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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the most necessary RPG supplements in history.,
By
This review is from: Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah (Black Dog Game Factory) (Paperback)
Understand, this is not an expansion for you and your friends to sit down and play after watching Monty Python. In the darkest game of the World of Darkness, Shoah is the darkest corner. The opening artwork is a brutal example of what you'll find in the rest of the book: if it's too much for you, then you may not want to get any deeper.Shoah: Charnel Houses of Europe opens with a brief bit of history (prompting some to even go so far as to use this section as a textbook) before detailing the Dark Kingdom of Wire: the Holocaust's wraithly inheritors. The book presents the falsified Jewish society that detoured a Red Cross investigation (which, in turn, kept the world blind just long enough for a few million more deaths), the Polish ghettos of Warsaw and their almost-victorious hero, and a Russian camp. These are, obviously, in descending order of darkness, but each are richly detailed and usable for any who think their troupe can handle the content. Auschwitz is last. It is detailed. It is thorough. If you decide your troupe should go to Auschwitz, it contains enough information to horrify the players: that this is the worst atrocity in human history. The book is dark, troubling, nightmarish, and easily worth three thousand times the cover price for any roleplayer who knows what it contains. It is very simply the best RPG book I've ever read.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Dark Kingdom of Wire,
By Indra Sunrise Geerts (Buffalo, New York United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah (Black Dog Game Factory) (Paperback)
Understand, I don't play Wraith. I read it for the background, which I find extremely interesting. So I can't help you on the subject of rules, game balance, whatever. But I can tell you something of the quality of this book.Perhaps the most suprising thing, right off the bat, is that this is a soft cover. Generally, one does not expect deeply disturbing images to leap from the pages of an oversized floppy book. Consistantly, White Wolf has challenged that assumption, and this is probably the best example everywhere. When you open it, you will find a two-page black and white image. This image is one of the most haunting pictures I have ever seen. Countless thousands of men, women, and children stand on the shores of a river. Garbed in prisoner stripes, heads shaven, they wait, some standing in edge of the water, some with their arms raised in supplication. There are so very many of them. There is a single small boat, with a single ferryman, ferrying them one by one into the afterlife. The magnitude, the idea that death is never wholesale, that it is always, always a personal matter, is message enough to be worth the purchase price. This book is never trivial. It is never "fun". It draws immensely from history, and makes it very clear what is fiction, and what is drawn from a history far darker than that found in any fiction. The background is superb, the infomation interesting and vivid. Places described are disturbing and realistic. Characters make sense, plots seem feasable. For many who read this, this will likely be a first look into the subjects described. It is much more intense than they may be used to. It is recommended for "Mature Audiences", and while I think teenagers should read this exact sort of thing, I think care should be taken that they be aware of the seriousness of such a subject. This is the sort of book that will remain on my shelf,long after the game system fades into obscurity. Castle Wolfenstein, this is not. Indra
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Be very, very careful if you use this book as history,
By
This review is from: Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah (Black Dog Game Factory) (Paperback)
Normally, I hesitate to judge an RPG supplement on it's historical merit. They aren't meant to be history books, after all; a fact omitted or misread can be understood because the goal is to give Wraith players an interesting background setting, not to educate us on the whos, whats, and wheres of the past.
However, this book starts out by emphasizing that it's contents should be taken as truth, at least in the areas where it discusses 'real' history. This causes problems because the authors clearly have historical blinders to anything BUT the Holocaust. What could be a powerful move towards discussing one of the great tragedies of history through the medium of roleplaying becomes almost a work of holocaust denial through omission. This is most horribly demonstrated in it's section on Babi Yar, outside of Kiev in the Ukraine. The author seems flatly ignorant of Ukrainian history outside of this one event. Never once is the Holodomor, the Ukrainian Famine which wiped out six million peasant farmers in 1933, so much as even implied; not in the background history, not in the character histories, not anywhere. The collectivization campaign, 'dekulakization', and the purges are similarly absent. The highlights of this section include a Wraith whose father 'fought for freedom with Lenin in Moscow', inspiring him to join the Red Army (the idea of Lenin 'fighting for freedom' would likely have come as a shock to victims of the Red Terror, and the authors make no attempt to show that this decision of the character's might be an unfounded point of view), and a Jewish character who is initially spared by a German because she has a "good Ukrainian name" after marrying a Ukrainian gentile (demonstrating complete ignorance of Nazi policy towards the 'sub-human' population of the area who happened to be Slavs rather than Jews). Similar background setting notes make it perfectly clear that the authors have no idea that, even as millions were dying in German concentration camps, millions more were dying elsewhere at the hands of the Soviets or Japanese. The 'Dark Kingdom of Wire' is founded by victims of the Shoah; nothing is even hinted at as to how the wraiths of the Gulags were dealt with by Stygia. In short, if you use this book, use it purely as an RPG supplement, not as history. There are bigger and more thorough books than this discussing what happened in occupied Europe under the Third Reich, books which do honor to the victims of Nazi genocide without pretending as if no other genocides have occured.
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