Minireview: War of Ages
War of Ages collects two old (1st edition) Vampire: the Masquerade sourcebooks, Elysium and The Anarch Cookbook, into one compilation.
Elysium is a soucebook for playing and running Elder characters in a Vampire chronicle. Now, these are pretty damn difficult characters to play – most of them have been “alive” for hundreds of years, and have (quite static) worldviews that are mostly quite alien to modern sensibilities. How do you play or run a creature like that? Answer: usually, not very well. Elders tend to become either overpowered cliches or overpowered monsters stealing away the limelight from the players. And what if one of the players is an Elder? Can he/she think about the character beyond “whee, I have tons of kewl powaz!”? All too often… no. While this book doesn’t give any real solutions to the above, it does outline how Elder society and society games differ from those of younger vampires, and gives some pointers on how to play them (many stolen directly from Machiavelli). While the book doesn’t contain a huge wealth of info and didn’t really give any new info to me (having helped run a Vampire LARP thingy for ten years)… it’s not bad.
Anarch Cookbook shows the other side of the coin, the (usually) younger generation who have left the Camarilla and who wage a war of sorts against the Elders. The book goes into why this is usually doomed to fail, but also highlights that it can work, now and then. There are notes on tactics, logistics, and on how to survive when an organization with lots of power is out to get you. Trust becomes a major issue, especially when you feature in things like a possible Blood Bond and the various Disciplines that may be used against you. There’s a small bit of silly emphasis on the words “Gothic-Punk”… but that’s forgivable, this is an old book from the era when Vampire really tried to be “Gothic-Punk”. Whatever that means.
When these books were written, Vampire was still something very new and different and the WoD metaplot hadn’t yet started to descend into the silly depths (mostly). Oh, I have a fondness for those silly levels myself – but these are from an earlier time, when the game was still figuring itself out.
Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:07 Posted in Books, Games
Tags vampire, white wolf
