Guide to the Camarilla

Vampire: the Masquerade

by Richard Dansky

World of Darkness book

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

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 14, 1999

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]

"Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies."
-Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

I'm kind of tempted to hack a star off Guide to the Camarilla's rating just because it never actually explains how to pronounce "camarilla." Is it the Spanish way, as would be implied by how one of the founders is named "Rafael de Corazón"? Is it an Anglicization, since the sect's power base is almost entirely in non-Spanish-speaking areas? Just pick one and stick with it, I guess.

The biggest problem with this book is that most of it is already set up in the basic premise to Vampire: the Masquerade. The Prince rules the city with the Primogen under them, Elysium is where vampires gather secure in the knowledge that they won't try to kill each other, the Six Traditions are the basis of government, and so on. All of that is set up in the corebook, so talking about it here ends up repeating a lot of information or spending time expanding on concepts that don't really need expansion. How much space do we need devoted to explaining that the Prince has absolute power subject only to their subjects not trying to kill them?

I think my favorite part came at the end, when the book was indirectly explaining why the Camarilla is such a nightmare through explaining the elder mindset. Being Embraced into the Camarilla is like being hired at the ground floor of a Wall Street banking firm except that all the employees are immortal and the only way to get promoted is to assassinate your superiors without getting caught. The elders are afraid of the younger vampires because of the constant temptation of diablerie, they're afraid of their peers because power games are the only thing keeping them sane against the endless press of years, and they're afraid of the Methuselahs because the elders manipulate their descendants and the mortals constantly so their own elders must be doing it to them. They're afraid of mortals because the pace of modern technology has left them behind, and they're afraid of not banding together because the Sabbat and non-vampire threats like the werewolves would overwhelm them if they do. And they're afraid of acting themselves because they're immortal and why risk the rest of eternity on any action that exposes themselves to any danger? So the Camarilla exists out of fear, because the consequences of it not existing are worse--as solitary predators, from the point of view of any individual vampire the ideal number of vampires in any given area is one--and the sense of endless paranoia and constantly feeling like you're just a pawn in someone else's schemes is an important part of getting the feel of a Camarilla game.

This is also one of the books where they put all the high-level Disciplines--though weirdly, most of the sample Camarilla characters provided are 8th Generation or higher and thus can't use any of them--and since the Camarilla has all the generic Clans without the weird Disciplines the powers are mostly pretty predictable. High-level Fortitude lets you shatter swords on your skin, which will certainly look impressive but probably isn't going to get players excited about buying it, assuming that they're able to do so. That and there's not much parity between the levels. Animalism 9 lets the user force someone's Beast to attack them from the inside, doing a bunch of damage. Dominate 9 lets the user give orders to all vampires descended from them down to the last generation. They cost the same number of experience points, and while you can make a lot of case-by-case arguments, I think the power difference is obvious here.

Then again, if you're hoping for rigorous mechanical balance in the oWoD, well, you're gonna have a bad time.

There's also a section about the anarchs thrown in near the end. I say "thrown in" because while it's not a bad section, and it's possible to justify its existence since the anarch movement is almost entirely a response to the existence of the Camarilla, that's true of the Sabbat too and they don't get their own section here. It feels like it was thrown in to meet word count, when that space could have been devoted to maybe showing an example Camarilla city. Or maybe a non-standard Camarilla city, one where the Prince is a mere figurehead or where there are six Primogen and two of them are Brujah, for example. Like the basic unit of the Sabbat is the pack, the basic unit of the Camarilla is the city, and I think a couple of example power structures could have helped a lot.

And maybe something about places that aren't Europe or North America? There's some notes about Hong Kong being a Camarilla stronghold, but what about Africa? India? Russia? Australia? Anything at all?

Those missed opportunities are why I think Guide to the Camarilla is only middling. Since the Camarilla city is the basic assumption of Vampire with other game types being the deviations from it, I would have preferred more expansion on what makes a Camarilla game special. And to be fair, it did do some of that, but it didn't do enough. I'm not sure what "enough" would have been, but without it the book just falls short.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote a very small -- 1500-word -- chunk of this book.

[Max Rudd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great lore dump for the WoD setting. It's always good to have more crunchy stuff to flesh out your campaigns and this book is a real time/work saver for you Storytellers out there. And, of course, OG WoD rules are still the best.

[Venus · Rating 4 out of 5]

white wolf has always excelled at very readable source books. not great for actual play tho. random rules for play scattered throughout lore.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

RPG Guides were more fun when I was in teenage angst.