Product Description

THE MIDNIGHT DANCE CONTINUES...

They stalk in the shadows, moving gracefully and unseen among their prey. They are the blood-drinking fiends of whispered legends –Kindred, Cainites, the Damned. Above all, they are vampires. Their eternal struggle, waged sicne the nights of Jericho and Babylon, plays itself out among the vampires' grand Masquerade is imperiled, and the night of Gehenna draws ever closer.

UNTIL THE END OF ALL THINGS
This new edition of Vampire: The Masquerade is an updated, revised version of the popular classic. In this mammoth volume can be found all 13 Clans, all major Disciplines, and a host of brand-new infomation on both the Kindred and the...things...that hunt them. This book compiles everything that a Vampire player or Storyteller needs to know about the Kindred and the World of Darkness for the new millenium. Plus, the new edition provides all-new information on the changes that affect the Clans, and on the beginning of the end of the Camarilla. Finally, the first of the Storyteller rulebooks is the best again!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98087 in Books
• Published on: 1995-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Customer Reviews

So much better than the second edition.
Well, first a small word to first time role-players in Vampire the Masquerade. If you have never tried the game, you don't know what you are missing in your life. Now here are the things I found to be sooo much better and distinctively different in the third edition than the second. Note how much the rules are so much better as well when you read them. a) Assimite Disciplines fixed to be useful b) Presence has a kick to it when used against some much lower generation. c) Fortitude is so much better explained now (some used to claim it as automatic soaking all the time). d) Combat has some good changes. e) Obfuscate limits are actually explained! f) Serpentis III is different and so much better. g) Celerity uses one blood per round to activate, was worded before as if it used one blood for each celerity point. There are so much more I can go on with but I figured if you went this far down I probably got your interest enough to go get it.

A great game for gamers who focus on character and story
Vampire: The Masquerade is an excellent product for the gamer who would rather have a character who has personality and, more often than not, a debilitating character flaw than a character who is a sword-swinging warrior or a blaster-wielding intergalactic hero. This game has a solid system that is simple to learn and a breeze to use, and the only dice that are used are ten-siders, eliminating problems with finding the four-siders or the twelve-sider under the couch. For the Vampire veterans out there, White Wolf has fixed and updated several things, including the insanely over-powered merit Iron Will, the damage rules (how does a dead guy take lethal damage from a bullet? Well, they fixed that little discrepancy for the Revised Edition), and the practically useless Giovanni Discipline of Necromancy has been fixed so it has more practical applications in chronicles without crossover to Wraith: The Oblivion. As a general rule, the Revised Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade is a wonderful product and an awesome improvement from the previous editions (they were great too, but the current version is better), with better art updated background information, and, perhaps the most convenient feature, every Discipline, clan, and sect in the same place; the scattering of this vital information over three $20+ books was a major shortcoming of the previous editions of Vampire. My only grievance is that the high-level Disciplines are not in this book. But beyond that, the Revised Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade is, in my opinion, a nearly flawless product.

Awesome RPG, Great Book
Vampire: the Masquerade is an amazing game to play with your friends. In stark contrast to RPGs like AD&D and Shadowrun, where your player attempts to be the coolest (and you live out a dream of, "if only I were my character"), V:tM dooms your character from the beginning. You are a vampire, cursed to prey upon the living, cursed to lose your friends, living out a solitary existence. Vampire emphasizes true drama--either comic or tragic, the game MOVES you.

If you have read this far, DO NOT TAKE THE SOFTCOVER VERSION. The �softcover edition� that Amazon.com advertises is a GURPS adaptation (GURPS stands for Generic Universal RolePlaying System). It tells you how to turn Vampire characters into GURPS characters, and how to run a GURPS campaign with Vampires engaged in the Masquerade. It is loosely a rulebook for the game, but its rules make much less sense if you�ve never played GURPS.

Now, on to the rest of the game�

The storyteller has the best time with the game. She runs the chronicle with the pride of a playwright, knowing that she touches her audience. She has all the power; she also has all he responsibility. The storyteller has to invent the chronicle, plotting out each week�s saga for the rest of you to endure. While the most rewarding, it�s also the hardest job in V:tM. And somebody has to do it.

You�ll probably notice the oddness of the feminine pronoun (She runs, she has, etc.). The writers of this manual have distributed the pronouns in the book to be roughly 51% female and 49% male, to accompany the national division of the sexes. If you�re a male, it�s a reminder of the alienation that female scholastics must endure. This book pulls that off flawlessly.

I have two complaints. The first is dice. Most pen-and-paper roleplaying games use dice, with the exception of Amber. AD&D uses seven different types of dice, and three to five of each. Shadowrun and V:tM are each more forgiving; they just use one. This is nice. Shadowrun dice are your normal 6-sided dice, which is awesome. In Vampire, the die is ten-sided, which is much harder to come by. This means no buying in bulk; I�ve simply found it impossible to get a package of 10-sided dice without extra AD&D dice added on.

My second complaint is that the book has almost no structure. I�d recommend putting post-its in as tabs for the sections that you want to have quick reference to; character generation alone involves swapping between different parts of the book 5-6 times. God forbid you have a rule conflict in a game; my group partitioned the book into sections to skim through whenever people were uncertain about a rule.

Once you�ve read the rulebook, though, you don�t need it in the game. The most I�ve ever done is have the lexicon open so that I have my terms straight; you get a feel for what each level of each vampiric power does, and you don�t have to look up Natures and Demeanors all the time. (Natures and Demeanors are personalities that you�re required to take. There is a list of 30 and you take different ones for nature or demeanor).

Overall, this game is splendid. It has advanced over other RPGs to give true entertainment. Focused, fast-paced, and fantastically horrid, some gaming might give you nightmares, depending on who your storyteller is. Some gaming will be a lot of jokes and mudslinging at authority. Either way, you�ll scare yourself with how casually you say, �I suck down all the human�s blood and kill him.� At some level, the horror of catching yourself saying that phrase is what the game is all about.