In this case, it’s a supplement about mortal vampire hunters, with an emphasis on running games where the PCs are said hunters. This is one of those really useful supplements which simultaneously opens up a whole new way to play the game it is designed to support whilst at the same time remaining true to the parent game’s themes. Supported by its own Kickstarter, this is a second edition of the widely-praised The Hunters Hunted supplement from way back in the early days of Vampire. At the end of the day it turns out that people don’t really want to believe in vampires, and it will take more than a badly-shot YouTube video to convince them otherwise.Īt the end of the day, an odds and sods collection like this hardly qualifies as a must-have (since by definition if the material in here were that central, it would be in the core book), but it enhances my appreciation of the setting enough that I am glad I have it. It’s really the critical mass of Masquerade breaches that the Camarilla and other vampiric authorities actually need to watch out for.
Put up a YouTube video of vampire shit happening and people won’t automatically flip out – they will just assume it’s a well-done fake. It does so by taking the interesting but very logical stance that individual Masquerade breaches on the Internet are not the end-of-the-world scenario that many Elders (and previous editions of the game) assumed they would be.
Of these, the tech chapter is perhaps the most interesting, since it demands that V20 offer a distinct take on the subject from the old line. There’s an interesting rundown on the various titles (well-known and obscure) used in the various Sects, essays on Prestation (the network of boons and favours that Kindred society works on) and Kindred uses of technology, and a collection of interesting locations around the world (effectively a bunch of evocative adventure seeds). Trusting that people won’t need extensive chapters of character design and storytelling device, the book instead focuses on offering handy bits of setting information. This presumably arises from the line’s emphasis on cramming in value for money and not going out of the way to hold anyone’s hand. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the book is its cover – whereas previous iterations of Vampire (and other World of Darkness games) had companion volumes for players and Storytellers, there is no such division here. This collects various bits and pieces which were a bit too peripheral to include in the core V20 rulebook. That being the case, I figured I’d take a look over the rest of the product line to see whether they’d kept up the same level of consistency. As I’ve said elsewhere, I really dig what Onyx Path are doing with Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition – I consider it to be a marked improvement on the original run of the game, especially since it is deliberately set up to be metaplot-agnostic and I particularly like how the Anarchs Unbound supplement made the Anarch Movement feel like a viable Sect again rather than the doomed second-stringers that they increasingly seemed to be over the run of the original metaplot.