed into one, to another one that literally changed himself into a monster or a centuries old "aristocrat" respectively an even older vampire from ancient Greece (that one was once ripped apart so only the bloody ribcage and inner organs remained and that one's maker cradled those remains while weeping tears of blood at Zeus' altar; imagine that scene for a second). All of these vampires have become legends, well the one that are known that is, either due to themselves or some miraculous event, and basically change the world around them due to their simple existence.
All of them can be used in vampire or non-vampire stories, to differing degrees, but it works with all of them, just for different stories. Imagine living in a city where you feel like something is watching you or you can instantly become a vampire thrall or where walls suddenly start bleeding, all because the vampires there managed to let their essence seep into the city itself.

Now as much as I like this book there are some things that are to me like a taste of vinegar in a good cocktail. The editing errors here and there, like some text being straight that should be in italics, are not the problem it is rather that certain elements of the book hit a bit too close to home for my taste and some stuff was a tad racist and contradicted some rules.

There is nothing wrong with having one of the vampires (named Emily) be of mixed white American-Japanese descent of the first generation, but using her to just once again claim that if you are an old European vampire you must be racist is really insulting. And actually sounds a bit like they are saying Americans are the super cool progressives. Not to mention that just because one parent is Japanese doesn't mean you look "different", you could still turn out white. But the book does not seem to treat Emily that way, it just calls her an Asian-American and I doubt she registered as European-American to the authors, because if she is Asian due to her mother she is also European due to her father. So I think this book has its share of racism, albeit I am sure many would say that it is not and rather progressive. Well not me, for me this is too similar to the habit of having white-non-white mixed children being assigned to the non-white parentage, whatever is defined as non-white that is.
Some other things are also weird and scream of stereotyping. The two vampire serial killers for instance are lovers and the book states that it appears on the surface as though the guy is in charge since she fawns over him, but at the same time it is obvious that she commands and he blindly follows, the book even says so, so how can it appear that he is in charge?
And it doesn't stop there. You know, it's not like this Dorjan guy isn't an imposing presence (he basically seeped his essence into the city and lords over everything) but since they already have Budapest be his playground, don't they think that it goes a bit too far towards stereotyping when they say physically, Dorján is ethnically Hungarian, large and well muscled like a laborer, with a mane of dark hair and a full beard? Sure the artwork of him is good, but it has cliché written all over it. The guy on it looks like a stereotypical Hungarian warlord with his beard, his long black hair, his grin and his fur coat and what I think are old leather clothes.
And there is another case of stereotyping. That one vampire who managed to make himself even more monstrous was stated to have once been a beautiful man of fair skin and pale straw hair and he is from Mainz (which they spell Meinz, which is incorrect, even if they wanted an older name it would have to be Meintz). Most men over here are not pale blond when they are adults. Most blonds only have pale blond as children, if ever. Oh and only wanting to speak German makes him even more of a monster apparently, because he doesn't chose to speak English. Considered that the book never says in what city he resides this is pretty arrogant to suggest that he has to speak English, I mean what if he resides in Madrid? The only thing missing would have been if they had made him a racist.
To be frank, I was already put off by the relatively large number of German sounding names in this book; it's odd considered that most of these vampires in the book are clearly Anglo-Americans.

The last two points are some significant rule breaks:
1) They have some vampires possess power combinations for which they do not possess the necessary prerequisites, said monstrous vampire would need the power to shapeshift to become so monstrous but the book doesn't list it among his powers.
2) This vampire calling herself an aspect of Hecate is ok a concept in itself but why does she and her childer have animal traits and the book claims that as part of the Gangrel curse? The Gangrel vampires in this game line do not usually acquire animal traits; that is something found rather in specific bloodlines. And her story suggests that she could transform into a wolf from the start, but vampires cannot do this when they are young, it takes time to develop that power. And this oddity is never acknowledged here.

These are basically the quarrels I have with this book. The positive aspects far outnumber the negative ones, that is for sure but the negative ones sadly carry some significant weight and so I cannot give a higher rating.