Unlike some other books I've read for World of Darkness, Damnation City never feels dry, focusing on the feel of city and a tool-box of ways to build one rather than history or the way things are. For this review I'm going to focus on the parts that I've used (particularly with Rosebriar) but the rest of the material is quite good.
Overview
Damnation City is broken up into 6 chapters. Chapter 1: Storytelling the City focuses on the feel and personality of the city over on mechanics. It also delves into some specific aspects of vampiric society. It's probably the least focused of the chapters but there is plenty of good stuff in there for sparking ideas for your own cities.Chapter 2: City Works provides several different mechanical systems to use in a city based Chronicle or campaign. It also contains guidelines for designing cities. This and Chapter 5 are the most applicable sections for use in other games.
Chapters 3 and 4 both deal with the politics of vampires. Chapter 3: Barony focuses on characters who are just above the subsistence level, seeking to gain more territory, more status and claw their way to the top. Chapter 4: Primacy deals with those at the top, the elders who vie for control of the city.
Chapter 5: Districts, Sites & Subjects is the complement to the guidelines in Chapter 2. It provides a large number of sample districts, locations and NPC prompts for building your city. Scattered throughout are also an equally large number of story seeds and hooks.
Finally Chapter 6: Newcastle is a worked out example of the city building system for the fictional city of Newcastle.
Vampire Specific
So let's start with the vampire specific material. The chapters above are nicely broken down into sections and the dividing line between what is generally applicable and what it specific to vampires tends to obey those section boundaries.The Neofeudal System gives a nice in-depth discussion about the roles and structure of vampire society. It talks about how territory is doled out and guarded, the general isolation of vampiric society, and how architecture can be used to color your city. It is choke full of great ideas about what a particular official (like the Sheriff or Prince) might be doing on a given night as well as variant positions that might exist in a city. This section could really have used some better organization but there are plenty of great story ideas here.
Selecting Your City is a bit of a mixed bag with lots of vampire specific material combined with snapshot overview of major cities around the world. It's a nice read but perhaps of limited usefulness unless you have a globetrotting Chronicle.
Ten Princes gives you the personalities, backgrounds and general feel of living under the thumb of ten very different vampire overlords. Five of the characters are defined by their covenant and basically exemplify that aspect of the game. The fun ones are the other five, the oddities, from the never present Phantom to the primal Chieftain. I would really love to play in a city featuring any one of these figures.
Barony Gameplay I ultimately didn't like. While I find the idea of playing a character climbing up the rungs of society interesting, I think it breaks down the process too mechanically. It seems everything you would want to do with a territory costs Merit Dots and everything has a cost. This overuse of merits was something I disliked in the new World of Darkness and something I hope to see less of in the second edition of the game. There are some good ideas in here though and if you were to build your own system, it would be worth looking through it. I especially like the Trespass mechanic where the owner of a domain picks how one can potentially cross without drawing their attention.
Primacy deals heavily with the political struggles of elders. There is a mechanic for influence and the like. Again it is a bit too mechanical for me. I'd probably just use the rules for Kingdom instead.
General Use
Now for the general usage sections of the book.The Marks: Kindred Graffiti despite the name could easily be applied to any society trying to convey information through graffiti. I've had graffiti feature prominently in my Promethean and Mage games for example. Just change some of the symbols and use the guidelines as presented. The mechanics here are fairly good, though I think they could be trimmed back a bit. I plan to cover this later in my description of Rosebriar but mainly I would try to make it simpler and less intimidating: the way the rules are presented it make it seem like you need to roll to spot, roll to recognize and roll to decipher a mark though in practice you'd only ever do one of those.
High and Low and Always Dark provides a nice assortment of city based imagery ranging for the tops of skyscrapers down into the hidden depths. A nice read and great for getting into the mindset of what your city is like.
City of Millions provides a bonanza of character ideas and seeds to use: 100 random mortals (consisting of a concept and what they are up to), 50 motivations, and an assortment of specific versions of a character might express their Vices and Virtues.
The section Ambience and Attitude I found less useful. It tries to put mechanics to how a given the populous of an area feels. While I can see a riot giving certain bonuses and penalties, I think It's too much detail for something that rarely comes up.
Hot Pursuit is one of the better attempts I've seen at building a good chase system. Basically each pursuit roll moves the characters to a new area with its own bonuses, penalties, and opportunities. I've used it several times to good effect.
City Building is probably the best section. It covers the basics of defining your city via Districts (which has its one lengthy section of 35 different neighborhoods with story ideas and game mechanics), Sites (75 locations for story seeds, possible characters, and histories), and maps. This section plus the ones I mentioned make up the heart of this book and were crucial to mapping out Rosebriar. The concept is to break up the city into useful and distinctive chunks of territory, your Little Chinas, Greenwich Villages, Boardwalks and the like.
Subjects does for people what Site and Districts did for buildings and neighborhoods, giving you 18 NPCs to use and abuse as agents, allies or enemies.
Finally there is Newcastle, a worked example using the material from City Building and Districts. If you look closely you'll find some variations on the previously established Districts to show how you can personalize your city.
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