VtM - WhiteWolf: Genealogy

VtM - Review: Clanbook Revised: Nosferatu
buried in regimented and protracted blocks of text. After finishing it, there was little I came away with
that wouldn't have come to me with some thought, and I felt that it had just taken too long to get to it - a
common trait throughout the book. Unfortunately, is fails to address questions like "How can the clan
had any degree of trust and unity when Obfuscate is everywhere and Auspex is rare?", instead spending
time talking about how alien the clan is, but not really backing that up. The famed humanity and
pragmatism of the Nosferatu seems to have been lost a bit (although their reputation for humanity seems
intentionally dispelled). The game mechanics are okay, on the whole, although a few are very ill thought.
The merits and flaws are all pretty interesting and good, some are even really good, like False Reflection
which allows you to use the Mask of a Thousand Faces power on film or video. Some of the rules are
less well done, however, like the largely unnecessary and seemingly weakened rules for "potent combat"
(using really big objects like cars as weapons) or the mention that Obfuscate works fine and dandy on
(still) film, though not on video - which makes no sense at all. There is also a discussion of each of the
clan's Disciplines, which also come across as overly regimented and a great deal longer than they needed
to be. On the whole, the chapter is long-winded, but has a few nuggets of goodness.
The rest of the book is taken up by notables and templates, the former of which I usually find much more
interesting and useful than the latter. The old clanbooks all had ten templates (most of which were
terrible), and the revised books continue this absurd tradition. Thankfully, each template only takes up a
single page now, with shrunken character sheets. Sadly, however, character sheets for MET rules are also
included, inflating the page count with more useless drivel. While the templates are, on the whole, good
enough ideas, they don't need complete character stats in two systems. It's the idea that is hard to come up
with, creating the character is childishly simple. MET character sheets (never mind the over-abundance
of templates themselves) eat up 5 pages that could have been used for something with any degree of use.
Aside from the four page character sheet, the book closes out with the well-known Nosferatu throughout
the ages, but I found it only of mild interest, sadly. I found few of them to actually be all that interesting
and the wildly inappropriate illustrations didn't help the matter.
Needless to say, Clanbook: Nosferatu is a great disappointment, not because it was an actually bad book,
but because it wasn't excellent. I was expecting great things out of the revised clanbooks, to make up for
the insults that the old ones often were. Instead, like its predecessor, ironically enough, I got a book of
average quality that is only really of use to those without the time or inclination to work on the clan
themselves. There were some good ideas, and there were some terrible ones, but the book just felt like an
opportunity squandered. The good ideas it has are washed out by taking to long to get to them and the
bad choices and few errors the book has (such as the character in the story possessing powers beyond her
ken or the Nosferatu of Russia having been isolated from the Camarilla "for centuries"). The book is
solid on the whole, but it lacks the zing and excitement that $15 calls for. I'm passing this review copy
along and saving my money, I'll be buying the revised clanbooks sparingly, only getting the really good
ones - when I had hoped that they would all be that good.
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