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Average Rating: 7. Browse 11 Images » wrong image? Fantasy Modern Urban Fantasy Horror. Publisher: SmiteWorks. Year: View Corrections Link Image. Publisher: Alis Games. Hard Cover. ISBN Publisher: Modiphius Entertainment.
Publisher: Arkhane Asylum Publishing. Leather Bound. Product Code: VLM No items found. No images found. No videos found. All 13 Clans from the classic modern Vampire setting are present and playable in the Fifth Edition. The 5th Edition Corebook only includes the seven traditional Clans of the Camarilla, with the rest being introduced through additional source books.
A new edition of the Players Guide provided a presentation of other Clans that were yet to be introduced. Using the mechanics of Amalgam Powers , a number of distinct Disciplines from classic versions of Vampire have been merged into Fifth Edition's base disciplines as part of the process to streamline how the game functions.
White Wolf Wiki Explore. Main Page All Pages Community. As a vampire you suffer the pangs. Vampire - The Masquerade 5th Edition. Vampire: The Masquerade is the original and ultimate roleplaying game of personal and political horror.
Original Title. Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition. Other Editions 4. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
To ask other readers questions about Vampire , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Sep 17, C. Phipps rated it it was amazing Shelves: vampires , vampire-the-masquerade , valducan , urban-fantasy , horror , roleplaying-games.
I was a huge fan of Vampire: The Masquerade in the nineties. I was about as big a Gothic Punk as a tabletop roleplaying gamer could be in the South with no Goths around him, no black clothing in his wardrobe, and a restrictive Catholic high school. I traveled from the seedy streets of Chicago to Prague during the Dark Ages to the end of the world before the line ended in Its difficult to overstate just how influential Vampire: The Masquerade was in a post-Twilight era when vampires have so much shade thrown on them.
Ironically, it's in part because of the tabletop roleplaying game that the undead became so over-saturated. There was a badly made Aaron Spelling TV series that I still have a fondness for and a couple of awesome video games. The premise of the game is extremely simple: you are a vampire in the modern world.
At some point in the last fifty years, your character was a normal human being transformed into one of the undead. You are part of an undead society that exists behind the scenes and must maintain a constant vigilance so humans cannot find out about your existence. This is the titular Masquerade. Nightly unlife is a constant struggle against the vampire nobility, vampire hunters, werewolves, and your dwindling humanity. If you give into the killing urge too often, you'll eventually degenerate into a mindless beast that has to be put down.
The 5th Edition of the game opens up with thirty pages of in-universe fiction that is designed to appeal to the now 30 and 40 year old fans of the game who played it in high school. The opening story is a letter from Mina Harker, a real person in the setting, who is addressing one of her descendants she's Embraced turned into a vampire out of loneliness.
Other fiction talks about how the Camarilla vampire society has fallen and a Second Inquisition of ABC agencies globally has started a massive purge of the undead. Yes, the Masquerade is partially broken and now vampires have to fear drone strikes as well as thermal-vision equipped Special Forces.
The idea of the government knowing about the undead is probably the only way you could believably do the Masquerade in the 21st century. In an age of cellphone cameras, cloud servers, instant global communication, and satellite networks--it's slightly more believable the intelligence communities want to avoid a global panic from the revelation the supernatural is real. I also like how the gameline says humanity is kicking the collective asses of vampiredom.
Setting juggernauts like the Tremere Inner Council and Camarilla's leadership are wiped out to remind people why the Masquerade is so important. Previous editions were criticized for overly relying on their metaplot.
So much so that the 20th anniversary edition of Vampire: The Masquerade 4th Edition by my count actively removed all references to it. However, while the metaplot was overdone, I think it's one of the chief reasons to upgrade to a new edition. Seeing how old favorites and characters you had an attachment to growing up is something worthwhile. I've already heard they have plans for a 5th Edition of Chicago by Night and I'd enjoy discovering what the characters within have been up to for twenty years.
Gameplay-wise, the biggest change is the focus of the game is shifted. Previous editions were a power fantasy where the majority of focus was on your disciplines.
Many characters were built like Connor Macleod with a trench coat, a katana hidden underneath it, and a bunch of awesome superpowers. Now, the game greatly broadens the focus on hunger and feeding. Many pages are spent discussing how a vampire feeds, what they feed on, and how they feel about who or what they eat. There's also a change to Humanity in order to make what a character cares about and how they stay sane more varied. Fans of all thirteen clans may be disappointed to discover the book contains descriptions of only the original seven clans, Caitiff, and Thin Bloods.
There's some light revisions to them like the fact the Gangrel's flaws are no longer as severe and the Malkavian's insanity is not related to any "real" mental illness as they had previously been depicted as tricksters and doomsaying prophets--not really things you want to associate with the mentally ill. We also get updates to Disciplines vampire powers , which are much more versatile.
Perhaps the best rules revision is that its much harder to feed on animal blood or blood bags if you're a vampire of power. Vampires also become more powerful as they age in terms of Blood Potency. Also, why there was no focus on the Paths of Enlightenment that serve as alternatives to Humanity. While I imagine part of this is a space issue, I think it's actually a thematic issue.
The above clans are the most inhuman of Kindred and they're really beating the drum of V:TM as a game about coping with the horror of one's condition. Besides, they have to get you to buy the supplements somehow. That's good business and I'm not just saying that because I leave cliffhangers in my books for the exact same reason bwhahahaha! The book has beautiful artwork spread throughout, using photos and touch-ups to give impressions of how the gameworld looks.
Some of the artwork isn't great, like the Nosferatu look like poor college students and runaways than horrifying monsters in their Clan write-up, but most of it is incredible. The game is clearly intended for an older, more mature audience. This is a good thing as we finally get straight answers on everything from whether Kindred can have sex High Humanity vampires can to how to make a Herd of mortals.
The general tone of the book is dark and edgy in a deliberately overdone style that implies Kindred are selfish monstrous creatures at every turn. One of my favorite pieces of art is a Ventrue debutante with her slave sitting underneath her as she wears a slit dress while posing over the city. Beside her, she has a little speech about how being rich made her life a party but being undead has made the world her bitch.
There's some questionable choices but the general sense is the game is trying to be politically aware in a time when punk is feeling out of fashion but never so relevant. Whereas the original books were Gothic Punk written for sixteen-year-olds, this feels more like it was written for people who watch HBO and FX. There's some bad decisions in the book, I think. It's an attempt to refute the "vampires behind everything" of previous editions but I don't think anyone really needed a story about in the first place.
I'm also not sure how Thin Bloods, a bunch of almost human vampires in the modern age, ended up making their own path of alchemy. I also think making rules about how nice a vampire has to be to have sex is a bad decision. Gameplay mechanics-wise, I think 5th Edition suffers a bit in design. The Predator types, basically how and what you feed on, are a major part of the new game. However, they aren't very well described and sometimes the mechanics doesn't make sense for what you're eating.
For example, one kind of vampire only feeds from other vampires but it doesn't explain how you do that--especially with the Blood Bond being a thing. Some players will also object to the changes to favored clans like the Tremere who have gone from the Clan which everyone is Blood Bonded in to the Clan which can't do Blood Bonds period.
The absence of Paths and Sabbat clans feels wrong, especially as they have a role as both antagonists as well as players. Given the Lasombra have supposedly joined the Camarilla, their presence is sorely missed. Still, I think the game is fantastic. Vampire's 20th Anniversary Edition was great but it didn't feel sufficiently distinct from Revised. Every game is going to carry a heavy bias on "how you should play it. View all 8 comments. Would you like to play one of a half-dozen different kinds of Hipster Millennial self-inserts?
Would you like to see the original Camarilla Clans made the only playable ones for some reason that doesn't even make sense in the new continuity, yet altered sufficiently that you wonder why they even decided to keep the Camarilla intact?
If so, then this is the book for you! I'll just crank out whatever! Twilight 's still cool, right? Enjoy, I guess, or whatever? Jan 18, Anton rated it really liked it Shelves: rpg. Fabulously looking rulebook. So it is quite faithful to old VTM we remember and love. Good fine-tuning of the rules we saw before, not something radically different.
Still, great reincarnation of the cult game. When it comes to this edition of Vampire, I had a number of psychological shifts. When it was announced, also involving some of the original designers, I was excited. When I first laid eyes on it, I was disappointed and somewhat worried. When I finally got my hands on it and started reading it, I got a really bad feeling from the get go When it comes to this edition of Vampire, I had a number of psychological shifts. When I finally got my hands on it and started reading it, I got a really bad feeling from the get go, but I did not have the time to study it thoroughly, so I discussed with others, read online reviews etc.
One thing started emerging as a pattern: this was Vampire for hipsters. Also, it was a Vampire game that wanted to please everyone and not offend anyone in this all-pervasive political correct trend; at the same time, it wanted to seem and sound "more adult and edgy". I am sorry, you cannot have both. At the end of the day, however, only reading the whole damn thing could justify any judgment. Or rather, playing it. Hence, the 2 stars instead of 1, since I have not played it yet and I hold on to some vague hope that I might be somewhat wrong.
I cannot and will not try to review it cover to cover, since I have found such reviews boring myself. Rather, I will tell you what I find wrong with it. Not to mention it forgets or retcons its own history.
For instance, there is an "immersion piece" that is a letter from Mina Harker to a Fledgling, where she talks about Dracula. Mina comes across as quite empathetic and even talks about her sire mildly, when in fact Dracula was a terrible Tzimisce Elder and therefore, she would have been of 7th Generation, therefore, per the new rules, akin to a maddened monster that in any case would have succumbed to the Beckoning.
This is just an easy example. Other than that, while the 2nd Inquisition is an interesting idea, what caused it it laughable. To put it simply, half the options of the previous vanilla Vampire the Masquerade. If they plan on a later book, it is shameless milking. If not, they just trashed half the fun.
Oh, and the Sabbat is basically destroyed because of, guess what, The Beckoning. Forget the interesting effects of yore. They just copied the powers from Vampire: Bloodlines right down to the symbols and added Thin-blooded Alchemy. You basically risk frenzy if you do anything interesting that goes beyond human abilities. Also, now Blood has Resonance and gives different benefits if you feed from people of different psychologies, etc.
The book has the standard hefty size of White Wolf tradition, but with so many things missing, you would wonder what's in there. Well, more micromanagement, from pointlessly complex Discipline allocation oh, did I mention, there is no more Dementation - it is now half-assed as a Discipline Combination Effect , to Chronicle Tenets the things that will cause you to lose Humanity, pre-agreed, on a Chronicle to Chronicle basis , to Relationship Diagrams, Coterie Styles blah-blah-blah.
Basically, they created micromanagement for roleplaying. The example given is that, for instance, you could lose Humanity for healing yourself, because, you know, that's not something humans do.
There is more, but to me, that is enough. I can only imagine a very skilled Storyteller making use of this mess and creating an interesting story, but here is the thing: a skilled Storyteller does not need all this mess.
As I read in another review, this game is made for those who did NOT and would not play Vampire before. This sums it up better than all my ranting. For extra annoyance points: ugliness is not allowed. All the Vampires shown are basically models and in the rare instance of actual artwork, they ALL look like the dress-up doll style used in the old Zynga Vampire Wars game - or put simply, clothes-designer sketches.
View all 5 comments. Sep 02, Jorge Villarruel rated it did not like it. The game's target is not the people who play or played Vampire the Masquerade, 20th or earlier, but people who don't play Vampire the Masquerade, instead.
Or for people who like Zack Znyder's over-production and pseudo-substance, Marvel movies' shiny colors and teenage jokes.
This game is not mature, this game is for younger millennials who like to?
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