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I did the reading yesterday, and I'm the kind of guy who refers to notes rather than jots the notes down on the computer as I'm reading. This is largely because it's really difficult to read a game book and type at the same time. My desk doesn't currently allow it. So, it's WIR once-removed. Let me talk about the book and format for a moment. I'll put it under the cut, because it's gonna be large.
I'm not going to just read the book and jot down whatever quick thoughts I've got; I'm going to read it cover to cover, fiction, mechanics, glossary, and index. I'm going to do it pretty close to chapter by chapter, and when I think I've got enough for an entry I'll write the next one. As I'm going through it, I'll add notes about what I think about adding for a character, and then I'll make one and talk about the character creation process that the book facilitated. I'm mostly doing the newer WoD games, but I don't have most of them, so you'll only end up with a few but I'm going to use the template (base) mortal character from WoD core and basically turn them into whatever template (minor or major) we hit in the various WoD core books down the line. I'll talk about my character creation process when we get there.
Now, I've had the WoD book since 2005 or 6. I don't remember anymore, but it's been a while now! Way longer than I initially thought it was. (2004 doesn't seem that long ago for me, but in the wan light of summer, 2013, I suppose it's been nearly a decade. I bet the rest of the big WoD fans I know occasionally suffer the same debilitating realization that time has passed.) I bought it when there were still book stores in the mall; in fact, I bought it when they were going under and I got the book half-off. Since then, I've read it many times but rarely cover-to-cover. I've read all the fiction and I've checked all the rules, but it's been a long time and now I know more about the lines and books then was even possible back then. That means I'm not doing this fresh but, rather, I'm bringing all my baggage with me. What I love most is finding out that my long-held assumptions were wrong, discovering something I never actually knew was there, and re-discovering old fiction or rules I thought were great then but faded away from disuse. I get to do all of that starting today. Let's begin.
Really the Beginning : The Cover, The Credits, The Ambiance, and The Table of Contents
Really, seriously the beginning.
The cover calls itself a "storytelling system rulebook" and its designation is WW55002 which briefly makes me wonder where WW55001 is at. (A quick Google search shows me that WW55000 is also the Core book and 55001 is Tales from the 13th Precinct. Truly the internet is a trove of wonders.) The credits page tell me that it was printed in 2004. Man, a blast from the past. Okay, this is boring, moving on.
The cover itself has been talked about a lot already. I like the color scheme, but I'm the kind of guy who likes things even more simplistic; a simple blue-black cover with the title where they put it would have been almost preferable, but what we get is an extremely blurry picture of a street at night with a backlit figure facing (probably) the viewer. There's no real detail going on here. I don't mind it, but it looks more like a storytelling game of getting way too drunk in a back alley bar, which is probably about as dangerous as actually being in the World of Darkness. The inside cover is full of scattered pictures clipped from the books interior art and out-of-context spooky quotes. It's okay. It's a little goofy. Next is the first of many pieces of Chapter One fiction.
I promise, we're probably getting to the fun part. The story doesn't really have a name that I've seen, so I usually just mentally refer to it as "The Detective Piece". There's a lot about this story that I like and it's probably my favorite of the lot (although one or two others have some stuff going for them that I like). It's a longer piece - the book intro piece is usually a few pages. It starts off with a detective named K.S. Delburton writing to a doctor in the department of psychology at a redacted university. The private detective Delburton was tailing a former journalist by the name of Janet Archer, who appears to remain at large.
Delburton was asked to look into the matter, according to the letter to the professor, and they didn't want to do it anymore. We know that Delburton is using a detective companies stationary, is working under the professor as a contact or ally, and that the professor is also working under someone else against something referred to as The Enemy. There seems to be a hierarchy, because Delburton says that they went over the unnamed prof.'s head to someone they won't dare to name to insure that Delburton no longer has to answer to the prof. Delburton has contacts within the police dept. and the contact would allow the letter that Janet wrote to be photocopied, they would let Del transcribe it. Because some of the information is redacted even now, that implies that the documents have fallen into yet new hands, because it's unlikely that the prof. would redact their own name, and whoever did has an interest in the prof. and the university being unnamed while Delburton and their agency remain obvious. Everything here builds layers onto a conspiracy, and the implications are what make it my favorite story.
The actual story takes the form of a letter that Janet wrote to her father, who she no longer knows if he is teaching (which implies a weak possibility that the prof. is Janets father, hence the interest in the first place). She's holed up in a motel room in Ohio, on the run from the police after a murder and arson. After trying to take a job, she's sent on a wild goose chase through an unnamed city to experience several flavors of unpleasant supernatural situations by a man named Mummer, who I initially thought was a ruse (which I thought was clever at the time - a mummer being a masked person at a masquerade). She doesn't get the gig - "Fenway" tells Janet he's died and the gig's off, so she goes home, which is when the goose chase starts.
She's sent to a creepy butcher shop where a creepy butcher disposes of human body parts in an alley. (This might be an allusion to something that shows up as a prompt in Second Sight.) She's sent to a pest control business to talk to "Clever Tim"; a shapechanger whom the "wild doesn't want anymore", then she's sent to a cafe called The Ugly Mug to talk to a woman with a bird tattoo who talks about a dream equation.
"Are you sure you're awake?" the barista asks her.
"I think I'm half-asleep." says Janet.
Initially, I took this to be a Mage reference (just like I took Clever Tim to be a werewolf reference), but it could just as easily have fit into a God-Machine reference frame or, very possibly both. Janet is given a playing card to give the woman to show she's supposed to be there. At this point, it looks like she's become a pawn in a larger game. The detective says he was going to check out the shop was told not to by his masters. Finally, Janet ends up back at Mummer's, who's a real (a little to my disappointment, but it may not be his real name, which I guess is what I'm assuming until someone tells me otherwise), alive, and was Fenway all along. He's a chronicler of tails that seem to relate to the Abyss as she sees "The Manikin in the Closet", "The Whispers in the Alley", and "Grandpa's Favorite", which are all told to a child by Fox in the Mage book, "Intruders". She loses it and shoots Mummer then lights the building ablaze before going on the run. Her life is already in shambles and that's how she ended up holed up in the motel in Ohio. A lot of the letter is damaged by a fire set in the motel, and it isn't clear if the authorities did it or if she did, but my guess is that she did before they closed in on her, because she's still not captured nor has her body been found. According to the detective, between the night the paper was written up and the day it was shipped, a lot of corny, "spooky" writing ended up on the document, and this is the weakest bit to me. It was pretty spooky before that, but this just made it look really silly.
I'm not going into any other fiction that in-depth, because it takes forever, but I personally thought this did a really good job of setting up layers of unnerving supernatural bollocks mixed in with layers of a conspiracy. We imagine that our characters could get to the bottom of the situation, or whatever's going on here. It's a great artifact for a starting ST who wants something to hitch his or her wagon to.
It leads right into the table of contents, though. The Chapters are well laid out and everything's pretty easy to find. Making a character is a snap, imo, especially compared to older WW games.
Chapter 1 : A Secret History
Chapter 1 is always the obligatory "What is Role-Playing" shit. I've tried to write it before. It's no fun to write, and nobody ever wants to read it, but everyone kind of assumes it needs to be there. In this case, I think what the writers did was really clever - they ended up leaving the dry prose to as little as possible, a few paragraphs where they more or less explain the shit-load of fiction packed into the first chapter as flavor. You've got a little on atmosphere, a little on theme, and the usual stupid bit where the writer feels like they need to tell you that the story is always more important than the rules. (Which I almost feel is damaging, but chalk that up to my personal bad experiences with people and the rules.)
The one-page chapter fiction intro is a little weak, but I chalk that up to the difficulty of creating a lead in story that fits onto exactly one page. Some are better than others, but they're all pretty poor at creating investment. I wish to god they ever had anything to do with what the chapter was focused on, ever. They never do. They seem like easter eggs for someone who's reading through, and I'm always like, >_>. That's it. That's how I feel.
In order to set the tone, there's a story about a mysterious swimming hole. (spoilers, someone dies) I feel like it might be a reference to the quarry swimming hole in Mysterious Places, but probably not. The rest are "Inside the Shadows", an excerpt from a fake magazine, "Cold Truth", which might be my second favorite fiction piece just because I think it's the best written, about a pastor's letter to a nameless replacement in a small Massachusetts community, "Roads Less Travelled" - notes from a deceased prof. on a talk about cryptids, and "Voice of an Angel" which is a first-person testament from a prophet and is clearly about the God-Machine, representing the closest thing to a Core plot we get, especially later.
That's it for the fiction. It's almost all of the chapter, but there's a rule summary, glossary, roll and trait summary, and character creation page that are really well laid out. (And I made myself read even though I think I've looked at them hundreds of times.)
Look, I know that a lot of people don't like game fiction. In fact, I know that most people only glance at the rules, too. Most people only use the books as a quick-glance reference tool to quickly cobble together the kind of character they want, and I respect that. That's part of why I'm reading this book in the first place! But, since I'm here, let me say that I've read dozens (if not the low hundreds) of game book first chapters and they almost always make me want to roll my eyes. I don't think you can really win with Chapter One, you know? I think that as long as you're forced into it, the mood-capturing fiction bits are the easiest way to make it roll, even if they're of varying quality. Because it's the core book, the actual fiction varies, too. None of it is out-and-out vampires, mages, werewolves, or anything that we're used to. It's all very, "something's out there" from sources both reputable and kooky. It's told in a variety of formats that are rarely the structure of 3rd person stories. Most of them are very solidly placed to help start a campaign or a game, even. (Especially Cold Truth, imo, or the Detective Piece.)
Of course, there's very little here anyone needs to know. The Table of Contents and the reference pages are pretty much it and they're well done. I've lost count of the number of characters I've written up strictly from the one Character Creation page. It's that good.
I'm not going to just read the book and jot down whatever quick thoughts I've got; I'm going to read it cover to cover, fiction, mechanics, glossary, and index. I'm going to do it pretty close to chapter by chapter, and when I think I've got enough for an entry I'll write the next one. As I'm going through it, I'll add notes about what I think about adding for a character, and then I'll make one and talk about the character creation process that the book facilitated. I'm mostly doing the newer WoD games, but I don't have most of them, so you'll only end up with a few but I'm going to use the template (base) mortal character from WoD core and basically turn them into whatever template (minor or major) we hit in the various WoD core books down the line. I'll talk about my character creation process when we get there.
Now, I've had the WoD book since 2005 or 6. I don't remember anymore, but it's been a while now! Way longer than I initially thought it was. (2004 doesn't seem that long ago for me, but in the wan light of summer, 2013, I suppose it's been nearly a decade. I bet the rest of the big WoD fans I know occasionally suffer the same debilitating realization that time has passed.) I bought it when there were still book stores in the mall; in fact, I bought it when they were going under and I got the book half-off. Since then, I've read it many times but rarely cover-to-cover. I've read all the fiction and I've checked all the rules, but it's been a long time and now I know more about the lines and books then was even possible back then. That means I'm not doing this fresh but, rather, I'm bringing all my baggage with me. What I love most is finding out that my long-held assumptions were wrong, discovering something I never actually knew was there, and re-discovering old fiction or rules I thought were great then but faded away from disuse. I get to do all of that starting today. Let's begin.
Really the Beginning : The Cover, The Credits, The Ambiance, and The Table of Contents
Really, seriously the beginning.
The cover calls itself a "storytelling system rulebook" and its designation is WW55002 which briefly makes me wonder where WW55001 is at. (A quick Google search shows me that WW55000 is also the Core book and 55001 is Tales from the 13th Precinct. Truly the internet is a trove of wonders.) The credits page tell me that it was printed in 2004. Man, a blast from the past. Okay, this is boring, moving on.
The cover itself has been talked about a lot already. I like the color scheme, but I'm the kind of guy who likes things even more simplistic; a simple blue-black cover with the title where they put it would have been almost preferable, but what we get is an extremely blurry picture of a street at night with a backlit figure facing (probably) the viewer. There's no real detail going on here. I don't mind it, but it looks more like a storytelling game of getting way too drunk in a back alley bar, which is probably about as dangerous as actually being in the World of Darkness. The inside cover is full of scattered pictures clipped from the books interior art and out-of-context spooky quotes. It's okay. It's a little goofy. Next is the first of many pieces of Chapter One fiction.
I promise, we're probably getting to the fun part. The story doesn't really have a name that I've seen, so I usually just mentally refer to it as "The Detective Piece". There's a lot about this story that I like and it's probably my favorite of the lot (although one or two others have some stuff going for them that I like). It's a longer piece - the book intro piece is usually a few pages. It starts off with a detective named K.S. Delburton writing to a doctor in the department of psychology at a redacted university. The private detective Delburton was tailing a former journalist by the name of Janet Archer, who appears to remain at large.
Delburton was asked to look into the matter, according to the letter to the professor, and they didn't want to do it anymore. We know that Delburton is using a detective companies stationary, is working under the professor as a contact or ally, and that the professor is also working under someone else against something referred to as The Enemy. There seems to be a hierarchy, because Delburton says that they went over the unnamed prof.'s head to someone they won't dare to name to insure that Delburton no longer has to answer to the prof. Delburton has contacts within the police dept. and the contact would allow the letter that Janet wrote to be photocopied, they would let Del transcribe it. Because some of the information is redacted even now, that implies that the documents have fallen into yet new hands, because it's unlikely that the prof. would redact their own name, and whoever did has an interest in the prof. and the university being unnamed while Delburton and their agency remain obvious. Everything here builds layers onto a conspiracy, and the implications are what make it my favorite story.
The actual story takes the form of a letter that Janet wrote to her father, who she no longer knows if he is teaching (which implies a weak possibility that the prof. is Janets father, hence the interest in the first place). She's holed up in a motel room in Ohio, on the run from the police after a murder and arson. After trying to take a job, she's sent on a wild goose chase through an unnamed city to experience several flavors of unpleasant supernatural situations by a man named Mummer, who I initially thought was a ruse (which I thought was clever at the time - a mummer being a masked person at a masquerade). She doesn't get the gig - "Fenway" tells Janet he's died and the gig's off, so she goes home, which is when the goose chase starts.
She's sent to a creepy butcher shop where a creepy butcher disposes of human body parts in an alley. (This might be an allusion to something that shows up as a prompt in Second Sight.) She's sent to a pest control business to talk to "Clever Tim"; a shapechanger whom the "wild doesn't want anymore", then she's sent to a cafe called The Ugly Mug to talk to a woman with a bird tattoo who talks about a dream equation.
"Are you sure you're awake?" the barista asks her.
"I think I'm half-asleep." says Janet.
Initially, I took this to be a Mage reference (just like I took Clever Tim to be a werewolf reference), but it could just as easily have fit into a God-Machine reference frame or, very possibly both. Janet is given a playing card to give the woman to show she's supposed to be there. At this point, it looks like she's become a pawn in a larger game. The detective says he was going to check out the shop was told not to by his masters. Finally, Janet ends up back at Mummer's, who's a real (a little to my disappointment, but it may not be his real name, which I guess is what I'm assuming until someone tells me otherwise), alive, and was Fenway all along. He's a chronicler of tails that seem to relate to the Abyss as she sees "The Manikin in the Closet", "The Whispers in the Alley", and "Grandpa's Favorite", which are all told to a child by Fox in the Mage book, "Intruders". She loses it and shoots Mummer then lights the building ablaze before going on the run. Her life is already in shambles and that's how she ended up holed up in the motel in Ohio. A lot of the letter is damaged by a fire set in the motel, and it isn't clear if the authorities did it or if she did, but my guess is that she did before they closed in on her, because she's still not captured nor has her body been found. According to the detective, between the night the paper was written up and the day it was shipped, a lot of corny, "spooky" writing ended up on the document, and this is the weakest bit to me. It was pretty spooky before that, but this just made it look really silly.
I'm not going into any other fiction that in-depth, because it takes forever, but I personally thought this did a really good job of setting up layers of unnerving supernatural bollocks mixed in with layers of a conspiracy. We imagine that our characters could get to the bottom of the situation, or whatever's going on here. It's a great artifact for a starting ST who wants something to hitch his or her wagon to.
It leads right into the table of contents, though. The Chapters are well laid out and everything's pretty easy to find. Making a character is a snap, imo, especially compared to older WW games.
Chapter 1 : A Secret History
Chapter 1 is always the obligatory "What is Role-Playing" shit. I've tried to write it before. It's no fun to write, and nobody ever wants to read it, but everyone kind of assumes it needs to be there. In this case, I think what the writers did was really clever - they ended up leaving the dry prose to as little as possible, a few paragraphs where they more or less explain the shit-load of fiction packed into the first chapter as flavor. You've got a little on atmosphere, a little on theme, and the usual stupid bit where the writer feels like they need to tell you that the story is always more important than the rules. (Which I almost feel is damaging, but chalk that up to my personal bad experiences with people and the rules.)
The one-page chapter fiction intro is a little weak, but I chalk that up to the difficulty of creating a lead in story that fits onto exactly one page. Some are better than others, but they're all pretty poor at creating investment. I wish to god they ever had anything to do with what the chapter was focused on, ever. They never do. They seem like easter eggs for someone who's reading through, and I'm always like, >_>. That's it. That's how I feel.
In order to set the tone, there's a story about a mysterious swimming hole. (spoilers, someone dies) I feel like it might be a reference to the quarry swimming hole in Mysterious Places, but probably not. The rest are "Inside the Shadows", an excerpt from a fake magazine, "Cold Truth", which might be my second favorite fiction piece just because I think it's the best written, about a pastor's letter to a nameless replacement in a small Massachusetts community, "Roads Less Travelled" - notes from a deceased prof. on a talk about cryptids, and "Voice of an Angel" which is a first-person testament from a prophet and is clearly about the God-Machine, representing the closest thing to a Core plot we get, especially later.
That's it for the fiction. It's almost all of the chapter, but there's a rule summary, glossary, roll and trait summary, and character creation page that are really well laid out. (And I made myself read even though I think I've looked at them hundreds of times.)
Look, I know that a lot of people don't like game fiction. In fact, I know that most people only glance at the rules, too. Most people only use the books as a quick-glance reference tool to quickly cobble together the kind of character they want, and I respect that. That's part of why I'm reading this book in the first place! But, since I'm here, let me say that I've read dozens (if not the low hundreds) of game book first chapters and they almost always make me want to roll my eyes. I don't think you can really win with Chapter One, you know? I think that as long as you're forced into it, the mood-capturing fiction bits are the easiest way to make it roll, even if they're of varying quality. Because it's the core book, the actual fiction varies, too. None of it is out-and-out vampires, mages, werewolves, or anything that we're used to. It's all very, "something's out there" from sources both reputable and kooky. It's told in a variety of formats that are rarely the structure of 3rd person stories. Most of them are very solidly placed to help start a campaign or a game, even. (Especially Cold Truth, imo, or the Detective Piece.)
Of course, there's very little here anyone needs to know. The Table of Contents and the reference pages are pretty much it and they're well done. I've lost count of the number of characters I've written up strictly from the one Character Creation page. It's that good.
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