Customer Reviews

Chicago Chronicles Vol. 3: Milwaukee by Night, Ashes to Ashes, and Blood Bond (Vampire: the Masquerade)

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Chicago by Night was one of the first supplements for Vampire: The Masquerade. This book was reprinted in a compilation volume, Chicago Chronicles Volume 1, along with The Succubus Club.

In setting their game in a dark mirror of the real world, White Wolf gave itself a challenge when it came to setting sourcebooks. D&D and other fantasy genre games could create new settings completely from scratch and could thus fill up word count with descriptions of the setting itself. White Wolf had to find a way to fill a book with just the supernatural elements of their settings, since the locations themselves were well known real world places.

As the first such setting sourcebook, Chicago by Night struggled a bit to find a proper balance between real world setting details and supernatural elements of the game world.

Chapter One is the standard introduction chapter, presenting an overview of the mortal and immortal Chicago. The chapter is a little scattered as it covers not only the normal White Wolf tropes of theme and mood, but also such mundane aspects of (un)life as traveling to and from the windy city and travel within the city as well.

Chapter Two covers the history of Chicago from the perspective of the vampires who dwell there. Thus it either glosses over, ignores, or puts a vampiric slant on real world events and mostly concentrates on the power struggles of the vampires. I often found myself flipping back and forth between this chapter and the characters chapter in order to understand who was who and what the motivations behind the events were.

Chapter Three is where the book struggles with finding a balance between its own fictional world and the real world. The beginning of the chapter reads like a tourist's guide to the city, if the tourist were a vampire. The chapter also spends an inordinate amount of time on locations devoted to the "fine arts" which hits my favorite "p" word (see my review of Vampire: The Masquerade 1st Edition) due to the assumption that all vampires are also wrapped up in high society. It should also be noted that this book was published in 1991 and thus a bit dated when it comes to descriptions of Chicago locales.

Chapter Four details the Non-Player Characters of Chicago and there are a lot of them. The book attempts to convey multiple layers of intrigue by spelling out who is pulling whom's strings from the lowliest anarch gang up to the 4th generation millenia old pair of vampires whose ancient rivalry influences everything else in the city. The problems here are many. First, though not as bad as the sample setting in the core rulebook, many of the characters presented are little more than stereotypes. Second, the wahoo, gonzo factor that crept into the Vampire supplements over the years starts here with the aforementioned uber-powerful vampires, along with a succubus that seems to have no purpose other than to say "there are other supernatural things in Chicago besides vampires." Third, there are just too many vampires. This is explained in the other chapters, but the need to detail almost all of them turns the book more into a NPC gallery than a setting sourcebook. It leaves little room for player characters to do much more than be manipulated and with the majority of the NPCs being much more powerful than PCs could ever hope to be there is also not much PCs can do about said manipulation.

The chapter has so many characters, in fact, that the second part of the chapter is devoted to how all of the various NPCs interrelate to eachother and the various groups and factions they belong to.

Chapter Five covers the various types of encounters one could have in the city. Later setting books would include a sample story, but this first book instead simply presents a collection of potential encounters. Many of these encounters either serve no purpose or could happen in any setting and thus don't really mesh with the rest of the book. In fact, many of the encounters seem designed to be intentionally arbitrary (including notes on how the NPC in the encounter ignores the vampire's inherent powers just to get a point across). While the rules of Vampire are supposed to be vague and left open to storyteller interpretation the suggestions in this chapter seem to be geared to a "gotcha" style of storytelling...in other words an almost adversarial relationship where the storyteller breaks the rules on a regular basis to prove a point or get one over on the players.

The first setting book for Vampire thus ends on a weak note. Later books would learn from the mistakes of this book, but, unfortunately, this book is full of mistakes to learn from. It presents a city full of intrigue and potential stories, but leaves player characters with little to actually do since all of the NPCs are already doing it.

Monkey's Rating: Two out of Five Bananas

Chicago Chronicles vol. 3 is a decent source for a campaing in chicago, and the added section on milwaukee adds an extra setting. But this volume has rather useless information and things are repeated. the book is tedious and not at all as usefull as the other 2 for shicago by night, but the milwaukee section makes it at least worthwhile. I recommend gamemasters using chicago buy the first 2 books, Chicago Chronicles vol. 1 and 2, but the third is only necessary if you want an added area like milwaukee.