Vampire Storyteller's Companion

Vampire: the Masquerade

by Richard Dansky

The Kindred hide amongst humanity, eking out their bloodthirsty unlives behind a veil of deception. Yet certain mysteries are obscured from even the most canny, perceptive vampires. Who else stalks the Final Nights? What powers do they wield? What hidden skills do they command?

There Are More of Us Than We Know

The Vampire Storytellers Companion collects new rules, abilities and bloodlines to aid Storytellers in their task of world-building. This book presents new information on the less numerous Kindred of the World of Darkness, as well as an expanded weapons list and frightening Disciplines only whispered of by the Kindred of the Camarilla and Sabbat. It is a valuable resource for Storytellers who seek to unleash forgotten terrors and new machinations upon their players.

Includes a Storyteller Screen.

Genres: Role Playing Games, World Of Darkness, Vampires, Gaming, Horror

72 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1998

About the author

By day, Richard Dansky works as a professional video game designer and writer for Red Storm/Ubisoft, with credits on games like Splinter Cell: Blacklist. By night, he writes fiction, with his most recent book being the short fiction collection SNOWBIRD GOTHIC. Richard lives in North Carolina with his wife and their inevitable cats, books, and collection of single malt whiskys.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is called the "Storyteller's" Companion, but it's really just overflow from the Vampire corebook. On the other hand, it admits that in the intro, and it's true that most of the material here isn't going to be useful for players unless the GM specifically allows it. I never had this book when I originally played Vampire and references to the Daughters of Cacophony or Nihilistics in other books always went over my head, but now I am enlightened, so to speak.

The book is divided into three sections: bloodlines (and their powers, which get a separate chapter), secondary abilities, and equipment. The bloodlines included are the Daughters of Cacophony, the Salubri, and the Samedi, three bloodlines that don't really belong to either the Camarilla or the Sabbat and don't have large enough numbers to play a big part in vampire politics. The Daughters of Cacophony are singing vampires who love singing and sing all the time, and also are pretty focused; the Salubri are that most tired of vampire tropes, the three-eyed warrior-saintssuicide messiahs (warrior-saints would come later); and the Samedi are repulsive, corpselike vampires who provide another option for people who want to play mercenary assassins but don't want to deal with the Assamites' uncomfortable stereotyping. They get to deal with different uncomfortable stereotyping, since the Samedi are primarily from the Caribbean, are led by an elder who calls himself the Baron, and raise zombies.

I can see why these were left out of the corebook--I mean, singing vampires who love singing and are all about singing?--but as the line went on and the Salubri got more fleshed out, they ended up becoming my favorite playable splat in the game. Yes, three-eyed vampire healers is completely ludicrous, but I'm a sucker for them because just by existing they help show the emptiness of all the other vampires' moral arguments. I was just doing what I had to, the other vampires say. "A beast I am, lest a beast I become" as the quote goes. Well, no. The Salubri show that that's not true--there is another way to unlive that doesn't involve being a tremendous asshole, it's just that being terrible is easier, and that's the tone I like for my horror games. There should be a way out that you could have taken, if only you had been willing to.

The secondary abilities chapter finally revealed to me what all those NPC writeups that had skills like "Grace" and "Intuition" were drawing from. There's a bunch of new skills here, all of them more focused than the ones in the corebook, but the XP burden is ameliorated by making them cost half as much. I can see these being useful for certain concepts, like taking Style but not Etiquette for someone who is always well-dressed and looks great but would be much better off keeping their mouth shut, but a lot of them are too limited even at half cost to really be worth buying. Throwing, bureaucracy, intuition, and meditation, for starters, aren't ever anything I would spend XP on unless the GM made it clear that I'd get some kind of use out of them. But I suppose that's why they're in the Storyteller's Companion.

The last chapter is called equipment, but it really should be called weapons. I admit, I've never thought of Vampire as a gun fondling game, at least not the way that something like Shadowrun is. I know I've spent a while comparing the Ares Predator to the Colt Manhunter and deciding what attachments and accessories to equip them with, but in Vampire I always just grabbed a "Heavy Pistol" and done. But if you want to compare the merits of the Smith & Wesson M640 and the Smith & Wesson M686, is this book for you.

I also have to give White Wolf props for not making the katana the superior weapon. It does Strength + 2 damage, which is beaten by the longsword at Strength +3. On the other hand, I suppose that just replicates AD&D Second Edition's longsword supremacy, but at least you can tell the people with the Desert Eagles and katanas under their trenchcoats that they are being mechanically suboptimal.

Three stars. I'm sure the information here was useful to a lot of people, and I can even see that I would use it in certain circumstances, but there's a reason it was a pullout from the corebook.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book of errata which aided my understanding of the game and offered some rules and explanations that will make my Storytelling smoother. Reading it cover-to-cover, the chapter covering weapons and equipment was dull; great reference material if you know what to look for, but not exciting. The bloodlines herein are interesting but look more useful as NPCs. If an ST allows them as player options, read up on their Disciplines as well as their backgrounds to ensure that those players don't "break" your game.