Minireview: Mirrors (World of Darkness)

Mirrors is a system tweaking toolkit for the new World of Darkness. Whole generally regarded in a positive light, there are lots of things about the new core rules set that people love to gripe about (the morality rules, the lack of a system for insanity, the Vice/Virtue breakdown, etc). This book attempts to fix that, and provide a huge pile of extra options to boot. We also get setting tweaks: how to use the system to run a historical, or scifi, or fantasy game (with example game world outlines provided). There are also lots of fun “end of the world” scenarios, with suggested rule set tweaks. Most of these setting tweaks have to do with modifying the skill set to more fit in with a given genre, but they also include some extra rules options.

While I still wouldn’t use nWoD as a “generic” rule set, this book gives some advice on how to do something in that direction. It also goes into the design assumptions and goals behind the system, and how to (and how not to) tweak the thing to do other things. Some ideas I liked, some I didn’t, but that’s quite normal for a tweaking toolkit like this. This isn’t one new variant of nWoD, it’s a big pile of extra options that should each be considered separately. Variant character creation also gets some love, with general point-buy outside the 5/4/3 system discussed. We also get “Extraordinary Mortals”, a new template to give nWoD something like Exalted’s “Heroic Mortals”, so you could design NPCs (or even PCs) to model a Sherlock Holmes (for example) – someone who is indisputably special, but has no specific supernatural abilities.

It’s a big book, with lots of stuff. Like the book’s title says, it’s an attempt to “mirror” the nWoD ruleset into different genres. I can’t say how well it succeeds, since many of the rules tweaks have to be tried out in practice to see if they work, but at least the book tries very hard. Anyone using nWoD to run pretty much any game should get some mileage out of this book. Unless, of course, they are 100% happy with how the system works as written, in which case: rock on.

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