Vampire: The Requiem

List Price: $34.99 Discount Price: $17.50

Customer Reviews:

Ruin before Revolution [Posted on 2007-07-20]
White Wolf ended the Original World of Darkness with grand fanfare. They promised after its discontinuation a new line, a new setting, and a new vision where fans of the original lines could tell a whole array of horror stories that had not been well supported by the original setting.

Requiem was to be the first offering in fulfillment of that promise. It fails to deliver.

In all fairness, I must offer three distinct ratings to the three distinct subsections of this game.

Mechanics 4/5

Presentation 4/5

Setting content 1/5

The mechanics are solid, and while some of the names seem a touch hokey (especially in comparison to their counterparts in Masquerade), the actual mechanics function well, and serve their purpose admirably.

The presentation is beautiful, downright breathtaking in many places. The game tries hard to look good, and it shines for it (I find it somewhat amusing to note that the developer, Justin Achilli, actually stated in his live journal that a coworker had put a drop of blood into the ink vat used on the first print run.... very fitting for a game about vampires)

The setting though... The setting is nothing new. It reuses three of the clans from Masquerade with almost no tweaking of their respective themes, and the two original clans have all the vibe of simply being composites of discarded clans. The advent of covenants, admittedly new, in many ways redraws the faction lines that they tried to eliminate by removing the Camarilla. The whole thing comes away feeling like a simplified iteration of Masquerade, with an alternate history founded on the same roots.

The choice to eliminate Metaplot from the New WoD lines hits Requiem hard. Masquerade was arguably the most metaplot dependent of the original world of darkness, and while many felt that this constrained the game by writing material that the individual storytellers could have worked up themselves... it did create a sense of a dynamic, inhabited world. Requiem lacks this. Anyone intending to run this game will have a lot of work cut out for them, because material on individual cities is sparse, and examples to inspire are similarly hard to find.

Overall, this feels like Masquerade with training wheels put on for the newcomers. It's not what the old guard was promised, it's insulting to the newcomers who should have been offered a game of at least equal complexity and quality to it's predecessor, and it just plain doesn't measure up to the high standards that White Wolf has set for itself.

V:R [Posted on 2008-04-07]
The Vampire: Requiem is a nice offspring of the well-know storyteller game, Vampire: the Maquerade.

Fortunatelly, all the vampire's history is built upon the new world view. The combinations of Clans, Covenants and Bloodlines gives a lot more options for the players and storytellers alike. The atmosphere of the game is still gothic horror.

The system is revised and better than the old one. It's a bit more player-friendly in a way.

I didn't like the idea of buying more books than one to start playing.

Altogather, it's a nice book that's worth it's price!

Amazed by it [Posted on 2008-07-17]
My husband bought me this book as he knows I love getting new books from White Wolf, and plus we are trying to get enough people around to start up a LARP in our area, but I couldn't put this book down I read it from cover to cover, amazed by the content of it all.

Not very surprised [Posted on 2008-08-30]
Why the title you may ask? I'm a little bit accostumed to the great quality of White Wolf's products. I ordered this with the core rule-book, and they arrived 3 days past schedule and with some little scratches on them. Amazon has to take better care of the stuff they ship.

Vampires take a whole new light... and get scorched by it [Posted on 2008-09-12]
I first thought this would be a smart game. I thought, hey, modern vampires, that'll be interesting.
I was wrong.
First of all, there is hardly a difference in the clans. No matter what you are, you are a stereotypical vampire in abilities. It had none of the elaboration that C:tL, W:tF, M:tAw had. It just handed you your options on a small sticky note and asked you to choose from them.
The covenants were smart, but couldn't increase how the game did well enough.
I thought that all of the disciplines were also stereotypical. They had a straightforward way of doing things that had I thought required very little imagination besides making them playable, instead of making vampires overly powerful. This was something that they were very careful about, making sure that all characters were equal. Of course, that didn't work out in this game very well.
The bloodlines were another strange, but imaginative thing that could have made the game better.
Lastly, there wasn't much to do. You could either do political intrigues, go on a blood-sucking spree, or try to amass an army of ghouls. Pick one.
Overall, I would have given it a 2.5, because I'm a kind person, but that was not permitted.

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