[OSSR]Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy

[Ancient History]

Where the falling expectations meet the rising shark.

2000. Vampire: the Masquerade Revised had come out in 1998, and Dark Ages: Vampire wasn't due out until 2002. So we're right in the middle of a kind of flood change in how the Vampire side of World of Darkness handled magic and Disciplines.

In Vampire 1st and 2nd editions, Thaumaturgy was different because it had a lot of different effects, organized into separate paths and rituals; this made it an experience point sink, but also allowed a lot of different effects - good for people that wanted to play wizards, which is basically what the game started out as. The designers didn't realize at the time how good it was, because of the hard limits on disciplines that meant Thaumaturgy effectively made Tremere characters a lot more versatile than other players - and that's before they started adding in more Paths in supplements.

Still, it was pretty damn clear that players liked it, and that there was little-to-no-oversight - so Thaumaturgy proliferated and diversified...slowly, and disorganizedly, in books like Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, etc. "Dark Thaumaturgy" becomes a thing, because regular Thaumaturgy wasn't edgy enough for the Sabbat, that kind of thing. Then we get to Revised edition...

...and Necromancy, which had previously been a 10-dot power, was now a path-based blood magic discipline like Thaumaturgy. It had taken about a decade, but the designers at White Wolf finally figured out that there was more they could be doing with Thaumaturgy - since unlike all the other Disciplines, it was uniquely expandable (just add paths/rituals), and as Necromancy showed, that could also apply to thematically similar powers that partially reinforced each other as opposed to the completely random collection of crap and awesome that was Thaumaturgy. It was received so well, they were already playing with Assamite Sorcery in Clanbook Assamite Revised (2000).

At the same time, Thaumaturgy was already acknowledged as the munchkin's tool and probably broken beyond all fixing, even if White Wolf ever acknowledged such things. Player characters weren't supposed to go for power-mad options, or try to figure out exploits.

They published Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy anyway.

Lot of familiar names here:

Authors: Bruce Baugh, Chris Bjork, John Goff, Alan I. Kravit, Robin D. Laws and James Moore.
Additional Material: Justin Achilli, Fred Garber and Dana Habecker.

...but I think the important bit is that this isn't a single-person 90-page sourcebook, this is a full on freelancer-fueled 140 page book that was like a dry run for the shovelwear production line. There's six main authors and seven sections (Prelude, Introduction, four Chapters, and an Appendix), and I think a lot of this was different people all throwing in ideas rather than any cohesive approach with a top-down layout for what they were trying to accomplish beyond "Hey...blood is cool, magic is cool, blood magic is hardcore as hell. Let's write it!"



So they did.

[Ancient History]

Prelude: Tricks of the Trade
Opening fiction. This is actually a pretty competent piece of fiction: Young Tremere on a fetch quest to get the component(s) for a ritual, using a combination of deceit and power, then plant it at the Prince's residence as part of a magic-fueled con involving vampire politics.

Unfortunately, and this pains me, like a lot of Vampire fiction, it doesn't actually work. Rituals in Vampire sometimes have components, but they're usually not exotic, rare, or weird, and they got progressively less D&D-style material components and more minimal as the editions ran on. Which is unfortunate, because if the setting was a Gothic Punk modern world, and medieval magic worked if you had magic in the blood (so to speak), then actually sourcing, say, a pint of virgin's blood, or the left hand of a hanged man, or the fat from an unbaptized baby, or a finger from the seventh son of a seventh son would require a bit of suitably grisly and morbid creativity and resourcefulness.

And the thing is, Vampire never fucked with metaphysics for its blood magic. Ever. It's always and entirely been about Rule of Cool and the Look of the thing; it's even more slapdash than the rotes in your average Mage supplement, because Vampire doesn't have Blood Spheres, which is a good thing.

I think that's worth expanding on: all Vampire disciplines are a grab bag of more-or-less random effects that are set in a tier, so you have to buy the lower-level effect to get the higher-level effect. In most cases, this doesn't mean you have to buy Spark, then Lightning Spark, then Lightning Bolt, it means you get darkvision, then claws, and then maybe turn into a wolf. And there are only 5 powers in a Discipline (6+ for disciplines is mostly academic), so if you want to add any powers, you have to create an entirely new discipline. Which the designers did. And which showcases the advantage of Thaumaturgy: they didn't have to add a discipline, they could just add a path.

But it was still a random grab-bag of effects for the most part. Especially rituals, but some of the paths too. There were powers you didn't care about and powers you cared about very much indeed. Thaumaturgy was the original garbage bin Discipline, where any power or effect you needed could be a random ritual or path - usually a ritual - and there was no framework for what a ritual could or could not do, or what level it had to be. Which you'd think is weird, but it's really an application of D&D level spell design for Vampire - these designers weren't doing a Shadowrun-style tear-down and rebuild using formulas, they were kitchensinking it.

Which is what led to this book.

Introduction

I'll tell you... something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.
- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Thing on the Doorstep"

It's a good quote to start the book off with.



The actual intro is pretty slick starting off. They immediately delve into the subject as being much more varied and different and older than it has been presented as, that there are multiple traditions and that it's a nasty business that involves imposing your will on the world and burning through your very essence. It reads a lot like Mage-lite, and is definitely approaching magic from a 20th century perspective, but that's the core audience for this book, so it works. It even touches on the withering effects of Humanity when you're bleeding people and other vampires dry to cast your fireballs and shit.

The Tremere brought organization and visibility to blood magic; they codified it, but didn't invent it.

Besides Thaumaturgy, the intro specifically mentions Koldunic Sorcery, Assamite Sorcery, Setite Sorcery, and Necromancy. Noticeably not mentioned: Dark Thaumaturgy and a couple other minor variants, but we'll get to those.

The initial reason you need all these types of blood magic is simple: the writers didn't want the Tremere hogging all the fun, and if you had to give every blood magician Thaumaturgy, it rapidly waters down their schtick. Because Thaumaturgy is all the Tremere have; their other two disciplines are Auspex and Dominate. It is the unique discipline of the Tremere clan, and from a game balance perspective they need to own that shit like the Giovanni own Necromancy (note: the Giovanni actually suffered the exact same issue but worse, since numerous little bloodlines kept getting access to Necromancy and sometimes more Necromancy in the form of Nihilistics and Thanatosis and shit. That's one reason Necromancy-as-blood-sorcery works: it scales Discipline proliferation back a little.)

On the plus side, only the Tremere and Giovanni (and a handful of bloodlines) have blood sorcery as a default awesome power. Everyone else has to buy stuff as an out-of-clan discipline. If your Assamite wants Assamite Sorcery, they have to pay more for it than the Tremere do for Thaumaturgy. If that all sounds like a lot of weird accounting...it totally is. And it gets worse the closer you look at it which we are going to do next chapter!

Although this book explores the secrets of Thaumaturgy, we've made the attempt to move beyond the obvious "book of spells" concept. In fact, of this book's many words, only about half are devoted to game systems and new powers. While this no doubt puts the book into the "that sucks, I wish it had kewl powerz" column for many people, those who are looking for storytelling hooks for their chronicles shouldn't be disappointed.

Prepare to be disappointed. Like many (all) World of Darkness books, this one is half-baked to the point where once you bite through the mouldy, spotted crust, you're chomping down into the cold, unfinished dough beneath. We'll go into specifics in later chapters, but the point is that the book isn't half so clever of interesting or intelligent as the writers think they are, and the "hooks" they imagine are there largely are not. Anything that isn't a game mechanic to be used is, in fact, probably something that would eventually be ignored, retconned, or just too bland or confusing to actually make it into a game.

Also, in the interests of helping the Storyteller, we've left many of the finer details unexplained with regards to ritual and effect.

It's not a bug, it's a feature (it is in fact a bug.)



The idea here is to leave some mystery and wiggle room for the Storyteller. Except Storytellers don't need mystery and wiggle room, they can say "fuck the rules" whenever they want. They don't buy the book just to see what you decided to leave unwritten. You want there to be the occasional blank spot on the map for player characters to say "what's there?" but you expect all the major cities and towns to be labeled.

We get a Lexicon. Because this is WOD, and they insist on re-defining established words and making up new ones. This one is super basic though. I'm pretty sure this is just a really pared down version of the Clan Tremere lexicon, which is really weird because it ends with like 7/8 of a page worth of white space. Like...throw some more shit in there, or take some terms out. There are words I specifically know they use in this book which are not defined here, like koldun and Way. It just seems like somebody had a given wordcount, and filled it, and the layout guy put it together and said. "Huh. Lots of blank space. Oh well."

I'm seriously wondering about that; Becky Jollensten is credited with "Layout & Typesetting" and this book came out in 2000, so I think it was all done on a wordprocessing program, but that's the kind of weird whitespace clusterfuck you associate with either bad layout or really bad editing, usually both. Something should have been cut or added to make up the space. But it wasn't. Oh well.

Next up: Chapter One: The History of Blood Magic

[Mord]

I love this book for its surreal inconsistency in power level. You have the Path of Alchemy on page 68, which is notorious for "boiling water" as its first dot power, and then you have Path of The Focused Mind on page 71, which is effectively the Munchkin Path to such an incredible degree that even a White Wolf editor should have noticed and put the kibosh on it.

[Ancient History]

Chapter One: The History of Blood Magic
Vampires are immortal, they have been shadowing (sometimes driving) humanity for all of recorded history, and they have their own secret history. Actually, several secret histories, because Mage has their own secret history which sometimes intersects and...y'know it doesn't matter.

I mean, the entire chapter. This is an in-character chapter that starts out by letting you know that the narrator and any or all parts of the chapter are inherently unreliable, because too much is lost and what was written down is probably false, biased, or incomplete, and nobody knows what the truth is anymore because nobody can trust what anybody else says. This is basically an anti-chapter.

And there are sticky notes. Someone else is commenting on this chapter in the form of sticky notes written in cursive, stuck in among the texts. It's not the worst or silliest annotation technique that White Wolf ever came up with, but it's up there.

Mostly, when you distill it down, it runs like this:

- There were vampire blood magicians way back
- They didn't like each other
- Vampire blood magic took a very long time to systemize
- Nonsense about True Names
- The Tremere happened

Thaumaturgy as a Discipline does not unite all forms of blood magic, of course. It is not given to usurpers to achieve the final consummation; great variations remain the forms of blood magic practice. Thaumaturgy, as we Tremere define it, does gather in many of what has been scattered paths. It brings order to what had been chaotic, with knowable patterns of progression and a methodology for building new definitions. Thaumaturgy has no room for powers of the blood that require outside factors, either environmental (as in koldunic sorcery) or spiritual (as in Setite sorcery), nor for some styles of blodo magic that accompany other cosmologies (as in the magic of the Assamite viziers).

It's a nice sentiment, although like a lot of things in this chapter, the specifics tend to fall short of what the game mechanics deliver. Because there are (or would be, at the time this book was written) a lot of exceptions to all of those statements. I like the idea of Thaumaturgy as somebody gathering up all the various blood magic experiments of the past couple millennia and then trying to structure and order them quasi-scientifically using medieval occultism as the basis...and actually cobbling together something workable, which surprised the hell out of everyone else. But in practice, all the blood sorcery Disciplines are more or less identical in broad strokes: Discipline rating, Paths, and Rituals. You might not be rolling all of the same dice, but you're not looking at different systems the way you would with Arcane spellcasting, Psionics, and Incarnum in D&D3.x.

So...what was the point of this chapter? It doesn't say anything useful, accurate, or trustworthy about the history of blood magic. It doesn't provide much in the way of hooks for potential stories. It doesn't significantly expand the history of any particular vampire clan, and much that it does say was later ignored or proven to be untrue. It's not unentertaining, in its own way, but this is fluff for the fluff god.


Head pats.

But what should this chapter have had? Especially given that the writers probably did a bare minimum of research (Wikipedia did not launch until 15 January 2001), and didn't want to step on Mage's toes too badly, this would be a fucking hard chapter to write if they actually tried to do a survey of the development of different blood sorcery disciplines. But that's exactly what they should have done.

The thing is, magic in Mage doesn't uncover great truths about how the universe works - instead, it's all about how different mortal paradigms of magic are true, for a given value of true, and that they do work if you're special enough. Then you become a vampire, and whatever was special in you goes away. But that's okay, because as a vampire, you're special in a different way!


And you get specialer as you get older.

So blood magic in a Vampire context should be about how a bunch of vampires figured out how to use their blood to power magic, and because there have been a lot of magical paradigms over the millennia, that happened a lot of different ways and in different places, and some ways to do it work better than others. And even if magic moves on, that's okay because vampires live forever. Sumerian blood rites are fine in the Modern Nights, as long as they work.

Vampire Disciplines, of course, are less focused on actual paradigm and more on theme. This makes a degree of sense, because in the real world wizards don't throw fireballs and yet the Tremere think the Lure of Flames is fucking awesome. There's a lot of real-world magic that would be described as "necromancy," but nothing like the Giovanni use (or, shortly thereafter, the Cappodacians and Mortis). Assamite and Setite sorcery is just...well, we'll get to that.

But even theme could be useful, if they had approached it as vampires interested in X that found some rituals that worked and that vampire blood was a great short-cut to doing Y that normal mortals couldn't do. Sort of a mini-Awakening. Or they could have compared the similarity of Thaumaturgy paths to Sorcerer paths and brought in the Mage perspective that "Oh, that's just a version of static magic that is powered by life force, nothing special, ha ha ha silly vampires." But they didn't do that either. This supplement, anyway.

Long story short: Skip this chapter. On to the next.

Next chapter: Chapter Two: The Rites of Blood

[Username17]

Vampire: the Masquerade made a fucking awful decision in book one when they made Thaumaturgy the "everything else" discipline and gave it to one of the seven clans. Even in the very first edition it was obviously better than any three other disciplines you could have, and the disparity only ever grew as Thaumaturgy picked up new paths and rituals and the other disciplines... didn't.

And it's obvious that there were people at White Wolf who knew that they done fucked up. One of the few pieces of design that is actually addressed in NWoD is specifically this one. Thaumaturgy gets broken up into a couple of different magical paradigms that are gated behind different rival initiatory groups and none of the starting clans gets access or a monopoly on any of them. Now obviously the sorcery disciplines that get access to rituals are much better than the disciplines that don't do that, and the difference gets more pronounced with the addition of expansion material that expands the sorcery paths and doesn't particular expand Celerity or Obfuscate - but it's a huge step forward nonetheless.

And it's not even like it would be fucking hard to retcon that shit into an edition of Vampire the Masquerade. No one fucking blinked when Thaumaturgy got split into Theban Sorcery and Cruac (and some increasingly obscure expansion sorcery disciplines) in NWoD. You could easily have announced that there were various different paths of wizardry and Camarilla thaumaturgy was this cluster and Setite Akhu was this other one and so on and so forth. But they didn't do that.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

They even invented Abyssal Mysticism in V20 so that Lasombra could have expansions to Obtenebration that worked like Thaumaturgy paths.

[Ancient History]

Abyss Mysticism wasn't a V20 invention, it was something that dates back to Vampire Revised - and even then, it was shit because Thaumaturgy had the Path of Shadowcrafting. This is (as I want to get into) a major problem with the Thaumaturgy paradigm as it was set in in Vampire: the Masquerade - the lack of any concerted developmental effort to define an approach for Thaumaturgy meant it was incredibly difficult to create successful alternatives.

Think about it this way: Koldunic Sorcery is strongly elemental in its approach - but Thaumaturgy has Lure of Flames, Neptune's Might, Elemental Mastery and Sielanic Thaumturgy could buy Koldunic Sorcery Ways. Necromancy was cool, but the Path of the Spirit for Thaumaturgy arguably did a lot of it better and cheaper. Setite Sorcery? Thaumaturgy has Soul of the Serpent. There was very little that the "new" blood sorcery disciplines did that Thaumaturgy couldn't do, and a lot of the "new" blood magic disciplines were based heavily on re-naming already existing paths.

I'll bitch about this at length later, but it's a real problem from a game design standpoint.

[DrPraetor]

Koldunic Sorcery is absolutely baffling.

It isn't blood magic, and it's not at all clear why vampires would have it. I mean, if it did cost blood, you could be bribing hungry spirits with blood to do your bidding, and that would make sense? There's some nonsense with demons and the true black hand which we won't get into because neither Frank nor I need the liver damage but the lack of editorial oversight meant that this supposed background was never tied into anything else where it would've made sense.

It isn't scholarly or scientific which are (nominally) the Tzimisce clan traits. I mean, it's shamanism - it's, like, the least scholarly form of magic. You might have a scholarly form of shamanism in which you spent a lot of time in the library researching the spirits you were going to bind, but they don't do that.

It isn't Transylvanian shamanism, either, which is a thing. There are a couple of problems there, starting with the Tremere are also supposed to be from Transylvania. Hell, the Tremere Tribunal book for ArM5th has a whole bunch of Transylvanian folk loric stuff (it's generally not good game mechanically for reasons I won't get into here) http://www.redcap.org/page/Against_the_Dark - which you might have given to the Tzimisce instead of elementalist shamanism.

Koldunic sorcery, the Black Hand and the Old Tzimisce are an onion of failure with just more layers of failure after you peel away the top one.

[Mord]

You wouldn't have expected much blowback on splitting Thaumaturgy paths into different Discipline headers for VTR, because no one had an expectation that their Tremere PC would be ported into the new setting whole cloth. I would have expected that VTM 2e players would have roasted WW alive if they had attempted to prune the Thaumaturgy tree in a similar way between VTM editions, but now that I'm browsing the Paths list on the WWWiki, it is apparent that a lot of the Pathsplosion happened after VTM Revised dropped.

During 1e-2e, WW didn't seem to really explore the options for Path additions to any great extent. For 1e, you had the 4 paths in the core book (Blood, Flames, Movement of Mind, Weather Control), 3 more in the Player's Guide (Neptune, Conjuring, Corruption), 1 in A World of Darkness (Geomancy, lol), and 1 in The Succubus Club (Spirit Thaum). That's 9 total for 1e. 2e added only 2 paths, 1 in Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand (Biothaum) and 1 in the Player's Guide to the Sabbat (Morpheus, though it must be noted that this one also contains an obscene number of Rituals). There's apparently a third new Path in 2e if you use some weird German licensed Frankfurt by Night, but fuck that.

Where the bloat really seems to have set in is with Vampire: the Dark Ages. They added 1 new path in the corebook, 6 new Paths in the Dark Ages Companion, 2 new paths in House of Tremere, and 1 new path in Libellus Sanguinis 2. I think it's worth noting that only 3 of these 10 V:tDA Paths made their way into Revised-era supplements for the Final Nights. Elemental Mastery from V:tDA core was reprinted in the execrable Guide to the Camarilla, while Levinbolt from DAC made it into Clanbook: Tremere Revised. Alchemy from DAC made it into the very shovelware book whose thread you are reading now!

When you look at the numbers, Revised was the most egregious source of Path bloat by far - 1e and 2e combined produced 11 new Paths, while Revised produced 18. Fully nine of those new paths came from this very book, which also includes the previously mentioned reprint from the Dark Ages Companion and a reprint of Biothaumaturgy from Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand (like we really needed that updated for the new edition).

The Thaumaturgy problem was obviously there from the beginning, but the poor editorial standards in the Revised era allowed it to reach critical mass. It's understandable why going into Revised they wouldn't have taken any steps to fix the Thaum problem, because I doubt it would have been apparent that there was a Thaum problem in general. At the time, you would have noticed specific problem cases like Spirit Thaumaturgy stepping into the Giovanni/Necromancy's schtick, but Spirit Thaum predated the Giovanni, so that one didn't have a good solution if you wanted to maintain backwards compatibility.

The Path bloat kicked in at the same time that the Paths that were written started to include really horrible niche-violating shit (e.g. Soul of the Serpent, Shadowcrafting). Which is really weird, because they absolutely should have known better at that point, and is more evidence that the Thaumaturgy issue only came to a head because of the specific production conditions that reigned during Revised edition. So, I don't think the explosion of different Thaumaturgy flavors with regionalized names was the product of a conscious effort either to clamp down on the Thaumaturgy Discipline as a means of access to broad power, nor do I think it was the product of a conscious effort to let non-Tremere vampires into the "Thaum-style" power pool. I think it was really down the realization that it was cheap to write new Paths and even cheaper to write some new fluff for the same old shit. Which is kind of the entire ethos of Revised edition if you really look at it.

[Whipstitch]

I think any big shakeup would have generated some amount of blowback because thaumaturgy vs the shitty disciplines was morphing into White Wolf's version of the Fighter vs Wizard argument. Lots of people put the blame entirely on Thaumaturgy for being too good and making them feel small in the pants but it's also pretty reasonable to argue that White Wolf is just too damn stingy with handing out magical powers in general and that a party full of blood sorcerers is more fun than the alternatives.

[Username17]

It isn't Transylvanian shamanism, either, which is a thing. There are a couple of problems there, starting with the Tremere are also supposed to be from Transylvania.

A big problem is the timeline. We'll just ignore the weird ass Young Earth Creationism aspect and all the "pre flood" nonsense and all the Mage nonsense about how 3000 years ago the fucking Sun was a dude who walked among men and the lands were a Dali-esque lava lamp ravaged by demon armies because that shit doesn't matter in addition to being extremely retarded. With a few exceptions (Tremere, Giovanni), the clans were supposed to have gotten their start in reasonably recognizable form three thousand years ago. The Malkavians are from the Italian Peninsula, but they aren't "Romans." They aren't even Etruscans. They are Villanovans, and there is lively debate in archeological circles as to whether their language should be considered Italo-Celtic or not.

The authors kept wanting to frame things in terms of extremely modern national stereotypes, but the timeframes they had set up make such questions irrelevant. At the Convention of Thorns there are no Italians, there are people who support Aragon Occupied Sicily and there are people who support the Sicilian Crown in Naples. And the people who become the Camarilla Inner Circle don't even care because their political disagreement is about how far should extend the might of Assyria.

In addition to it being kind of stupid that so many groups come from Transylvania, the timeframes involved makes it not even matter. The Tzimisce aren't meaningfully Transylvanian, they are fucking Gets, and they aren't from "Transylvania," they are from Dacia. And the authors don't even know that, or what that would mean, and don't even know that they don't know that and never bother to look it up. Tzimisce overlords should be ranting about their conflicts with the Sarmatians and Persians.

-Username17

[K]

I think the seed of the rot started with the entire concept of Thaumaturgy and Disciplines.

From a story-writing perspective, you always needed a way to include new powers and one-shot effects. The villain-of-the-week sometime needs a special murder-ritual for power that no one else in the setting has, and also there needs to be a reason why it doesn't unbalance your whole setting.

Enter Rituals or Paths, shit that can die with the guy who uses it.

A better designed game would have expanded the Disciplines so that its not weird that some vamps use Potence to fly or throw sewer grates with killing force, and Protean turns you into a wolf if you are a Gangrel and an alien monster if you are a Tzimisce (neatly removing the need for expanding the Discipline list with shit like Vicissitude).

Thaumaturgy could still be used for weird rituals, but then you wouldn't need it for every time you wanted to go off-brand with a vampire concept. I mean, sometimes you just want fire vampires this week and having to default to Thaumaturgy for that is just lazy design.

[Ancient History]

Chapter Two: The Rites of the Blood

The collection of pages you are holding details the secrets behin the true power of Clan Tremere--the secrets of Thaumaturgy and blood magic. [...] The Camarilla derives its strength from a structure o centuries of tradition fostered by conservative elder Kindred. By hoarding its knowledge and manipulating younger Kindred ike pawns, that ivory tower is becoming a prison for all but the most ancient among us.

Yadda yadda, so whatever the last chapter was supposed to be, this chapter is supposed to be an Anarch's guide to thaumaturgy, reproduced at the local Kinko's and intercepted and annotated by some Tremere high schmuckety-muck. If that sounds silly and maybe like different people were writing different chapters for different books, well...

This chapter takes the common approach of many Vampire books in assuming that the target audience for the in-character document knows far, far less then the players. Case in point:

The legends whispered among neonates are true: Clan Tremere was founded by human mages who voluntarily took on the mantle of the undead.

Honestly, I thought that was a selling point rather than a secret. The anonymous Anarch author also touches on one of the finer points: how did those first Tremere vampires transition from Mage spheres/Sorcery paths to Thaumaturgy...and shies out of giving a definitive answer. Which is silly, because later in the edition the designers would get lazy and just let vampires buy Sorcerer paths and pay for them with blood, which is a short and relatively simple solution. And likewise, they suggest that Sorcerers can learn blood magic from Vampire grimoires, which rather is against the point made in this chapter that blood magic either doesn't work or burns through mortals way too quick to be effective. Then there's this:

The Embrace imbues the vitae with mystic energy. Kindred draw upon this energy to maintain their existence. This same vitae that makes it possible for us to suspend death opens the door to blood magic. Any Kindred with the proper knowledge and desire can practice blood magic; the Tremere have no special exclusive capacity for Thaumaturgy. The Warlocks' miserliness with their secrets holds back the entire race of Kindred from achieving its full potential, however.

Well, no. The Tremere do have Thaumaturgy "in the blood," so to speak, and if they didn't then people wouldn't care so much. This is what happens when Clan-exclusive disciplines get passed out to all and sundry. Or maybe when writers write something so ambiguous, you can't tell if it's a deliberate error seeded into the work to show that the Anarch doesn't know everything, or if the actual writer is a dumbass.

After some dickering on Mages vs. Blood Magi, it gets into the basics of "What is Thaumaturgy" and "How Does It Work" and runs into the age-old problem that Vampire has no in-character explanation for Discipline dots or blood points. So when it comes to talking about why younger vampires can't access certain blood magic rituals, the text flails about offering half-assed explanations about Generation and how much vitae you can expend in a single night. It's silly.

They also make the bold claim that Paths tend to be vitae-intensive, and so most vampire thaumaturgists prefer Rituals. This is exactly counter to all of my experience, because rituals tend to be nerfed quite hard by comparison to paths, and all of them involve the kind of "I'm going to go play my mini game here, the rest of you go jerk off in the bathroom or something" approach that is one of the major problems with hacking minigames. Rituals are nice, but they're not like D&D-style spells. They're usually very situational, have their own costs and complications, and the rules for actually learning them tend to be somewhere between rudimentary and non-existent. Sometimes you can buy them for points, sometimes you have to go and learn them in-game by stealing a grimoire or something. There are fewer rules for creating a Thaumaturgy ritual than there are for creating Mage rotes. None of which exactly endears rituals to PCs a lot of the time.

There's several pages on "Thaumaturgical Principles" which you don't care about because they're largely never mentioned or referred to again, anywhere or ever. The closest you get is a bit about True Names, and some related stuff like sympathetic magic which was looted from early 20th-century interpretations of magic. The only reason you care about this is a sidebar on page 44 (yes, in the middle of the fucking in-character text) telling you that at Mister Cavern's discretion, you can ignore range requirements on rituals if you can satisfy a requirement by, say, finding out the target's True Name or getting a piece of them. Which is way less clinical or detailed than ritual magic in Shadowrun but...well, that's WoD in a nutshell.

Spirits and Demons gets their own section, and is arguably the best section, given how little the Tremere actually go in for this kind of thing...because it explains why. You either call up a demon so minor that you can cow it, and it doesn't know shit that's useful to you, or you call up a demon too powerful and then you're on the wrong end of the negotiation. Mostly this is moot, because Thaumaturgy by itself lacks rituals for demon summoning - that's Dark Thaumaturgy territory - but the exact details on that get a little iffy, especially between editions.

"Spirits" have always been a bit weird in Vampire, because the fine distinction between ghost/wraith/soul-outside-the-body and elemental/nature spirit/any-spiritual-entity was not well defined. Mostly, this section focuses on ghosts and reanimation, which is strictly speaking Necromancy territory, except Spirit Thaumaturgy and Spirit Manipulation are both paths, so...whatever.

In "Other Traditions" they talk about Kabbalah, Voodoo and Santeria, Wicca, and Dark Thaumaturgy. These are about paper-thin as you might expect: nobody was going to do serious research to try and make Voodoo Tremere a thing, especially when there are at least two or three versions of Voodoo vampire sorcery already (Voudoun Necromancy and Wanga are practiced by the Serpents of the Light, the Samedi, and even some fucking Haitian Lasombra).

As an aside: the thing about Dark Thaumaturgy is that supposedly you're getting much more limited abilities than regular Thaumaturgy, because you're just repeating memorized formulae rather than learning the principles involved. The demons tell you what you need to know to invoke hellfire or whatever, but not how to design rituals or your own paths.

Then we get some entry-level overview stuff of Clan Tremere chantries...was this cut out of a Clanbook Tremere draft?...if you're not a Tremere, you don't really care, but then if you're picking up this book then your character knows Thaumaturgy so maybe they are a Tremere and care...I guess. There's also a couple paragraphs wasted on certamen (magical dueling), which I've never seen come into practice, ever.

This goes on for pages.

It really is Clanbook Tremere Lite, and I don't really grok why, because the Revised edition of the clanbook came out the same year...and even if nobody else on the team knew that, Justin Achilli should have. Which really makes me wonder if this wasn't spillover from that book. There's a couple points of possible interest buried in there - like why a Tremere might teach a non-Tremere blood magic - but it's all left very loose and iffy on exact quid-pro-quo of it all. There's just not a standard market price (unless you count XP).

Books of Blood Magic is a subject after my own dark, shriveled pumping organ, and as a consequence is exactly as heartbreakingly stupid and worthless as you'd imagine. Vampire: the Masquerade is not set up for spellbook culture in the way it is for Shadowrun or Dungeons & Dragons. You get a brief list of titles and instructions which are absolutely worthless as far as game mechanical concepts. He also touches on scans of grimoires being traded on FTP networks like so much warez, which is cool but also fucking pointless.

The last paragraphs are a dire warning that blood magic is losing its potency, and it's all because Gehenna is coming. Whoop-di-do.



Once again, I'm left wondering how this chapter could have been made better. Like the last chapter, it really doesn't go into a lot of detail about how blood magic works from any real mechanical standpoint, and only barely from a fluff standpoint; it maybe provides a few hooks, but there's no mechanical meat to those hooks. What the hell did players actually want, that this chapter should have given them?

Pay-to-Play
Basically, there should have been a lot more ways to "spread the wealth" as far as blood magic is concerned. Emphasize that there are other options than just the Tremere for blood magic, talk about the advantages and disadvantages involved, maybe name some specific personages, tomes, and organizations that would a Keeper could drop into a campaign. This kind of thing has always seemed anathema to White Wolf, but that's because it always posits Vampire society as being much more tight-knit than it is. In a book that's all about Real Magical Power(TM), they should have emphasized ways to get it, not ways you can't get it. Otherwise it's like putting a fence around Tir Tairngire and forgetting to give any reason to hop said fence.

Primitive Blood Magic
This is probably just my personal approach, but I like the fact that the first Tremere didn't start their unlife as big dick-swinging archmages, but realizing that "Oh shit, we fucked up" and having to quickly work to resolve the issue by coming up with something new. Actually coming up with ways to design Paths and Rituals is mentioned all over this book and others, but there is basically never any good set of mechanics to doing so, because every single designer was writing by the seat of their pants. But they could have given a start to it just by giving guidelines for adapting Sorcerer Paths and Mage rotes as blood magic rituals and shit. Sure, it would have been expensive and inefficient - but that's the fucking point! And it would have fulfilled a real gap in the play experience. I mean, if blood sorcery is going to be a kitchensink effort anyone, go nuts...

Honest-to-Ghost Variant Rules
This seems super silly, considering the rest of the content in this book, but if you're going to re-skin Thaumaturgy with other occult traditions you might as well do it right, and present them as modestly complete alternatives. One or two pages would have been plenty for Blood Kabbalah for Jewish vampires to indulge in, for example. Wicca, if you had to mention it at all, should have been part of a larger conversation on pop occultism vs. Thaumaturgy and how that pale goth kid hanging out at the Barnes & Nobles New Age section might be more or less dangerous than he looks.

Anyway. Meat and potatoes next: Chapter Three: The Ways of Magic

[DrPraetor]

There's also a couple paragraphs wasted on certamen (magical dueling), which I've never seen come into practice, ever.

Ars Magica really tries to get you to care about certamen, which is supposed to be the Tremere specialty and enables you to settle disputes by having illusions fight. This is both cool in principle and a reasonable thing to have in the setting, but it was an utterly boring series of die rolls in actual practice. It was also totally unclear why Mages in Ars Magica had the power to do this at all.

Anyway, it was a minor point of curiosity what happened to that certamen specialty of Tremere when they became vampires. Can people with thaumaturgy do the illusion-fighting thing for no reason?

[Ancient History]

Anyway, it was a minor point of curiosity what happened to that certamen specialty of Tremere when they became vampires. Can people with thaumaturgy do the illusion-fighting thing for no reason?

Still exists, although it's a ritual in Clanbook Tremere Revised.

Blood Certamen
While most modern Tremere apprentices see Thaumaturgy as a distinct property of their blood, some aged Tremere who survived the Long Night remember nights as mortal wizards. The clan's very foundation rests upon the traditions of those wizards. The clan's very foundation rests upon the traditions on those wizards - tribunals, apprenticeships, the Tremere Oath; all stem from the organization that the Tremere abandoned in their plummet into damnation. Among those early practices was one magical rite used to settle disputes.

Even though the Tremere traded their mortal sorcery for blood magic, they managed to find ways to turn their old practices into their undead state, and the ritual of certamen made that transition as well. Certamen exists as one of the oldest forms of dispute resolution between wizards, or so the elder Tremere say. In the modern nights, certamen takes a decidedly sinister form, and remains in the hands of very few Tremere. Indeed, perhaps only a half-dozen Tremere below the rank of regent know the ritual itself, and a handful more remain aware of it's existence.

Still, it's use remains protected by ancient tradition, and a Tremere without other recourse can, if he is even aware of it, call for certamen to settle a quarrel. One pontifex supposedly favors certamen as a traditional measure and a hallmark of a true and loyal Tremere - and correspondingly evidences terrifying skill with the practice. The rite of certamen opens with a formal declaration of challenge, though that does not constitute part of the actual ritual. The rite itself sees the contenders in a circle of blood or vitreous humor, where by technique and form - the power to harness Thaumaturgy - they shall settle the matter.

A circle 10 paces across marks the boundaries of the competition, while each participant stands in an interior circle two paces wide and faces the opponent. The interior circles' outer edges just touch upon the inner ring of the large circle, so the competitors stand just a short distance apart. The participants state their terms immediately upon entering the circle, challenger declaring what he stands to gain and defender declaring three limits upon the forms of the combat. Each one intones the ritual for certamen; when both complete it, the test of blood begins, to end only in death, submission or the judgment of the presiding arbiter.

By tradition, each participant brings a second, who makes announcement of this contender and handles offices such as holding the participant's trappings or ritual accoutrements. The seconds stand behind and to the right of their participants. A (supposedly) neutral party arbitrates, and may end the certamen at his discretion; he can, for instance, intervene or prevent a prodigious apprentice from destroying a regent. The arbiter determines or ratifies the victor, and also overrules the apparent victor in rare cases of cheating (though technically, the only way to "cheat" at certamen is to bring in magical artifacts or excess blood without announcing their presence to the arbiter and opponent). The arbiter also determines whether a given certamen contest has a definitive result. Should, say, one contender simply use Movement of Mind to force the other out of the ring a few seconds into the contest, or should both participants exhaust their stores of vitae without a clear victor, the arbiter may declare the matter inconclusive or a draw.

Certamen allows a thaumaturge to extend his usual path effects into more symbolic and devastating forms. Fire magics become incendiary great swords or demonic flamebolts; spirit minions become translucent, armed legionnaires; weather sorcery takes on a viciously turgid aspect. Onlookers watch as the two Tremere contend with the mightiest blood magic at their disposal. Ultimately one must give way or be slain. Each participant holds comparable amounts of power, while the ritual causes Thaumaturgy cast by the two to evidence mystic traces and patterns that allow onlookers to tell what's happening and even give the participants some ability to defend against the opponent's attacks. Victory goes to the finesse and broad knowledge, not to raw power. Should a participant frenzy, his second ( and any attending guards) must put him down immediately; he loses the contest.

Similarly, stepping from the inner circle immediately results in forfeiture. Completion of the ritual does not mystically bind either participant to it's terms, but failure to adhere to one's own agreed upon certamen carries grave weight with nearly every Tremere, and may well lead to condemnation as a rogue ( assuming that the oathbreaker survived the experience). Of course, in the Final Nights certamen exists more as a curiosity than as a common practice. Some few Tremere do use it, but certamen is never frequent nor lightly invoked. A Tremere can decline a challenge of certamen, though doing so usually entails a loss of face among the more traditional members of the clan. Successful certamen garners some small amount of prestige among the few who still consider it an art, but its use remains restricted to personal disputes.

A Tremere cannot use certamen to force a superior to give him rank or to show off his thaumaturgical might, but he could use the rite to legitimately dispose a superior with whom he had a personal grievance or to force a peer to stop interfering in his affairs. Similarly, a higher ranking Tremere may step in as an arbiter, and an dour pontifex may very well step the whole process before it begins. And, of course if the battle results in death, why then someone more competent than the loser must step forward to take over the late kindred's assets and duties. To this night, very few members of the other clans have even heard of certamen. Elder Tremere intend to keep it that way.

System: Certamen ultimately serves a simple game mechanical purpose: the two (always and only two.) Tremere involved in certamen may expend exactly two blood points per turn, regardless of generation. Furthermore, at a cost of one blood point, a player may make a Willpower roll against the opponent's Thaumaturgy roll, with the difficulty being the opposite character's Thaumaturgy. This acts as a normal resisted roll, canceling out the opponent's successes. Because certamen highlights all the thaumaturgical actions, the player can roll Intelligence + Occult (difficulty varies by power) to recognize most incoming thaumaturgical effects and decide whether or not to defend against or respond to them, as if using the power Thaumaturgical Sight. This allows participants to invoke potent Thaumaturgy and to defend more ably against incoming attacks. The certamen ritual imposes these modifiers only so long as both participants remain in their respective circles.

[/edit] Can't sleep, want to rant.. the whole certamen deal requires a certain number of assumptions on the parts of all involved. First off, if you don't have Thaumaturgy 4, forget it. That puts it out of the range of nearly every starting character except the really hardcore Tremere. Second, all Tremere default to Path of Blood until they hit 5 dots in Thaumaturgy, and this is not the optimal path for a game where you stand ten feet apart and try to use magic at each other, because the only offensive ranged weapon you have is Theft of Vitae, and that means that unless you suck the other bastard dry, you're probably going to be blood-bound to him before the match is over...and then, of course, there's the fact that you've got a finite number of blood points - it's entirely possible to run out of vitae before either one of you drops from damage or Willpower loss.

I mean you could, potentially, turn this into a really shitty version of Magic: the Gathering where you're casting from hitpoints and goldfishing is a legit tactic as you wait for your opponent to exhaust themselves, but it's such a fringe circumstance it's really hard up to think of how you're going to make this interesting, much less work. And there aren't a lot of really helpful rituals for certamen either; there's a handful of rituals that enchant weapons and shit, but I'm not certain that's in the spirit of the enterprise.

It's weird because obviously there's a part of the design team that thinks PCs should be able to throw down in these Epic Magic Duels, but even with rituals designed specifically to enable that, you're not looking to actually make that work until the PC has increased Thaumaturgy from 4->5 and enough XP to raise up another path or two a couple dots to make an actual fight of it.

That's not to say the concept might not have some small legs to it, but the game as written really isn't predicated toward it. I'd love to see a Necromantic version where both sides are allowed to bring in a single corpse and it's like Giovanni Pokemon - and that works because there's like 3-4 ways in Revised/Dark Ages to raise and augment the dead and shit. Even then, both sides probably bring in a camelback full of blood because they're going to be running on empty pretty damn quick. And it's still a case where it's a game 9/10 of the other players can't play, because they don't have any Necromancy or Thaumaturgy.

So like...if you were doing a Hogwarts RPG, you could have Duelling as a pasttime, no problem. Because everybody has a wand, and anybody with a wand can duel. Some of them will be good at it and some will be shit at it, because they put all their points into Potions or whatever like a fucking Neville, but it's not a mini-game that rules anybody out...and, frankly, wizards zapping each other is a fundamentally good way to past the time, and not much limited just because there's a sporterized version of things.

Does it work in the Modern Nights? Eh. I mean, if you want Sabbat gangs that have one-on-one fights to see who's going to be leader, and maybe vampires in general are old enough and snooty enough to think Duels of Honor are totally a thing that should happen, sure. But traditionally, duelling was an extralegal practice where rich assholes murdered each other because they were rich and privileged enough to do so. Judicial duels were a thing, but they were also a thing that was phased out when people realized that haivng six weeks to train to defend themselves/kill the other guy (who might have hired a mercenary to stand in for him) wasn't such a hot idea.

[Longes]

It was also totally unclear why Mages in Ars Magica had the power to do this at all.

Because why not? In-universe it was just a magical technique Tremere designed so he can cheat at politics. It's not like "let's summon chunks of raw power and throw them at each other" is out of theme for the Hermetic Magic.

[DrPraetor]

It's not like "let's summon chunks of raw power and throw them at each other" is out of theme for the Hermetic Magic.

Well, a magic system is made up, so it works however-you-say-it-works. But you couldn't create an illusion of fire using Muto + Ignem, unless you were specifically having an illusion battle with another Magus. You also couldn't hurl "raw" MuIg in any other context, nor is it clear what that would mean/do.

So, to me, certamen is out-of-theme for the magic system in the game, because there isn't the ability to do similar stuff. It's a strange carve-out for a weird niche circumstance.

Having read that description of VtM certamen I'm still not sure how it's supposed to work. This is not unusually for WoD.

[Username17]

I think the seed of the rot started with the entire concept of Thaumaturgy and Disciplines.

From a story-writing perspective, you always needed a way to include new powers and one-shot effects. The villain-of-the-week sometime needs a special murder-ritual for power that no one else in the setting has, and also there needs to be a reason why it doesn't unbalance your whole setting.

Enter Rituals or Paths, shit that can die with the guy who uses it.

A better designed game would have expanded the Disciplines so that its not weird that some vamps use Potence to fly or throw sewer grates with killing force, and Protean turns you into a wolf if you are a Gangrel and an alien monster if you are a Tzimisce (neatly removing the need for expanding the Discipline list with shit like Vicissitude).

Thaumaturgy could still be used for weird rituals, but then you wouldn't need it for every time you wanted to go off-brand with a vampire concept. I mean, sometimes you just want fire vampires this week and having to default to Thaumaturgy for that is just lazy design.

I think it's basically inarguable that the original sin of Vampire is the lack of ambition of the original disciplines and clans. The original concept was that the starting ten disciplines would encompass all the powers demonstrated by Dracula. But the premise of the game was supposed to be that everyone got to play a different kind of vampire. So really, the powers of one clan should have been enough to do a decent Dracula impersonation. The idea that any clan would cover roughly 30% of the ground depicted by Dracula is just fucking terrible. It doesn't even succeed in covering one fucking book worth of source material.

If you want to play a Brujah, presumably you want to be a Lost Boys vampire. The vampires in Lost Boys fly and make illusions. If you want to play a Toreador, presumably you want to be a Lestat vampire. Lestat also flies and has telekinesis and talks to spirits. And if you want to play a Ventrue you presumably want to get your Dracula style vampire aristocrat deal on, and that means you want the fucking super strength and turning into a mist and shit. Even when the relevant powers exist at all, they are so restricted in access that it's unclear what character concept you could have that's actually supported by the game as presented. The answer to "I want to play a vampire from [Fill In Blank]" is often answered with "you can't" but even when it isn't the answer generally involves four to six cross clan disciplines. Getting enough powers to do a reasonable approximation of the vampire from virtually any book or movie you care to name takes like a decade of regular campaign XPs if it's even possible.

That's atrocious. People want to be able to do a reasonable approximation of the vampires that inspire their characters. And while you can make a compelling argument for starting at "first level" and the concept of "vampire neonates" is so reasonable that the terminology has been adapted by everything from Buffy to Magic the Gathering - and indeed Lucy is much less powerful than Dracula when she becomes the Blufer Lady. But for fuck's sake, as a first level vampire Lucy Westenra has limited mind control powers and turns into a fucking mist to go through cracks. if a starting character can't even be Lucy Westenra, your vampire game is failing at genre emulation.

Once you expanded the powers of vampires so that they covered the breadth and might of the fictional sources they are supposed to emulate, I'm not certain that you really need to have one-off powers at all. There's really a lot of room for vampire enemies of the weak to mix and match these abilities. A Vampire that could teleport short distances like Carmilla and stand on walls or ceilings like in Wir Sind Die Nacht could be a thing. A vampire with the death gaze of Necroscope and the shadow control from Vampirella could be a thing too.

Now don't get me wrong, there's certainly an argument to be made for unique abilities. And ironically NWoD actually had a reasonable explanation for them with their whole deal about founding blood lines. But I think the argument for them becomes very much weaker if your core work has enough powers in total and for the individual character to cover a decent portion of the source material to begin with.

Both Masquerade and Requiem were incredibly fixated on splitting things up into exactly 10 basic disciplines and giving each exactly five levels. That fixation was and is extremely harmful. The truth is that each discipline wants to be a grab bag of stuff that people cherry pick out of - some vampires with bat powers turn into bats and some control bats and some do both. There's no reason to put those in a defined order because that literally just makes the game worse. And once you have things as unordered (or at most tiered) lists, it's not really important whether you make nine piles of 8 or eight piles of nine. It just doesn't actually matter. I don't really care whether hypnotism and majesty are in separate disciplines or the same discipline.

Which is a bit of a long walk to say that yes, the purely sorcerous aspects of power should work that way too. Because fucking obviously. Where the categories of sorcery are arbitrary and you don't necessarily have to learn all the spells or learn them in any particular order. There's a lot more variation in vampiric weather control than just "more" and "less."

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Chapter Three: The Ways of Magic
We're 65 pages into the book and haven't had more than two sentences of actual mechanics yet. This chapter is the aforementioned "spellbook" portion, where they list all the new Thaumaturgy paths. But before that...

Learning Thaumaturgical Paths - Most of these rules default to "oral sex the Storyteller harder," and this is no different. The rules basically say that to learn a Path you either need access to a mentor or "occult materials that hold lore essential to deciphering the magic." In D&D and Shadowrun and any other reasonable game, they'd just qualify this as "a grimoire," but this is WOD!

Creating New Thaumaturgy Paths - Requires at least Occult 5, Thaumaturgy 5, a haven with a laboratory, and then copious oral sex. <cough> Okay, they want you to write out all the Path powers, get the Storyteller to sign off on them, and then begin a series of Extended Rolls...

The thaumaturge then begins an extended action, rolling Intelligence + Occult (difficulty 5 + the level she's researching) and requiring five successes. Ever time a player makes this roll, she must also spend five blood points per every level of the power she's researching. These blood points need not necessarily come from her immediately, but she must have them readily available (it's assumed that she consumes them and spends them as necessary during the research). Each roll represents one year of research and experimentation, with success allowing the character to develop a single level of the path. Each level of the new path repeats this process and levels are researched sequentially. A character may not learn the next level of a new path without researching and creating it first. A botch on any given roll resets the successes garnered for the creation of a path's level to zero.

While this technically doesn't make researching Paths impossible, it effectively puts them out of the reach of player characters because it takes at least five years to research a full Path. Imagine the poor bastard that spent a year and probably bled out a dozen sheep learning how to boil water. I mean sure, you're immortal, but damn.

Also, you have to pay 7 XP for the first level and 4 x (New Level) for each level thereafter.

Now, I will say this about Path research: the fact that you can research Paths at all, and that it is hinted elsewhere on here that some Paths have alternate powers, actually gives rise to the tantalizing possibility that maybe you can have paths with more than just five powers. This should not have been a hard sell. The whole point of Thaumaturgy is that you buy a Path with the powers you want, if you can then just buy the powers within the Path that you want for a given level, that's just one more drop-down menu to sort through. Seriously, imagine if they'd adopted that for other powers! You get a macro-discipline like Protean, with Paths like Shapeshifting and Path of the Beast, and when you buy up Level 3 Shapeshifting you get to pick if you want to be a bat or a wolf or whatever - and if you want to turn into more than one you buy another power at the same level!

I know, I know, we've gone over this. It's just...the pieces were there for a better game.

New Thaumaturgical Paths
There are 11 new Paths in this section. I can't tell if they're all written by the same person, and some are refurbished, but they are:

- Alchemy
- Biothaumaturgy
- The Focused Mind
- The Hearth Path
- Mastery of the Mortal Shell
- Oneiromancy
- Path of the Blood's Curse
- Path of Curses
- Path of Transmutation
- The Vine of Dionysus
- The Faux Path

We won't go into every power, but let's hit the highlights:

Alchemy - Not what it says on the tin, and they actually start out by telling you that modern technology has largely made this path redundant. This is because it sucks. The Path of Alchemy lets you manipulate elements, but the internal logic involved is bizarre and sometimes contradictory. You can turn lead into gold, for example, but if you try to actually cast the gold into coins it melts into worthless crap because it's not real gold, but some alchemic ideal. But you can turn water into breathable oxygen. Part of this is a pro-active nerf to prevent players from creating their own fissile material, and part of this is a reactive nerf to the Path of Conjuring.

Biothaumaturgy - Should probably have been a set of rituals instead of a Path, this allows you to create Frankenstein's Monsters...sortof. You're basically playing "creative taxidermist" and bringing the resulting creations to rude unlife, which has serious shades of Necromancy to it - but nobody cares, because Biothaumaturgy takes weeks. You basically become the mad scientist behind Prometheans. Sortof. Biothaumaturgy is at least potentially one of the more broken paths, since your creations require no vitae upkeep and can basically be put together from scraps of your last meal. Good way to generate chaff for PCs to fight through, anyway.

The Focused Mind - OMG, hax. Seriously though, this is the Path that gets a lot of people hot and bothered. None of the powers require any action to activate: 1st level gives bonus dice for Wits rolls, 2nd level removes penalties, 3rd level should be Dominate power that makes the subject super-focused on what they're doing, 4th level lets you take an extra action per turn (as long as it's mental), and 5th level reduces all difficulties for a scene. While they all have their advantages (keeping in mind how bullshit the WoD dice system is), the one people actually tend to care about is the level 4 power, which lets you, say, throw a fireball at someone and then hit them. Or throw two fireballs. Whatever meets your fancy, really. It's sufficiently threatening that I'm pretty sure White Wolf tried to nerf Celerity so you don't give yourself ten actions a turn or something.

The Hearth Path - Should just be a collection of rituals, which is what the Path itself says it started out as. This is because it's just a collection of effects for protecting your haven. Low utility for PCs, who probably aren't used to having to booby trap their crib, slightly higher utility for NPCs because the PCs can fully be expected to break in. High-level powers get weird, where you seriously ask your toilet who did the double-decker, but whatever.

Mastery of the Mortal Shell - Basically, this is supposed to be controlling your opponent's body. Which is fun, but the first three levels require you to touch your opponent and so probably aren't happening. Notably I doubt they ever playtested the level 5 power, which appears to be an automatic success as long as the subject is in sight - fun way to win certamen, just take control of your opponent and have them walk out of the circle.

Oneiromancy - The Tremere antitribu had the Path of Morpheus for dream/sleep magic, and as of Revised all those dudes are dead, so now this version of dream/sleep magic is kosher again. Or something. It's mostly just level after level of divination, which is kinda sucky when the original Gift of Morpheus let you put targets to sleep - something that would actually let you feed from a victim, which Thaumaturgy powers are usually sucky at.

Path of the Blood's Curse - This is basically a grab-bag of five vampire-specific curses for causing difficulty to your opponent but not, y'know, actually killing them. That makes them less than ideal. Should probably have just been a collection of rituals.

Path of Curses - As above, but applies to non-vampires and vampires alike; curses still mostly suck.

Path of Transmutation - Like the Path of Alchemy but instead of changing what it is, you change what state it is in. So you can solidify the blood in somebody's goblet, or you can solidify a river and walk across it (well, no, you can't do that because of hard volume limits, but you should be able to do that), or you can turn stone liquid and let it harden again around somebody's ankles. The 5th-level power lets you walk through walls, which is a neat trick.

The Vine of Dionysus - Most vampires can't drink...wine, but they can take this Path, which lets you give others all the effects of being drunk. Which could potentially help in feeding, I guess. The 5th level power lets people literally get drunk on your blood, which 1) seems like overkill, given the blood bond, and 2) seems very inefficient, blood-spendage wise.

The Faux Path - For whatever reason, this two-page path is set off in its own section. I think this is because one of the other guys wrote it, did not get the memo about how these things were to be formatted, and they just folded it in anyway. Anyway, this incredibly shitty Path lets you play poker with other vampires by doing things to make them think you have Disciplines you do not actually have. They spend quite a lot of words explaining how this works, none of which you care about because it literally amounts to a giant game of bluff...and if you wanted to do that, why not just play a Ravnos? (Oh, right, they're all dead...) But seriously, this is over-complicated Chimerstry for people that don't want to actually accomplish anything. I can see how an NPC might use this to seem like a much bigger threat to the PCs than they are, but any PC playing with this is going to get their bluff called fair quick.

Looking back, there's a surprising lack of combat viability for most of these paths. I think that was probably intentional, but it has the downside in that the ultimate utility for these paths is also very low compared to the main book or its sequel Blood Sacrifice (possibly coming soon to an OSSR near you!)

Rituals of Thaumaturgy
Rituals started out really simple, got out of hand because they were easy to write and nobody bothered to keep track of mechanics, and then got hit by successive passive-aggressive attempts to nerf them. Case in point, in this section they claim the higher the level of the ritual, the more time it takes to learn (one week for Level One, one year for Level Five), and they try to encourage you to spend XP for the privilege...fuck that...and add in Occult Library as a background, which is quickly forgotten. Backgrounds in Vampire are either made of suck or awesome, there is no in-between.

There's really no reason why White Wolf couldn't have gone the full grimoire route, and had a Books of Blood supplement which detailed ten grimoires, each of which describes one Path and a handful of Rituals. That worked so well for AD&D in Pages from the Mages that they did three or four books like that. It's an easy and appropriate way of introducing both new mechanics/powers and how to access them, while providing story hooks for Storytellers to drop it in their campaign along the way. Did they do that? They did fucking not.

Creating New Rituals works a lot like creating new Paths, but based on little tell-tale differences in the language I think was written by a completely different person. Instead of each roll taking one year, for Rituals each roll takes "one Season." I don't know how that works in Massachusetts which only has Autumn, Winter, and Road Repair, but whatever.

Rituals...I'm not going through all of these. Most of them you don't care about. A few of them cross the boundary into what should be other blood sorcery disciplines: Learning the Mind Enslumbered (Level 1) lets you learn why a vampire is in torpor or how it died its final death. Probably the most useful are Sanguineous Phial (Level 1), which lets you store blood without spoiling and Extinguish (Level 2) which lets you extinguish flames (size not specified). Sense the Mystical (Level 1) is basically a stand in for Thaumaturgical Sight, a combo power with Auspex. Blood Mead (Level 2)...lets you make bloody honey wine, and Trima (level 2) lets you make bloody spiced wine (did somebody have a homebrew Dionysus cult when writing this book?).

Then there's this one:

Cleaning of the Flesh
Vampires must drinkt he blood of mortals in order to survive and, accompanying this bane is the risk of becoming addicted to mortal vices: illegal narcotics and alcohol. In some cases, Kindred lead their unlives as hosts to a number of sexually transmitted disease, such as AIDS. The Warlock casting this ritual must spend one full night in a bathtub filled with purified water. Throughout the night, the thaumaturge must expunge all but the smallest drop of his blood from his body, a little at a time over the course of one night. As the blood is released from the body, all addictions and diseases the vampire formerly housed will no longer burden him.
System: The caster lies in a vessel of purified water and bleeds out all but one of his blood points, roughly two points an hour. All addictions to drugs and all diseases that are not supernatural in nature will no longer hinder the thaumaturge beginning at night's end, though he will likely be quite ravenous after performing the ritual. This ritual may be performed on another, who must open his own veins, with the Warlock chanting beside the tub.

On the surface, this is stupid: as Frank ranted well in the Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom OSSR, blood-borne illnesses do not work well in room-temperature corpses. On the other hand, this is great...for ghouls...provided you can get them to survive it. That last part might be tricky, given the rules for humans and damage vis-a-vis blood loss.

Major Creation (Level 3) sounds like a D&D spell and it sortof is? It's really a way of expanding the Path of Conjuring limit on items you can conjure, at the expense of a thumb (no word on if the thumb grows back, or if you can use Vicissitude to graft extra thumbs on you to use this ritual/power more often).

The Curse Belated (Level 4) is a nice trick: it's cast on a ghoul, and if the ghoul dies, they immediately become a vampire. That's the kind of thing the Giovanni would really get a kick out of as a kind of insurance policy.

Stolen Kisses (Level 4) lets you suck blood through something other than biting the victim. Strong handshakes are mentioned. Choking is mentioned. Sex is specifically mentioned, which is way past ew.

Sculpting the Perfect Servant (Level 5) lets you manipulate the fetus inside a pregnant woman to it's a superbaby, with exceptional attributes, long lifespan, and ready to be ghouled. Somebody has a fetish.

Vires Acquirit Eundo (Level 5) is basically like the AD&D spell permanency, in that it is supposed to extend the effect of another ritual. Of course, it has no mechanics besides "Storyteller decides what it does," so it is in effect useless.

Higher level rituals are bullshit set dressing because your PC will never cast them; they're the things that NPCs are attempting that PCs interrupt. That said, the four rituals here aren't worth much.

Refined Digestion (Level 6) is a curse that makes non-Kindred blood worth less to the victim (i.e. for every 3 points drunk, you get 1). Sucks, but only from an economy of blood standpoint.

Bone of Eternal Thirst (Level 7) makes a magic bone-weapon that causes aggravated damage and drinks blood. ("Storytellers, beware of players that would carve bone claymores.")



Eyes of the Ever Vigilant (Level 7) enchants a building for a decade so Kindred within aren't affected by Obfuscate, Chimerstry, and some applications of Dominate. Caveat: requires the eyes of seven lying vampires.

Blade of the Forbidden Flower (Level 8) turns a vampire into an enchanted weapon that has all of her powers. This is Samuel Haight level hax, but you'll never get to do it yourself, so...meh.

That's basically it. I skipped a few rituals, because they were extra meh. Rituals literally have no limits and no well-defined boundaries, so it's all Calvinball anyway.

Next up: Chapter Four: Eldritch Sorceries

[Username17]

The one and only reason to invest in a new path of magic is because you conned the Storyteller into letting you have a new path whose first level does something unique that you want to do. The first level takes a year or two to research, and you could plausibly have that in some campaigns. The fifth dot takes centuries, because of the shitty way White Wolf game mechanics work - you aren't actually more likely to roll more 10s than 1s regardless of your dicepool size, and every year that you roll more 1s than 10s sets your progress back to zero. But the first dot is completely achievable.

Which raises the question: what can you do with the hypothetical first dot of a thaumaturgical path? The answer, apparently, is fucking anything. There aren't any guidelines for what the first dot of a thing lets you do. Some of them are completely worthless. Some of them are extremely useful or even provide core functionality in a concept. Famously, the first dot of Protean gives you red eyes, which is a minor disadvantage in any sensible scheme, but in any way is entirely there because of a scene where Lucy sees a shadow with glowing red eyes in chapter 8 of Dracula. That's fucking it! On the flip side, the level 1 eye power of Serpentis lets you use a "No Save, You Lose" attack an unlimited number of times. So that's pretty much the range: trivial and somewhat disadvantageous cosmetic modifications up to no-cost automatic victory powers and anything in between.

Nor is there any especial reason to believe that the first level of a power is especially worse than the second, third, fourth, or fifth. The top level power of Serpentis is just a ritual where you more your heart from one place to another place, which basically just makes you the villain from Suicide Squad. And that movie was fucking awful. Meanwhile the first level ability is as we previously discussed a reusable "I Win" button against the vast majority of potential opponents. Surely, there are disciplines where each level lets you do the same thing in quantifiably bigger ways - whether it's something like Celerity where you get steadily more bonus actions or something like Lure of Flame where you get to make progressively larger fireballs. But the majority of disciplines are just lists of stuff with no apparent underlying logic as to what abilities go n at level 2 and what abilities go in level 4.

So to the extent that the new paths research rules were good for anything at all, it was for players to create the path of "I am seriously only ever going to take the first dot in this path, because fucking obviously." Which was a theme so common in White Wolf games that I'm honestly not sure it's an exploit. That seriously might be what the designers of the book intended for you to do. Dumpster dive key one-dot abilities from progressions you made up in order to do that with.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Chapter Four: Eldritch Sorceries
This is for the other blood magic disciplines. But first, a word from our sponsors:

A quick note on using these magics in your stories - certain clans (notably the Assamites, Setites and Tzimisce) are described as having Thaumaturgy available to them in the core Vampire book. These rules supersede those (which are intended as rough simulations) - Assamite viziers learn the Assamite sorcery herein, Setites learn their special magic and Tzimisce koldun learn koldunic sorcery. The costs they pay to increase their knowledge with experience are the same as if they learned Thaumaturgy - paths at their current rating times four and the base Discipline (and its "free dot" in the primary path) at the current rating times seven. Note also that they may be eligible to pay "in-clan" costs for these Disciplines.

So, a word on that: why do these three clans in particular have their own blood magic? In part, this is because they are non-Camarilla clans, in part because they suck, and in part because they are fan/designer favorites. Let's tackle those in turn.

Non-Camarilla Clans - Despite the basic idea that all vampires are theoretically playable, in practice the internal politics of Vampire make it almost fucking impossible to get a group of vampires in the same room that aren't supposed to kill each other. On very broad lines, you can probably get some cooperation between different clans in the same sects - that would be Camarilla and Sabbat - and those sects have/had Clans with relative monopolies on blood sorcery: the Camarilla has the Tremere, and the Sabbat had the Tremere antitribu and now has Tzimisce koldun and I guess Harbingers of Skulls for Necromancy. Nobody cares what the indie clans get up to, so all's well there.

They Suck: Vicissitude and Serpentis are both kinda-sucky Protean knock-offs. They should all be Paths under one discipline that's about changing your body. Quietus as a Discipline has always been a kludgy clusterfuck of a discipline which they change every edition. While Tzimisce fleshcrafting gets points for creativity, these aren't actually the most awesome powers when going up against undead wizards that throw fire and lightning bolts.

Fan/Writer Favorites: I don't think the writers actually like most of the Camarilla clans, because the Ventrue, Toreador, Brujah, and even the Gangrel are boring as shit; the Malkavians and Nosferatu at least encourage you to come up with a unique madness or deformity. The clans that get cool shit tend to be the clans the fans and writers want to be cool: hence the constant small additions to indie clans like the Giovanni. So too, the Assamites, Followers of Set, and the Tzimisce attract interest and get Kewl Magick Powerz. Because you expect the Setites to hold dark mystic ceremonies, the Middle East has a long and ancient magical tradition, and it's neat to have Tzimisce wizards fighting with Tremere wizards in Transylvania.

Bad part: these are all out-of-clan disciplines. One of the Assamite bloodlines I think got Assamite sorcery in Dark Ages, but honestly I'm not sorting through that caste bullshit. By-and-large, even the most liberal White Wolf designer was leery of giving any Clan or bloodline two unique disciplines off the bat - although that did happen with a couple bloodlines like the Kiasyd and the Nagaraja, before they were nerfed - and you can kind of understand why. Some clans, their unique in-clan discipline was their entire gimmick, without that they are nothing special. It is why nobody gives a fuck about Brujah or Toreador: Celerity, Potence, Auspex, and Potence are just not that fucking special. And they wanted to make blood sorcery retroactively available to all members of the Clan, so... quasi-unique, out-of-clan discipline?

Yes, it sucks. Yes, they should have come up with something better. We've mentioned one of the few good things about nWoD is create-your-own-bloodline at a certain level of potency made sense, for precisely that reason. But, this is what we have to deal with.

Necromancy
This is actually split into two sections: Western Necromancy and Voudoun Necromancy. (By the way, we're back to the pure exposition format that is kinda in-character and kinda not? It's not pretending to be an actual in-character document anymore, anyway.) We get a lot of pages on the history of necromancy, most of which is purely speaking wrong from a straight historical viewpoint; Necromancy would see the most advances over the next few years, as Mortis was introduced as its precursor in Dark Ages: Vampire and the two would slowly sort of merge together to the point when even the designers didn't are about assigning Mortis Paths to Necromancy. But we're a long way from that.

What we get are not new paths, but a handful of new necromantic rituals, as well as a couple rules for lowering difficulty numbers I doubt anyone ever used. The most famous ritual is Rape of Persephone (Level 1) which...well, there's no easy way to summarize this one:
NSFW WARNING

A team of surgeons trained in the unpleasant ways of Necromancy performs an elaborate operation on a freshly dead or well-preserved corpse. From the cadaver's dead tissues, they create up to seven new penises, vaginas or other sexual apparatuses.

The necromancer engages in intercourse with the corpse's new genitalia. he may then subtract two from the difficulty of all necromantic magic - except those targeting ghosts, Spectres or spirits - for the remainder of the night.

If a number of necromancers perform the ritual together, they may freely trade Willpower points between one another for the rest of the night. During this time, one participant may experience the tactile sensations of another by concentrating for a few seconds and spending a point of Willpower, regardless of the distance separating them. No more than seven necromancers can perform the ritual together.

Okay so, you didn't accidentally pick up a Black Dog supplement by mistake, and yes Necromancy rituals are written in the old way where the effect/mechanics are not separated from the description like everything else in the book, but holy fuck did they seriously think that Giovanni PCs would start the night with a necrophiliac gang-bang, high-fiving each other like bros before going out and doing whatever? And how did they arrive at the magic limitation of seven? Jesus wept.

The other rituals are a bit ghoulish, but generally to the point, involving either an expansion of or assistance to a necromancer's ability to deal with ghosts or spectres, or using necromantic means to accomplish something else via ghosts or spectres. Drink of Styx's Waters (Level 3), for example, lets you make a bowl from a skull that traps any blood descendant of the donor into keeping their promises to you. Or great-grandma's spectre haunts them, or something. The exact mechanics on these are a little unclear at points.

Voudoun Necromancy is part of a sort of ill-advised attempt to cram voodoo into the setting; the island of Hispaniola (occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) has a population of 20 million, so you can have quite a few vampires living there, but that's also the population of the New York-Newark-Jersey City Metropolitan Area so...yeah, whatever. There's a couple different approaches and backstories involving voodoo and vampires in V:TM, but in this case the major players are a group of Lasombra, and the Samedi and Serpents of the Light bloodlines, which both practice a variant of Necromancy derived from the local voudoun traditions.

Don't be confused by the fact that they were they were talking about Tremere with voodoo-flavored Thaumaturgy a couple chapters back, there's no trace of that here! In the next book, Blood Sacrifice, they'd make the claim that the voudoun "Thaumaturgy" was actually an African blood sorcery discipline called Wanga, and that Wanga/Voudoun Necromancy shared a similar relationship to Thaumaturgy/Western Necromancy. Which would all be completely fucking forgotten by whoever wrote Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom, because that used a version of Assamite Sorcery and its own African-themed Necromancy.

Anyway, after several pages of Voudoun Necromancy history, we get a couple notes on differences with Path powers. This amounts to two increases of difficulty and a couple name changes, basically. Then we get some rituals: no corpse fucking here, so it's automatically a step ahead in my book. These aren't bad, although the Baneful Doll (Level 4) is your stereotypical voodoo doll that doesn't have anything to do with Necromancy.

Overall, the Necromancy section is...half-assed? I mean, for all the work they would do with Necromancy later, you'd think at some point somebody would sit down and sort out all the myriad little bits and pieces and cobble together a cheap supplement that at least tried to present it as a cohesive whole. BUT THAT IS NOT THE WHITE WOLF WAY. Instead, they prefer to re-invent the wheel and give the finger to anybody else writing before, after, or at the same time, even if it's in the same book.

Setite Sorcery
Technically, this shouldn't be called Setite Sorcery. It's a silly name, and in Blood Sacrifice they ended up calling it Akhu to try and tie it more strongly to ancient Egyptian magic. We won't get into all the really weird ways that works with Mummies here, but suffice it to say it shows a complete lack of top-down design on everyone's parts. Standard White Wolf practice, really.

Anyway, the special thing about Setite Sorcery is that technically for it to work, you have to capture an actual mummified corpse and desecrate it, and keep it that way in your shrine. That sounds cool for an NPC, as you end up dodging spells as you try to hunt out the evil Setite's lair, but for a PC it means finding or creating a properly mummified corpse and then figuring out where to store it that the Storyteller won't fuck you over at some critical point. Good luck with that.

Otherwise, Setite Sorcery is 100% the same as Thaumaturgy, it just has fewer paths and rituals available, a few of which are unique. These new Paths are:

The Snake Inside - Creates addictions in the victim

Path of the Dry Nile - Curse a victim by putting an amulet among their effects (or as I like to call it, the "You just won a free iPhone!" path.)

...and that's it. But we get some rituals! Milk of Set (Level varies) lets you make magic potions. This is demonstrably less complete and useful than equivalent Sorcerer paths for making potions, and all of the effects are handwavy. You'd think they didn't give a lot of thought to this. Opening the Gate (Level 2) is weird because it sounds exactly like the setup you're supposed to do for Setite Sorcery to work in the first place, taking a mummified body and ritually desecrating it to steal power from the Egyptian afterlife, but instead if you do it right you get a temporary power-up.

Dismemberment of Osiris (Level 4) requires you to capture the head of a group or organization and ritually dismember them, saving the penis for last (what if it's a woman? Sexist Setite sorcery!) The dick is cast in a bowl of fish.

It only works if the fish devour the severed organ.

If the ritual works, then the organization suffers a major setback. Like...losing their leader? I guess? I mean, the possibilities are hilarious if you manage to kidnap the President or the Pope or something, but honestly, even if the fish swallow the schlong, how can you tell?

Dismembering the God (Level 5) requires a sample of a victim's flesh, which is stuck in a canopic jar and then brewed into an unguent which is then spread on the caster's genitals. If the caster touches the victim before the next sunrise, Bad Things happen (usually fatal to a mortal). While I'm sure somebody wrote that and thought they were being clever referencing some aspect of Egyptian mythology or magic...why? How? How and why? Did no editor ever stop and say "Y'know Justin, maybe we don't need them to paint their vagina with corpse-goo."

Assamite Sorcery
Also would get a name change, becoming Dur-An-Ki. This actually has been the cause of a bit of confusion and dispute, given that they keep giving different names to the same discipline and different names to Paths for different disciplines. But whatever, for this book, it's Assamite sorcery - and despite the Assamites all being Muslims (more or less) these days, it actually has its roots in ancient Persian and Mesopotamian magical traditions. This is supposed to be helped by smoking kalif (marijuana; I'm not sure how this works with vampires, but whatever). Otherwise, identical to Thaumaturgy. Just one new path:

The Hunter's Winds - Grant temporary powers of stealth to others; 5th level gift lets you move intangibly through solid objects

Rituals, there are a few...but then again, not much worth mentioning. And most require playing dress-up and killing bulls. The "biggie" is From Marduk's Throat (Level 6), which lets the Assamite sorcerer create an alchemical blood substitute which if it works can lower the target's generation without diablerie - which is good, because the Assamite curse is still in effect at the time this book was written. Mechanics, however, are a fail: you need to ingest an amount of alchemical blood substitute equal to the maximum blood pool of your next-lower generation, and then you need to succeed at an Extended Stamina roll (Difficulty 9) equal to the amount of alchemical blood you just ingested. So that's...not happening.

Koldunic Sorcery
Okay, so this was given to the Tzimisce so they could be a credible threat to the Tremere. They get a new Knowledge skill in place of Occult, called Koldunism (Dark Ages used a different skill, just to fuck with people), and a number of elemental paths and rituals. The basic idea was that the Tzimisce are really tied to the land, and in this case there's a demon sleeping under Transylvania and his corruption taints the air, water, and soil, and the Tzimisce learned to draw on that. Which is fine, because Koldunic Sorcery is probably the most workable and fully-fleshed out of the shitty Thaumaturgy alternatives in this supplement, because you get:

The Way of Earth - Command dirt

The Way of Wind - Command winds

The Way of Water - Less "command" than "make convenient use of." Level 2 lets you sleep underwater, for example.

The Way of Fire - Something of a misnomer, this summons magma.

The Way of the Spirit - "See" everything within a given range; at some point someone didn't do their math correctly and Way of the Spirit went up to 6 instead of the usual 5.

One the one hand, these are all very showy and occasionally useful effects, and it's fun to think about creating a wall of magma or causing roots to burst up and drag your foe underground. On the other hand, while the Assamites and Setites would get more Paths eventually, in their own books or in the next one, the Tzimisce largely didn't. After this, they added one new Path "The Way of Sorrow," and some writer that was lazy tried to cram some Thaumaturgy paths in there as Ways in the Dracula write-up, but aside from that, this was it. They added a number of rituals, but no new Paths to Koldunic Sorcery until V20.

Rituals - there are only two. Reawakening the Dead Water (Level 1) lets you regain a temporary Willpower point, and Ties that Bind (Level 4) lets you carve one of your own ribs and lower Koldunic Sorcery difficulties for a bit. In other books, Koldunic Sorcery rituals would summon demons and nature spirits and shit, and there were combo disciplines where you could turn into a corpse-spewing dragon and other nonsense. Maybe something for another OSSR.

And...that's it. This short chapter covers two flavors of Necromancy, Assamite Sorcery, Setite Sorcery, and Koldunic Sorcery, but not a fucking lot of any of them, to be honest. Not enough to actually want to play an Assamite or Setite sorcerer, anyway; and kolduns are woefully under-equipped as far as rituals go, and there's a lot of Thaumaturgy/blood sorcery rituals that trip on Necromancy's dick and...that's pretty much all par for the course. The only surprise is it's all in this book.

How would I have done it different? Honestly, I'd have expanded these guys. You don't need all the Thaumaturgy chapters, and there's no point in presenting half-complete systems for a bunch of different blood sorcery disciplines; they should have filled these out so that everybody got at least a couple more paths and rituals...basically what they ended up doing in Blood Sacrifice, but that book has its own issues. Aside from that...there's no real reason why Setite Sorcery and Assamite Sorcery are different from Thaumaturgy on a mechanical level. Or why they decided to differentiate between Western Necromancy and Voudoun Necromancy. That just feels like arbitrary and poorly-devised ways of splitting powers up for little real purpose or gain. I grok they were trying to keep everything unique, but if you're not going to make the effort to actually make the different powers worth taking, why the fuck bother?

Next up: Appendix: The Faces of Magic

[Longes]

Vicissitude and Serpentis are both kinda-sucky Protean knock-offs

Um, excuse you, Vicissitude is one of the most amazing disciplines in the game this side of Dominate. It's free-form flesh sculpting. It can do most anything Protean can, and then also give you every physical merit on top.

Aside from that...there's no real reason why Setite Sorcery and Assamite Sorcery are different from Thaumaturgy on a mechanical level. Or why they decided to differentiate between Western Necromancy and Voudoun Necromancy. That just feels like arbitrary and poorly-devised ways of splitting powers up for little real purpose or gain. I grok they were trying to keep everything unique, but if you're not going to make the effort to actually make the different powers worth taking, why the fuck bother?

From my time on Onyx Path forums, for many, many fans powers that feel different is a sufficient result, even if the powers aren't actually different. Threads occasionally pop up on how to replace Thaumaturgy's Willpower casting roll with something else to make your Assamites feel unique.

[Ancient History]

Vicissitude is edgelord Protean; the level 4 power basically lets you turn into the Man-Bat, and all the Clive Barker stuff came out later. Unlike Protean, it does reward creativity, but it's also become infected (literally) with the space parasite meme, which it has never shaken off, even though "Vicissitude is a disease!" is blatantly stupid.

[Longes]

Vicissitude is edgelord Protean; the level 4 power basically lets you turn into the Man-Bat, and all the Clive Barker stuff came out later. Unlike Protean, it does reward creativity, but it's also become infected (literally) with the space parasite meme, which it has never shaken off, even though "Vicissitude is a disease!" is blatantly stupid.

But all the goodness in Vicissitude is on levels 2 and 3 - freeform fleshcraft and bonecraft. Zulo Shape and Bloodform are just tiny cherries on top, and never getting those is a perfectly valid life choice.

The being infected by space parasite and/or [Tzimisce] part is only relevant if your game is set during the Gehenna or your GM decides to severely punish you, in which case you've been fucked from the start.

[Username17]

Vicissitude and Serpentis are overpowered precisely because you don't give a shot about the higher levels. The first two levels of Serpentis let you kill any mortal, no save. The first three levels of Vicissitude let you do any physical transformation you feel like doing with a modicum of downtime. Yes, you don't give a single fuck about the higher dot powers. That's the point! Real Vampire powergaming isn't about OP capstone powers, it's about cherry picking abilities you can do awesome shit with despite a small investment.

Never turn into a Giant Snake. It never helps. But Serpentis isn't good in spite of you not giving a shit about turning into a big black snake, it's good BECAUSE you don't care. You get the real ultimate power in two dots, allowing you to be a fully functional warrior of set as a starting character.