Customer Reviews

The Hunters Hunted: The Battle is Joined (Vampire The Masquerade)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is of major importance for every Hunters-Chronicle. It begins with a nice short-story you can use as a chronicle, followed by different methods and approaches to hunt vampires. You might be a Hunter by plain accident or by profession, anyway the book provides background information for you and/or your hunters organisation. What is known about supernatural beings? How to fight them? Etc. It contains new Merits&Flaws for mortals, some Thaumaturgy spells, psychic abilities and True Faith (though the latter is a bit too powerful in my opinion). It usually provides good overviews on all the various concepts. Nothing to reprove. Recommended for players and storytellers alike.

Although in the product information provided by Amazon states that this book is from 1995, the first edition was published in 1992. It was one of the first Vampire the Masquerade products. In it, we already find some information about several trademark signature organizations like the Society of Leopold, the Arcanum or the Special Affair Division of FBI. As most know, WW published supplements detailing all those organizations; so the material is naturally outdated...but in 1992 it was an essential book used in many campaigns, so it is an interesting collectors item.

We must also remenber that many gamers don't use or buy all supplements. For those that don't want to invest a lot of time and money can use this book to run a Hunters chronicle or to flesh out interesting enemies.

In this book you will also find description of the bloodline Children of Osiris (and their discipline Bardo), Numina powers (including the powerfulls Clairvoyance and faith), spells (specific for the hunter), motives and vampire hunting techniques.

This book is not that bad. As another review said, it was written in the early stages of the other White Wolf games, so theres a lot of info thats not that meaningful anymore. What it is good as it as provoking your imagination to make your own Hunter characters. After all this is a Storyteller game, so it makes sense to make your own character using broad concepts to flesh it out. Overall, its just ok but not horrible.

Stalk blood sucking terrors! Slay slavering beasts of horror! You are a mortal hunter of fearsome foes out of fevered myth and legend. These are no myth and no legend though and your character has taken that banner to defend other mortals from the ravages of vampires (mostly) and werewolves (and maybe other shape-shifters!)

These are the role playing guidelines for running a mortals campaign in World of Darkness from Whitewolf. It meshes nicely with the whole series even if this is slanted as an antivampire campaign.

The character creation is concise and well developed and the 'flavour text' is vivid and pertinent to both the player and Storyteller and is a good mood setter.

The combat system in the World of Darkness is rather clunky and there is not good fix (so far) but the "Storyteller System" itself is fluid and the inherant clunkiness can be worked around.

A good suppliment even if you are not running a mortals campaign, as a GM/Storyteller can flesh out the hunter NPCs he or she unleashes on the gamers.

Some of the flaws to a modern reader can be attributed to the era this was written in: There only was hedge magic, and the other White Wolf games weren't in their final stages. Fine. That makes the specific examples it cites fairly useless, but that's to be expected.

The real problem is that this only adds slightly to the definitions given in the Vampire basic game of each of the groups of hunters, padding with typically not-so-great "fiction." (It must be great to have friends at a game company, and not have to be a good writer to have your fiction published.)

What's good in here could be squeezed down into about eight pages. But even those concepts have been expanded in more recent supplements. Either stick with the core rules or buy "The Inquisition," "Project Twilight," "The Arcanum" and "Ghouls" (for the masterless ghouls who prey on the Kindred) as your interests dictate.