VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE 5TH EDITION: A REVIEW

PAST IS PRELUDE

2000 zero zero party over oops outta time

So tonight I'm gonna party like its 1999 

THE YEAR WAS NINETEEN-NINETY-ONE and the world was coming to an end.  Millennialism hadn't reached a fever pitch yet, but it was there in the air, like the smell of ozone before the storm.  Computer geeks were on about something called Y2K, and it was going to throw us all back into the Dark Ages. The fundamentalists--who were seeing vast Satanic conspiracies and blood-thirsty cults pulling global strings behind every scene--were talking more and more about Rapture and writing books like Left Behind.  The Red Scare was over, but fear of the New World Order was replacing it.  Ruby Ridge and Waco encouraged armed militia groups to multiply.  And AIDS?  AIDS was still making sex as scary as hell, and blood-borne disease was in everyone's mind.  So we knew the world was ending.  Prince knew the world was ending.  Even the vampires knew the world was ending.

Enter Vampire: The Masquerade.

Seldom has a game been such a product of its times.  Introspective bloodsuckers were in, put on the map by Anne Rice in her 1985 The Vampire Lestat and 88's The Queen of the Damned.  In gaming circles, "cyberpunk" was the It Genre, either in pure form or mixed with other flavors like "fantasy-punk" or "steampunk."  In the midst of all this Mark Rein-Hagen's Vampire was the perfect storm, tapping into the Millennialism, the vampires, and the punk to create an explosive cocktail.  It entered the scene as a commentary or meditation on the times, but ended up shaping and defining them.  It was the closest to mainstream the hobby had gotten since D&D appeared in Spielberg's E.T.  Hell, even Aaron Spelling wanted a piece of it.

But because zeitgeist was the rocket fuel launching VtM into the stratosphere, no one really expected it to last.  2000 came and went not with a bang but a whimper, Rice had gotten bored writing about her Brat Prince, and D&D 3e was sucking up all the oxygen in the gaming room.  The things that had made VtM hot were now irrelevant, yesterday's pathos.  White Wolf had the good sense to recognize this and so they shut the whole circus down--not just Vampire: The Masquerade, but her sister games as well.  Their setting, "The World of Darkness," had always been about the coming of the end of the world, so in 2004 they let that end arrive in an epic storyline.  The original World of Darkness was dead, and they replaced it with a new one, and with new games rewritten with a lot less zeitgeist dependency.  

So if you had told me awhile back that Vampire: The Masquerade was due for a 2018 comeback (a new edition we'll be calling V5), I would have laughed in your face.  That ship had sailed.  Who the heck did they have who could pull off a VtM Second Coming?

Then I heard it was Ken Hite.

RISEN FROM TORPOR

Cold and black inside this coffin

'Cause you all try to keep me down

How it feels to be forgotten

But you'll never forget me now

   

Though the man has worked on all sorts of games over his storied career, Ken Hite is probably best known for exquisitely crafted modern horror, particularly horror with a conspiracy twist.  He worked on Nephilim and authored both GURPS Horror and GURPS Cabal, he wrote Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade for White Wolf and The Cainite Heresy for Vampire: The Dark Ages.  Later he was responsible for Pelgrane Press's Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents, a game about modern spies hunting vampires.  For NBA he was part of the team that gave us the masterpiece The Dracula Dossier.  If anyone was going to have a chance at pumping fresh new blood into the sleeping remains of Masquerade, this was the guy to do it.  

Leading a team of writers including Martin Ericsson, Matthew Dawkins, Karim Muammar, and Juhanna Pettersson (the writing credits also include Mark Rein-Hagen and Neil Gaiman), Hite redefines VtM by seeming to ask a simple question; what is the zeitgeist of the current decade?  V5 isn't giving us a new World of Darkness, nor is it a successor game like Vampire: The Requiem.  V5 is the same setting, the same vampires, picking up fourteen years after the story left off.  But it recognizes that our world has changed, and by extension, the World of Darkness has changed as well.  VtM knew what scared you in 1991.  V5 is asking; "what is it that keeps you up at night in 2018?" 

Maybe the answer lies in the increasingly divisive politics of out time; we all seem to be at each other's throats.  Maybe, if you are lucky enough to be on the "better off" side of things, you fear the growing threat posed by young and hungry millennials flirting with socialism and change.  On the other hand, if you are one of those millennials, maybe the stranglehold of the "haves" over the "have nots" keeps you awake, the fascist jackboot on your throat.  Or maybe climate change concerns you...the fact that Mother Nature herself seems to be rising against us.  No?  How about the constant threats to your privacy posed by cameras located everywhere, or increased spying online?  If you are in the States, maybe the horror of the opioid crisis, the ravages of addiction, trouble you.  If you live anywhere in the West, it is possible the nearly endless War on Terror, dragging on year after year in the Middle East worries you.  

Hell, maybe all of these things plague you.

Well guess what, dear reader.  In 2018, all these things plague the Kindred too.  Because Hite and his team understand something that Rein-Hagen knew; this game was never about vampires...it was about us.

RUNNING WITH THE DEAD

Driven by the strangle of vein
Showing no mercy I'd do it again

Open up your eyes

You keep on crying

Baby I'll bleed you dry

Let's start at the beginning.

The vampires in V5 call themselves the Kindred.  Many believe they are the children of Caine.  Some 14,000 years ago, as the hunter-gatherer Eden-like age of innocence drew to a close, Caine murdered his brother and was cursed by his god.  Marked to wander for all eternity, repeating his sin of bloodshed, he was eternally damned to struggle with the Beast in his soul.  Some say in the wilderness, the witch Lilith taught him to harness his powers.  Regardless, he learned how to "sire" more of his kind--a process that requires draining a human of blood and then giving the dying mortal your own.  However, any vampire you sire is one generation "down" from you.  The vampires Caine sired where Second Generation, the ones they sired Third Generation, and so on.  Each step down the chain means a decrease in power, as moving away from Caine the blood thins and grows weak.  The highest generation vampires have blood so thin they are practically still human, and are incapable of creating any more of their kind.

Vampires did more than create new vampires.  Caine and his brood were behind the spread of agriculture and the first cities.  These population centers were for the Kindred feeding pens, and the humans in them were their "kine" or "cattle."  In this way the vampires guided and shaped human civilization, reigning over it as ancient god-kings.  The ancient city-state of Enoch was their capital, and from here Caine ruled.  At some point in the ancient past, however, the 13 members of the 3rd Generation rose up against their sires and slaughtered them, stealing their precious blood for themselves.  Caine himself went into hiding.  These 13 usurpers--born before the Flood and therefore called the Antediluvians--sired 13 unique bloodlines in their own images, each with slightly different powers and weaknesses.  In time, the weight of age and constant gnawing hunger drove them into the earth, into a deathless sleep the Kindred call torpor.  

Millennia passed and humanity expanded well beyond vampire control.  The Kindred slowly began to fear the vastly superior numbers of their prey, instituting something called the Masquerade, a formal policy of remaining hidden.  Feeding in secret, protected by the shadows, the centuries ticked by and their hidden society grew ever more labyrinthine and complex.

On the eve of the 21st century--the setting of the original game--two major factions of Kindred, the Camarilla and the Sabbat, held sway.  The Camarilla preferred to remain hidden amongst humanity, ruling over them, while the Sabbat rejected everything human from their natures.  Both lived with the threats posed by the Anarchs, younger Kindred seeking to overthrow ancient power structures, and the looming threat of the Antediluvians themselves.  For it was whispered in Kindred prophecy that these Antediluvians would awake en masse, initiating a vampire apocalypse in which the only thing that would slake their hellish hunger was the blood of their own kind...

2004's Vampire: Gehenna provided four alternate versions of this apocalypse.  V5 gives you a fifth.  It's End of Days is less Revelations and more Ragnarok.  

In this unfolding, the Sabbat--always the enemies of the Antediluvians and their "Jyhad," the manipulative game of chess played with vampires as pawns--have abandoned their cities and hunting grounds to descend upon the ancient strongholds of the Middle East.  Tired of waiting for the Antediluvians, the Sabbat took the Gehenna War to them.

The Antediluvians responded with the Beckoning, a powerful summons that drew the Elders of their bloodlines to them.  Higher generation vampires, rulers of Kindred communities, answered the call and left the younger vampires holding the reigns.    

Thus the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, the so-called "War on Terror," conceals a more terrifying truth; Enoch and its masters have awoken.  

As the Sabbat and the Elders wage this vicious conflict, the Camarilla--deprived of its senior leadership--has been unable to hold back the Anarchs, the rebellious young vampires now rising up in revolution.  The only thing that keeps these two factions from open war is a a greater threat.

The Masquerade has been broken.

While the public doesn't yet know about the existence of vampires, many western intelligence agencies do.  The War on Terror has exposed the Kindred at last.  The FBI, Homeland Security, and the CIA; MI5 and MI6; France's DGSI and Germany's BND, are all among those now coordinating with the Vatican in a sort of "Second Inquisition." Thousands of vampires around the globe have been exterminated in the hunt.

In response, the Camarilla has forbidden any of its members to communicate via the Internet.  NOTHING vampire can be on the Web.  The Masquerade must be tighter than ever.  Even the Anarchs, who reject the rest of the Camarilla's traditions, recognize this.  In a world where everyone has a camera, it is harder (and more important) for vampires to hide than ever.  

WHAT HAVE I BECOME?

Don't be afraid

I didn't mean to scare you

So help me, Jesus

I can promise you

You'll stay as beautiful

With dark hair

And soft skin, forever

Forever   

Entering the world of the Kindred means becoming part of a specific bloodline or Clan.  Each has its own powers (in the form of supernatural abilities called Disciplines) and weakness.  Fans of vampire film and fiction can easily trace the Clans to their sources: the rebellious Brujah are reminiscent of the vampires from Near Dark; the elegant and aloof Toreador recall Miriam and John Blaylock from The Hunger; the hideous Nosferatu echo Count Orlock from...er...Nosferatu.  There are shapeshifting Gangrel, the aristocratic Ventrue, the sorcerous Tremere, the insane Malkavians, and the clanless Caitiffs.  Adding to these are the Thin-Blooded, not really a Clan, but 14th or 15th generation vampires barely vampire at all.  There are six other Clans, but these were not present in the first two editions of VtM and have been excluded (like the Sabbat) from V5.

Aside from reshaping the world the vampires live in, V5 has reshaped the systems governing the vampires as well.  

The core mechanics remain the same.  To attempt an action, players build dice pools of ten-siders.  This is usually a characters core Trait (something like Charisma, Dexterity, or Strength) plus a Skill (perhaps Athletics, Etiquette, or Persuasion).  Such attributes are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, so your dice pool is generally one to ten dice.

In V5, however, the object is to score a 6 or higher on each die.  Those count as successes.  If you roll a natural 10, it counts as two successes.  You are rolling against a difficulty assigned by the Storyteller (GM).  A routine action requires one success, a challenging action requires four.  A nearly impossible action will need seven.  If you score the number of successes you need, you succeed.  Otherwise you fail.  Any additional successes make your success even sweeter.

This is all considerably more streamlined than previous editions of Masquerade, but where V5 really demonstrates innovation is in the new Hunger mechanics.

Vampires drink blood; this is the core of the concept.  Traditionally Masquerade tracked this with the concept of a "Blood Pool."  Like a tank of gas, feeding "filled you up."  Rising each evening, or calling upon your blood to fuel vampiric powers, burned points from your Blood Pool up.  As the Pool got lower you got hungrier, and needed to fill up again.  The system worked fine, but it focused more on the Blood as a resource than on the actual Hunger which drives vampiric existence.

V5 tosses the idea of Blood Pools and replaces it with Hunger, which like all attributes is on a scale of 0 to 5.  At zero you are sated.  At five, the lust for blood is overpowering.  Rising each night, or using your vampiric powers, triggers a "Rouse" check.  This is the roll of a single die; succeed, and your Hunger remains at present levels.  Fail, and your Hunger increases by one.  More powerful vampiric abilities might require multiple Rouse checks.  The lower your vampire's Generation (the closer he is to Caine), the greater your chance of being able to re-roll Rouse checks (compensating for the fact that in previous editions these characters had larger Blood Pools).

Now, to show the overpowering force of the Hunger on vampires, every dice pool you build (with the exception of things like Willpower or Humanity checks) must contain Hunger dice.  These are dice of a different color.  If, for example, you are making a Charisma + Persuasion roll and have a dice pool of six, and your Hunger is currently three, then half of your dice will be Hunger dice.  Hunger dice work normally...unless they come up 1s or 10s.

If they come up tens, they still act as double successes, but the Beast--the monstrous vampire nature all characters wrestle with--emerges and colors the result.  A vampire trying to pick a lock might lose control and just rip it off its hinges.  A vampire trying to intimidate a mortal might suddenly show his fangs and vampiric features.  You still achieve your goal, roughly, but the Beast emerges and taints your victory.  

If you scored any 1s on your Hunger dice, AND failed the roll as well, your character must act out a Compulsion.  There are standard ones--Hunger, Dominance, Harm, and Paranoia--and there are clan specific ones.  The bestial Gangrel are overcome by animalistic behaviors, the rebellious Brujah pick a fight with authority.  Basically a Compulsion is the Beast taking over and driving the character awhile.  The player is still in control, but must act out the character's darker impulses.

Obviously you want to keep your Hunger under control, and that means feeding.  Completely killing and draining a victim will remove all your Hunger dice...but there are happy mediums like taking a pint or two (slaking 2 Hunger dice) or lunching on an animal (removing 1).  The lower your generation, and the more potent your blood, the more difficult these half measures become.  The stronger you are, the more likely you are to need to kill to keep your Hunger under control.

If you have played Masquerade before everything you remember is still here.  You can still call upon your vampiric blood to fuel feats of physical strength and speed, heal damage, etc.  You are still vulnerable to the Blood Bond (drinking too much blood from another vampire can form an emotional attachment that makes you essentially "fang whipped").  Sunlight is still the enemy, and Humanity is something you will struggle with.

In fact, "Humanity" is front and center again.  Rated on a scale of 10 to 0, Humanity measures how strong the "human" half of you is, as opposed to the vampiric Beast.  With Humanity 10 you feel relatively warm to the touch, have an essentially healthy human appearance, and can even eat and drink food (though not live on it).  The lower you drop from this, the more corpse-like and cold you appear, the harder it is to pass as living.  It becomes increasingly harder to interact with living mortals.  At zero, your character is gone, completely consumed by the Beast within.

Humanity is lost by committing acts of brutality or cruelty.  It is lost by giving in to the Beast.  Thus the vampire in V5 is constantly struggling with Hunger and Humanity, trying to find the balance between the two.

Another interesting mechanic is "Memoriam."  Vampires are ageless, and even the younger ones can have decades of life behind them.  However, the mind cannot hold all that memory all of the time.  It would drive you mad.  Vampires tend to exist frozen in the moment then, but can dive into their past when necessary with Memoriam.  This involves stopping the main story and entering a flashback, something that was a common trick back on TV shows like Forever Knight or Angel.  Memoriam can give you bonuses to dice tests ("Wait, I remember, I have done this before..."), answers to problems ("There is an old secret tunnel dating back to Prohibition that will give us access to that building") or even resources ("As I recall I still have a safety deposit box in that bank from my early years, stealing jewels").  It can only be done once a story, but fleshes out the vampire's long unlife in a satisfying and relevant way.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY

On candy stripe legs the Spiderman comes

Softly through the shadow of the evening sun

Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead

Looking for the victim shivering in bed...

...And there is nothing I can do

When I realize with fright

That the Spiderman is having me for dinner tonight

Ah Vampire, how I missed you.

In the summer of 1991 was back from college, running a RuneQuest campaign. We were only about four sessions in when a trip to my local game store changed everything.

On the new arrivals shelf was a strange softcover book with a marbled green cover and a rose on it. The game was called Vampire: The Masquerade. I liked horror games; Call of Cthulhu was an old favorite, and I had been running the new Mayfair version of Chill at university. A game about hunting vampires was intriguing. Reaching out to flip through it, it took a few moments to realize the mistake in my casual assumption. With something akin to mild shock, I realized that in this game, you weren't hunting monsters. You were the monsters.

I bought it immediately.

Understand, there had never been anything like this. I'd been game mastering for over a decade, and games were all pretty much the same; you played heroes, and heroes fought the bad guys. These might be James Bond megalomaniacs or Lovecraftian horrors, they might be orcs, scorpion men, or Stormtroopers...but they were all the villains. Yet here was this weird game, and the damn thing was about being the villain. It was about exploring the nature of evil and essential humanity. I stayed up half the night reading it. It was like discovering role-playing all over again.

The next day I called my players to tell them we had to drop RuneQuest and play this game.  They probably thought I was nuts, but it ended up leading to one of my most memorable campaigns in nearly forty years.  

All good things come to an end, though.  As much as I loved the first and second editions, in the years leading up to the revised edition the game rapidly mutated.  The addition of the Sabbat--originally just a shadowy nemesis--shifted the focus from personal horror to being a sort of amoral, blood-sucking badass.  It was less a game of personal horror and more one of acquiring as many dots as possible.

White Wolf understood this and tried to recapture the initial voice of Vampire when they drove the stake through the heart of Masquerade and let Requiem take its place.  Ken Hite and his team also understand this, and have returned to the original ethos of the game.

V5 is far, far closer to the first edition of Masquerade than any of the subsequent iterations.  This is both a selling point, and to many I suspect, a flaw.  If you came on board with the first edition, V5 will speak to you.  It has the same Clans, the same power levels, the same sharp focus on feeding and clinging to your waning humanity.  On the other hand, if you came to Vampire later in the game, when there were tons of Clans, bloodlines, power levels, and backstory (and a lot less pathos), the stripped down nature of V5 is likely to turn you off.  

Weirdly, a turn-off for me was the production design of the book.  Don't get me wrong, White Wolf has turned out a superior product here, glossy, eye-catching, and worth every penny of the price tag.  But the full-color art, a lot of it quite bright and flashy, often made me feel like I was flipping through a fashion magazine.  This wasn't helped by the fact that much of the art is actual photography, with live models playing the Un-Dead.  I guess I remain nostalgic for Tim Bradstreet, but none of this was to my taste.  It's a minor bitch; the book is a fine piece of publishing.

That covers the good and the bad, now the ugly.  And again, this is a personal bitch.

As a writer, as a college professor, as a HORROR fan, I grow increasingly alarmed with the need for trigger warnings and safe spaces.  This version of Vampire is littered with them.  From the Mature Content Warning on the first page to the Appendix in the back devoted entirely to "considerate play," V5 feels the constant need to remind us to use the "safeword."  It cannot seem to make up its mind if it wants to confront personal horror or turn away from it.  In 1991 I was shaken to my core by a roleplaying game willing to go to the dark places.  That is what horror, at its black heart, was all about.  That is what Vampire was about.  In 2018, we all seem to have gone timid. But in tapping into the zeitgeist of its times, V5 had to embrace this bit as well.  Apparently this is something the newest generation of gamers wants and needs.  So be it.

Neither of my little rants takes away from a game that deserves your attention, gentle reader.  V5 has everything I loved about the original game, and manages to drag Vampire into the 21st century, safe spaces and all.  

It gets a definite four out of five stars...or stakes...or whatever.

            

THE RUNEQUEST GLORANTHA BESTIARY: A LONG HARD LOOK

GENERAL THOUGHTS

THE BESTIARY HAS ITS ORIGINS with Aristotle, whose History of Animals is one of the oldest and most influential examples of it.   Aristotle’s work, however, was that of a naturalist.  It is based on direct observation and sticks—in the words of Joe Friday—to “just the facts.”  However by the Middle Ages, and the bestiaries we are all more likely to be familiar with, the nature of the form had changed a bit.  The bestiarum vocabulum wasn’t as interested with what beasts were as much as what beasts meant.  Now including basilisks, dragons, unicorns, and griffins, the medieval bestiary used animal life to show the meaning of the world.  It saw flora and fauna as a reflection of spiritual realities, manifestations of the underlying themes of the world.  The creatures described in the pages of the bestiary didn’t simply inhabit the world, they helped define it.  

The new RuneQuest Glorantha Bestiary lies somewhere between Aristotle and the bestarium vocabulum.  In terms of “facts” it is full of them; as a system, RuneQuest has always been detail oriented, and so all the creatures here get the full statistical treatment from characteristics and skills to passions and hit locations.  With a wink and a nod to the 1984 third edition, the subjects even get Latin taxonomies.  The Brown Elf, for example, is Dendro sapiens mrelum, the True Dragons are Draco infinitus.  On the other hand, this isn’t just RuneQuest…it is RuneQuest Glorantha.  This means the first thing discussed in each entry is the species’ place in the greater context of Glorantha’s rich mythologies, and thus the creature’s meaning.  For example, to really “get” the physiology of the the Gloranthan troll, whose predominant personality trait is hunger and who is able to eat quite literally anything, you need to know the race is the result of the mating of the Man Rune and Darkness.  The Man Rune gives the troll its humanoid shape and form, but Darkness—which devours everything—defines its nature.  The symbolism of the creature is as integral to its design as its hit points.  This has always been the case with creatures in Glorantha.  They don’t simply exist, but rather they personify the deep primordial forces underlying this unique world.  Like gods, they are manifestations of the Runes.  Thus you cannot really understand these creatures without understanding Glorantha…and you cannot understand Glorantha without experiencing them. 

The design team of Sandy Petersen, Jeff Richard, Jason Durall, Michael O’Brien, Steve Perrin, and Greg Stafford have given us the most definitive and comprehensive look yet at Glorantha’s non-human cast of characters to date.  It is possible that Anaxial’s Roster contained more entries (I didn’t dig out my copy to count them), but that earlier work went nowhere into the depth that these entries do.  Aside from game statistics and the creature’s mythological role, each entry goes into subtypes, region of origin, and distribution.  Whenever appropriate, religion, culture, and government are discussed.  If the creature is suitable as a player character, it gets a section on adventurer generation as well as full cult write-ups for the major deities or faiths of that race.  Thus the RuneQuest Glorantha Bestiary goes a long way to “completing” the game.  As mentioned in my review of RuneQuest Glorantha, the core rules departed from previous editions in not being “an entire fantasy role-playing game in one book.”  This Bestiary now goes a long way to filling the gaps, not just with adversaries, but with player character races long-time Gloranthaphiles have come to know and love.  

With a heavy-hitting cast of writers like this, it might come as a surprise that the real “star” of the Glorantha Bestiary is San Diego-based artist Cory Trego-Erdner.  Rare for books of this kind, Trego-Erdner turns in literally all of the illustrations in this work, from detailed black and white sketches to glorious full color paintings.  The Dragonewts on pages 36 and 37 finally surpass those from back in RQ III (and this reviewer has spent three decades convinced no one was ever going to do better Dragonewts than those). Trego-Erdner’s Mostali straddle perfectly the line between what we think of as fantasy “dwarves” and the unique spin Glorantha puts on them, and the Uz (Trolls) take the iconic images from way back in Trollpak and breathes new life into them.  I kept going back to a Dark Troll with a Trollkin on a leash (p. 77) and staring at his face.  There is a story there in his features, character and detail.  And the Broo?  Terrifying perfection.  It was both risky and inspired to let a single artist define how the entities of Glorantha were going to look in the imaginations of a new generation of visitors, but it gives the world a wholeness and uniformity of vision.  It was a gamble that paid off; this artist was chosen well, and pulls it off with aplomb.

IN DETAIL

The RuneQuest Glorantha Bestiary is a 210-page PDF.  Layout, typeface, and overall style matches both RuneQuest Glorantha and The Glorantha Sourcebook.  Just under 200 monsters are covered in this work (which, like an idiot I counted before seeing the back of the book already told me that).  The text is divided into ten sections;

INTRODUCTION:  The first topic covered here is game balance—which, in a system that eschews “levels” of any kind can be tricky.  RQ has always embraced gritty realism; if your young and experienced character wanders into a lair of scorpion men or encounters a dream dragon, defeat is highly probable.  This not only differentiates RQ from leveled games, but also her sister game, HeroQuest, where all difficulties are fluid and you will seldom face a challenge (unless dramatically appropriate) that outclasses you.  So the Bestiary recommends handling this by applying—you guessed it—more realism.  “Dark Trolls are people too.”  Not all monsters fight to the death…they prefer to live.  They will retreat rather than let all their hit points be depleted.  Adventurers should do the same.  Intelligent monsters will negotiate, or hold defeated captives for ransom.  And of course the GM should never railroad the player characters into an encounter.

Next there is a discussion of Non-Human Adventurers (hallelujah!).  One of the glaring absences in RuneQuest Glorantha were that of the Elder Races, or any other non-human intelligences.  One could be forgiving for reading the core rules and coming away thinking the only race was the humans.  The Bestiary addresses all of this, with detailed instructions how to create Adventurers from other species.

The chapter rounds out with a discussion of Gloranthan ecology and ecological zones, as well as special monster abilities, hit points for creatures, and hit locations.  The format of all entires is summarized.

DISTRIBUTION MAPS: The reader will probably not be shocked to learn this chapter contains…distribution maps.  There are 14 of these, detailing where all the major races and Chaos fiends can be found in and around the Dragon Pass area.

ELDER RACES: By far the lengthiest and meatiest chapter, this chapter (re)introduces us to Gloranthan’s inhuman—and in many cases prehuman—cultures and species, the so-called Elder Races.

All the races you might expect are here.  The Aldryami or “Gloranthan Elves,” children of the forest goddess with sap in their veins and wooden bones; Baboons, the intelligent and tribal hunter-gatherers wandering the Wastes and Prax; the Beast Men, including Fox Women, Minotaurs, Centaurs, Satyrs, and yes, damnit, Ducks; the enigmatic and transcendent Dragonewts are detailed, including their religion, magic, and society; Giants—colossal and surly brutes who play an interesting role in the life of the Zola Fel river of Prax; Gorillas, which like their Baboon cousins hail to an earlier age when animals had not yet been divided from men; the mysterious and only recently discovered Maidstone Archers; the towering “Men-and-a-Half” or Agimori, and old fan favorite; the human-herding Morokanth;  

the Mostali, or “Dwarves of Glorantha,” a race that regards the world as a broken machine and themselves as the engineers to fix it; the amphibious Newtlings; the Triolini, or Gloranthan Merfolk; the brutal Tusk Riders and their horrid cult of the Bloody Tusk; the winged humanoid Wind Children; the shapeshifting Telmori, or Werewolves of Glorantha; and of course, the Trolls of Glorantha, the ever-voracious, darkness-spawned Uz.  Each race is extensively detailed, including subtypes and creatures related to or employed by that species.  The major cults and magical philosophies of each race are described as well.  While on the whole the main value of the Bestiary is for GMs, this chapter insures it is a tome players (especially those interested in nonhuman characters) will want as well.

CHAOS MONSTERS:  When the gods of Glorantha fell to warring amongst themselves the world was cracked, and Chaos—the essence of corruption, nihilism, and entropy—started leaking in.  Time itself was created to contain it, a sacrifice that required the very freedom of the gods themselves.  Unfortunately, Chaos remains in Glorantha, not as the world-extinguishing threat it once was, but a slow cancer eating at the world.  This chapter deals some of the chief forms the infection takes.

We begin with rules for Chaos features, the weird—often horrific—mutations Chaos randomly engenders in its infected.  Then a panoply of Chaos creatures are unleashed, from the Broo to Walktapi.  There are many old friends (“fiends?”) here; dragonsnails, gorps, jack o’bears, etc.  Some are less known—the vampiric servants of Delecti the Necromancer, “the Dancers in Darkness,” are mentioned in King of Sartar and the HeroQuest sourcebook Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes, but I don’t recall seeing them in RuneQuest before.  The Broo in particular get an extensive treatment, and rightly so.  To my mind they have always exemplified what makes Glorantha Glorantha.  They are essentially this world’s equivalent of the “orc,” the standard fantasy foe that you can in general feel good about killing.  Yet they are so tied to myth, even their physiology, that they powerfully demonstrate how Glorantha works.  The Broo are fertility gone wrong.  Their origin story has wavered over the decades—we have been told in the past that the fertility goddess Thed brought them into the world as her revenge for her rape by Ragnaglar—this Bestiary prefers instead to suggest that Thed’s children, like their mother and father, were originally an untainted race that fell into corruption.  I suspect the reasons for their origins shifting has more to do with shifting sensitivities in our world than any factor of theirs; regardless the horror of the Broo is that 85% of them are male.  They reproduce by breeding with other species, sentient or otherwise, and like the face-huggers from the Alien saga such impregnation always ends in Broo larvae bursting from the doomed host.  

No orc could ever be that terrifying.

MONSTERS: This chapter details creatures which, though not necessarily malevolent, are nevertheless large and terrifying.  Dinosaurs are here…yes, dinosaurs.  In Glorantha these are the bastard offspring of the Dragons, which unlike Dragonewts (who eventually evolve into True Dragons) have gone off the evolutionary rails.  And speaking of Dragons, there are here as well.  True Dragons are discussed; nearly gods themselves, these beings are often several kilometers long, their slumbering forms mistaken for mountain ranges and geographic features.  Bound by their own elaborate mysticism, the Dragons have transcended this world, but remain to keep an eye on their evolving offspring, the Dragonewts.  Often as their sleep, their suppressed ids manifest as Dream Dragons (also discussed here).  These entities personify negative desires True Dragons have cast off…hunger, greed, cruelty.  As True Dragons sleep for centuries, Dream Dragons can remain a very real threat just as long.

GIANT ARTHROPODS:  Oversized arthropods are prevalent in Glorantha, especially among the Trolls, who worship both the goddess of insects and the goddess of spiders.  Nor surprisingly then, giant bugs get an extensive treatment in the Bestiary.

ANIMALS:  The distinction between an “animal” and a “monster” in this volume seems to be chiefly a matter of size and ferocity.  In this chapter we find both wildlife and domesticated fauna, some familiar to those of us who inhabit the planet Earth and some unique to Glorantha.  Most notably, perhaps, horses are detailed here, as well as the Praxian riding animals.  The nomadic people of Prax, for ancient reasons, shun horses and ride (and herd) more exotic mounts—bisons, bolo lizards, high llamas, impalas, ostriches, rhinos, zebras, and more.  Finally the shadowcats, ranging in size from a house cat to a lynx, are described.  Beloved of the Orlanthi peoples, who use them as others might dogs, these will no doubt provide many PCs with loyal animal companions.

SPIRITS:  In a setting where shamanism and the spirit world are so well fleshed-out, it comes as no surprise that the Bestiary should devote a chapter to the denizens of that realm.  Spirits of all types are here, from elementals to wraiths.  Included are the legendary Black Horses of Sir Ethilrist, a mercenary captain whose men ride steeds won in Hell.  The Thunder Brothers, the collective sons of the storm god Orlanth are here as well.  Additional rules are given for using spirits in play.

TERRORS: I like to think of this as the chapter given over to Gloranthan kaiju.  The creatures here are all, thankfully, unique.  They are immensely powerful monsters that lay waste to entire regions.  The fabled Crimson Bat is here, the steed of the Red Goddess.  Something of the Lunar Empire’s “Death Star,” it is the ultimate military weapon.  Other terrors are here as well, such as the Chaos Gaggle, the fiends of Cacodemon, and Cwim.  Essentially any creature here could easily be the climax of an entire campaign.

FLORA: Finally we come to Glorantha’s flora.  The focus here is mainly on the more magical varieties of the world’s plant life, but discussions can be found of species like oaks, redwoods, and pines as well, mainly in relation to Gloranthan Elves

FINAL THOUGHTS

Fantasy settings are defined by their inhuman species.  Who could possibly imagine Middle-earth without Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Orcs, or Ring-wraiths?  What would Thedas be without the Darkspawn?  How and why magic works—what forms it takes—is probably a more fundamental issue in distinguishing one fantasy world from another, but it is the monsters we remember.  

This was always strongly the case with Glorantha.  As far back as the early days of RuneQuest there was always the “yes, but.”  Does Glorantha have Elves?  “Yes, but they are more like dryads than Norse fairies.”  Does Glorantha have Dragons?  “Yes, but they are more forces of nature than monsters you fight for treasure.”  There was never a single creature included in the setting that hadn’t been reworked, re-imagined, or recreated to be specific to the world and its rich mythologies.  We might be less impressed with this today than we were back then, but it was Glorantha and a handful of other settings that made this the norm, as opposed to the “everything and the kitchen sink” approach of games like D&D.

This is what made the absence of such beings from the core RuneQuest Glorantha so glaring.  We were seeing just a slice of the world, not the entire picture.  The RuneQuest Glorantha Bestiary goes a long way to fixing this, fleshing out the setting for a new generation of players.  These two books together are enough to fully bring the world to life at your gaming table.  

Should they have been brought out together?  Probably.  But Chaosium is and always has been a very small game studio.  Not everything can be done at once.  What is critical is whether or not it was worth the wait, and without reservation I can assure you it was.  The Bestiary is a treasure, a masterfully illustrated and produced tome that far and away surpasses any other monster guides we have seen for Glorantha.  More even than the core rules, this is a book I think you could hand prospective players to get them excited about visiting Glorantha.  This is a strong second entry in the new line, and assures us that RuneQuest Glorantha was not a one-hit wonder.  It whets the appetite for whatever comes next. 

The Bestiary retails for $19.99 US.  It is available from Chaosium and from Drivethrurpg.       

CTHULHU CHRONICLES: A FIRST LOOK

AH, THE AGE-OLD QUESTION; "what to do in-between sessions, when no Keeper is around but you still want your sanity abused?"  For Call of Cthulhu addicts who just can't get enough this has long been a problem.  Over the years, video games have been the answer, alternate delivery systems for the mind-bending horror provided by the pen-and-paper game.  2005 saw Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, an unholy partnership between Cthulhu publisher Chaosium and Headfirst, Bethesda, 2K, and Ubisoft.  This year sees Cyanide and Chaosium unleashing the very promising Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game.  For those who simply had to take their Cthulhu on the road with them, iOS and Android provided Red Wasp's Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land.  All of these adapted the classic 1981 RPG to various engines and platforms...but were--and let us be honest here--video games.  Not that I dislike video games, mind you.  But they are by definition a visual medium where the horror takes place on the screen.  Call of Cthulhu (the table-top game) is a literary experience; it takes place inside the imagination.  I have never been wholly convinced that even the most gifted graphics team can create Lovecraftian horrors as hideous as the mind can.

Now Chaosium and MetaArcade have joined forces to try something a bit...different.  

Cthulhu Chronicles is perhaps the closest thing to the tabletop Call of Cthulhu experience that gamers can reasonably expect.  Released today for iOS, with Android coming soon, Chronicles essentially takes tried and true Call of Cthulhu scenarios and adapts them to text-based solo-play.  About a week ago, via TestFlight, I had a chance to look at the game for this review.  Here's what you need to know.   

Players choose one of six Investigators to play.  These can be changed between scenarios, or if they survive, continue into the next story.  These characters come with a Bio and some equipment, and are defined by 5 statistics.  Health measures how much physical damage you can endure, Sanity tracks your psychological injury, while Appearance, Athletics, and Knowledge each allow you to face different tests during the game.

Players also select which scenario to pursue.  These are all genuine tabletop Call of Cthulhu scenarios adapted to Chronicles.  We have, for example, the introductory 7th edition scenario Alone Against the Flames, and the 6th edition's Edge of Darkness.  Others from the Chaosium archives are Dead Border, Eyes of the Law, and Paper Chase.  

 

Actual play is fairly straightforward.  Chronicles doesn't have the animated sequences that something like the Steve Jackson's Sorcery! line has, though game play is similar.  A page of text is provided with a picture or illustration, and this will give the player a series of choices to pursue.  It's a time-honored approach going all the way back to those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.  

 

Sometimes these choices lead to a test.  These are the equivalent to rolling dice in the tabletop game.  Tests come in various difficulties, and these modify your chances accordingly.  A wheel appears and spins, resulting in either a pass or a failure.  Consequences depend on the test.  You might simply fail to notice a clue or to persuade an NPC to talk...or you might take damage.

The game is free to play, but as with all games of this sort there are in-app purchases.  These take the form of "tickets."  Basically, players get a number of free trials of a scenario, after which they must purchase the scenario and play it to their heart's content or spend tickets for additional single play-throughs.

Are multiple play-throughs worth it?  Taking different characters through the scenarios changes the text considerably, and I applaud MetaArcade for tailoring the text to each character.  We've all played games like this where it doesn't matter what character you are playing...the text is the same.  This is not the case here.  Also, multiple plays opens up different story paths, either through making alternate choices or passing tests you might have failed before.  On the other hand, just like a pen-and-paper scenario, the second and third time you play it some of the fun derived from surprise and the unknown is dissipated   This isn't a fault of Chronicles, just the nature of the beast.  I suspect players will want to try at least two or three play-throughs at least.

Cthulhu Chronicles is without doubt the closest thing to playing Call of Cthulhu you can get without a Keeper, and this is really the most attractive feature of the game.  The writing is atmospheric, and the music provides suitably creepy immersion playing in your earphones.  The real success or failure of the platform will depend on what scenarios are offered in the future (a massive adaptation of Masks of Nyarlathotep, anyone?).  A steady stream of classic spine-tingling tails will certainly keep drawing players back.  And since the price of admission is free, why on Earth haven't you downloaded it yet?

I give this solid adaptation of Cthulhu three-and-a-half Elder Signs out of five.  Recommended heartily for those who need their Cthulhu fix between sessions and for people who are curious what the whole "Call of Cthulhu" thing is about.  Find it right now in the iOS App store.