Originally published June 22, 2012
Glimpses of the Unknown is a short (48 page) e-book put out by White Wolf in 2011. As I was snatching up Victorian Lost, I decided to grab this long delayed purchase as well. The book is essentially a gathering of story seeds and plots for all the major lines of World of Darkness in addition to World of Darkness:Innocents. It also adds onto some of the story ideas in World of Darkness: Mirrors.
A Storyteller, you can never have too many sources of inspiration and adventure ideas. So in many ways this is a no brainer. The ideas in this book are broken up into two categories. There are the seeds, little ideas that might lead to a larger story or just add that creepy wrinkle to a current plotline. Also presented are roughly mapped story ideas with several scenes worth of ideas.
The ideas themselves range from the imaginative and intriguing (everyone they meet begin to work “she lives” into their sentences) to some that seem uninspired. In particular I found the last section for Mirrors to be uninteresting. Perhaps it is just that Mirrors itself focused on major changes to the setting like the apocalypse or True Blood-like outings of monsters, but the ideas there just don’t grab me. Overall however the ideas in Glimpses of the Unknown are pretty good and I expect to use several of them in my next World of Darkness game.
One theme throughout the work is that not everything can be categorized into vampire, mage, werewolf or so forth. There are creatures that fit none of the established groups perfectly, like all-knowing talking cats, magical gardeners, and mysterious men in black. Are they angels, agents of mages or spirits, or something else entirely? I think this concept is a good one to keep in mind in any game with a well established background. Fundamentally a game is how the game master and the players define it. If you want to ensure well read players are surprised from time to time, it is useful to put creatures and objects in the game that are not in the established rules. This might be a change in the established monsters, like vampires that are immune to sunlight or a contagious form of lycanthropy, or might be just an original tidbit, like a spell no one has seen before.
Throughout the book there are several little extras for each of the major groups: a rote for Mage, a ritual for Sineaters, an Athanor for Promethean, a rite for Werewolf, a goblin contract for Changeling, a new merit. These crunchy bits are tied into some of the presented story ideas and seem fairly balanced. They are not worth buying the book on their own but are a nice addition that dovetails with the theme I just mentioned.
The art is largely recycled from earlier books but at least seems to be partly matched up with the material.
All in all it is an interesting collection of ideas and certainly worth adding to your collection if you are a storyteller who is on the lookout for new ideas.
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