Vampire: the Requiem, Second Edition
Highlights
The second edition of the game contains a lot of changes. Requiem is its own game now, establishing itself apart from Vampire: the Masquerade. The fat has been trimmed, troublesome rules simplified, and more mystery and customization injected.A notable change is the removal of the Fog of Ages. Vampires still sometimes emerge from torpor addled and amnesic but that is the exception rather than the rule. History remains murky but more due to the insanity and lies of elder vampires than due to knowledge lost.
Also significantly changed is Predator’s Taint. Where once this caused vampires to Frenzy with alarming regularity when encountering one of their kind, it is now something they are always aware of but only rises to the surface when one Kindred uses it to lash out at another.
Second edition also tweaks the weaknesses of vampires. Prolonged exposure to sunlight has become survivable for vampires with high enough Humanity and low enough Blood Potency. Clan banes only come into effect once Humanity drops to 6 or lower. Humanity is now more about how separate from mortals a character has become and can be modified much like in Hunter: the Vigil, by taking on new banes to ignore risks to Humanity in certain cases.
Disciplines got a power up, with relatively weak levels removed and replaced. In general the powers are much more flexible. Even the physical disciplines now do more than boost Strength or Health. The two forms of blood magic, Theban Sorcery and Cruac, now mirror each other, one requiring Humanity while the other antithetical to it. The Odro Dracul's Coils have been updated as well with new features called Scales to purchase. These allow specific effects using the Coils, sort of like Devotions. Devotions in general are promoted, especially over the creation of bloodline disciplines.
As for Merits, the book contains many, many options from Covenant specific merits and abilities to enhancing Clan strengths to focusing on the heightened senses and the Beast. New vampiric combat styles are included as well as a new social style.
Revenants have become reenvisioned and brought into the main book. These flawed or accidental embraces have many of the same abilities as Kindred but lack the ability to hold onto Vitae night to night.
Also interesting is the inclusion of lost clans and covenants, showing that Kindred society is not as static as one might expect. While some of these comes from earlier books there are also a few new groups and organizations.
Overall the game has a very political focus while still retaining the feel of personal horror as your character find themselves torn between the roles of monster and man.
Humanity seems easy to maintain but remains a slippery slope especially for the Mehket who suffer the banes of torpor and sunlight more extremely. If you happen to lose enough Humanity that you lose connection to your final Touchstone (5 unless you have the Touchstone Merit), then you risk either torpor (and possibly another Humanity roll) or the loss of a second Humanity dot. Since you start with 7 Humanity this isn’t too much of a problem but as the game progresses, you will want to work to maintain a high Humanity or buy up the Touchstone Merit to avoid extra unpleasantness when you do lose Humanity.
The change to sunlight damage also has oddities. A vampire with low Blood Potency can survive in the sun for tens of minutes but at certain level of Humanity damage switches from Lethal to Aggravated making survival much harder (you can at least heal Lethal quickly, Aggravated damage still takes nights). The odd part is that you go from taking 3 Lethal per time period to 1 Aggravated. I think it works but can feel odd like you are taking less damage all of a sudden. But like a I said Lethal is healable (1 for a point of vitae).
Chapter by Chapter
The actual introduction outlines the book and gives the reader an overview of the major themes of the game. It also includes an overview of roleplaying in general which is something I see less and less these days.
Chapter 1 is where we hit the first material of real substance: the clans and covenants. Each clan gets a description, why they are awesome and why they are scary. Several possible origins are sketched out as well as their general history and place in Kindred society. Three lost clans are included: the Roman Julii, the Babylonian Akhud, and the bizarre Pijavica. The only thing I wish was that some more detail was available on their abilities, especially the Pijavica. Perhaps in a future supplement.
The covenants are given similar treatment: selling you on them, briefing the reader on their history and philosophy, and detailing how they act when in power or on the ropes. The VII show up as an alternate covenant, offering several new possible truths about them. We also get a few “dead” covenants: the Legion (the Camarilla’s militant arm), the Gallows Post (a post Camarilla transport network), the Children’s Crusade (a horrid covenant of child sized monsters) and the Tenth Choir (who ate angels). The Children’s Crusade in particular looks ripe for “resurrection” plot.
Chapter 2 details what life as a vampire is like from the three traditions, feeding, the lies, the need to survive and move up, and so on. It is a solid chapter that gives a good sense of what the game is supposed to be like, not just the lies vampires tell themselves. As a bonus we get a lexicon, with some handy pronunciation guides.
Character Creation is covered in Chapter 3, everything from Humanity and banes to new Merits to Blood Sorcery. Like the God-Machine Chronicle and the new Chronicle of Darkness book (soon to be reviewed), it shares the system of static experience costs, Conditions and Beats.
In terms of merits, there are a multitude. Even with a starting 10 merit dots there is not enough points.
Selling down humanity is gone, though thanks to flat experience costs it is much easier to raise. Losing Humanity comes from losing connection to what it means to be mortal: outliving family, surviving mortal injuries, torpor, mind control and the old standby of murder. The option to gain banes, or mystical weaknesses, to ignore some of these is nice, allowing your vampire to commit manslaughter at the cost of being lost at crossroads or having to sleep in grave earth. It adds back in the folklore.
Vice and Virtue become Mask and Dirge, how you hide yourself from mortals and others and what truly gets you up each evening. I feels much like Nature and Demeanor from Masquerade but with more mechanical weight.
The addition of touchstones, mortal connections that tie vampires to Humanity, is cool, adding a useful NPC connection and a potential vulnerability to each character.
Vampires are now more dangerous. Blood potency allows more Vitae to be spent than before and Kindred take Bashing from almost everything except fire and the sun. Their senses are heightened, with most being able to see well in the dark (and the rest working fine in pitch blackness).
The book presents the core rules in Chapter 4 from the basics like Attributes and Skills to dice pools and combat to “new” things like Social Maneuvering and Down and Dirty Combat. I like that all the rules I need are in one book and that lots of examples for equipment bonuses are available.
As to the later chapters, I haven’t read them in as much detail as they concern game master material. But they seem, if anything, more revolutionary than the earlier sections.
Chapter 5 details the Strix, the owl shadow beings who torment Kindred and might be their creators. We’ve seen versions of them in Requiem for Rome and Night Horrors: the Wicked Dead. Here they are presented in a similar but altered fashion. The truth of their past remains vague but they hate and envy vampires, craving their physicality and despising their humanity. On their own Strix can only drink breath and exist as smoke and shadow. But they can possess the dead and living (as well as vampires), turning them into puppets for their own amusement. The book provides a very modular system for constructing Strix as well as many example characters to drop into your game.
Chapter 6 turns the focus to cities, presenting eight distinct settings and helping to show how much diversity exists for the structure of Kindred society. I haven’t read it in detail but the settings seem quite distinctive and interesting.
Chapter 7 is the storyteller section. It picks apart many of the core rules of the game: masks and dirges, aspirations, blood potency, health, and so forth. It offers ways to focus on those aspects of the game and alternative rules for handling them. Of particular interest to me was the character & world building system at the very end, which encourages PCs to develop connecting characters and history for a chronicle. I need to give it a try someday.
Then we end with a couple of Appendices. The second simply collects the various Conditions for the game. More interesting is the first, detailing the mortals and ghouls who get caught up in Kindred affairs. The book provides some advice on crafting stories about mortals and how ghouls view Kindred society and vice versa. Also provided are rules for building ghoul characters and merits for ghouls and mortal alike. Plenty of good material here from how a clan affects a ghoul to rules for ghouls as representatives of reclusive Kindred.
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