Vampire The Masquerade 5th Edition Core Book
Celena Sessler
Vampire myths are very, very old. How old is difficult to say precisely, as the definition of "vampire" changes with every retelling, but folkloric beliefs around nocturnal demons or undead who drink blood stretch back at least to the dawn of recorded history. The publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula embedded this monstrous archetype in the public mind permanently; and, in 1976, Anne Vice's Vampire Chronicles (beginning with Interview with a Vampire) cast a look on vampires as sympathetic beings, more cursed than damned.
So, how does V5 approach the daunting task of creating a second fresh start? It appears to have taken a hybrid approach between older Masquerade's deep lore approach and Requiem's rejection of all metaplot. The corebook name-drops a lot of things that I'm sure are deeply resonant with long-time gamers. Gehenna is approaching, and the Antediluvians are Beckoning the Elders to the Middle East to fight the forces of the Sabbat, at the same time that the Second Inquisition isolates and picks off "blankbodies". Characters can be built with "loresheets", which are hyper-detailed powerups that connect them to some deep element of the world from older editions.
But, you can also just as easily ignore all of that. The world is constructed so that each play group, or even individual players within each group in some cases, can decide how much lore they want in their story. Don't want to deal with Camarilla rules? Play in an Anarch city. Don't care about the difference between a Malkavian and a Toreador? Play a Caitiff, its fine. I really like that flexibility. Metaplot lore is treated like a spice, used to amplify the flavor of the core experience, without becoming the core experience itself.
But I'm gonna be honest, I don't really like the look of this book. Unlike a lot of RPG rulebooks, which rely primarily on hand-drawn art, this book uses an eclectic mix of hand-drawn art, shadow-emphasis photography, and found-material style scrapbooking. The result, to me, is this really chaotic and confusing vision of what the book is supposed to be. That might be intentional, since a lot of the rules do have a lot of "play it your way" flexibility, but I found it more distracting than helpful. I also don't like the switching between black-on-white and white-on-black printing it uses. In some places, the white-on-black layout is used to indicate sidebars, but in other places that layout is used for core rules or lore.
The core resolution mechanic is very simple. You take an attribute rated 1-5 and a skill rated 0-5, and roll a number of d10s equal to the total. Any die that rolls 6-10 is a success; a pair of 10s is a critical and adds two bonus successes; and 3 successes is usually enough to get what you want. This is a simple, straightforward bell-curve distribution, satisfying and effective.
At least, it would be, if it weren't for Hunger. See, you also have a Hunger value from 1-5 (rarely, 0, more on that later). A number of your dice equal to your Hunger are turned red on every roll. These dice act perfectly normally, except in two cases. If you roll a critical, and a 0 appears on any red die, it is a "messy" critical; if you fail and there is a 1 on any red die, it is a "bestial" failure. In either case, your critical or failure is augmented by a loss of control, as your vampire nature reveals itself.
That's bad, so you ideally want to keep your Hunger low. Problem is, you're a vampire; you need to drink blood to feed yourself. While it's easy enough to slake one Hunger, through a blood bag, or killing a dog, or taking a gentle sip from a human. But once every night, and every time you do a cool vampire thing, you have to make a "Rouse check", essentially a coin flip of increasing your Hunger by 1. Eventually, the pressure of nightlife means you're going to need to drink more; and when you do, people get hurt. The only way to hit Hunger 0, and blessedly roll zero red dice...is to murder a person and drink them dry.
And that's when you bump into Humanity, the other pillar of the game. Humanity is a morality meter, and losing Humanity means you start to be more vulnerable to vampire weaknesses. Doing bad things gives you Stains; every session where you get a Stain carries up to a 50% chance of dropping your Humanity by one.
What counts as a "bad thing", though? One of the eternal problems with morality meters in games is that ethics is like, really hard, and is frustrating if players don't agree with the moral rules being enforced. Fortunately, V5 addresses that through its system of Tenets and Convictions. Each campaign of V5, the group chooses a set of three shared Tenets to guide their game. These can be the simple Humanist tenets of "don't kill, don't torture, don't hurt the innocent" or something more thematic, like the Street Code of "don't snitch, demand and give respect, don't hurt outsiders". Additionally, each character has a set of Convictions, which are character-specific beliefs that reduce penalties for breaking Tenets; however, each Conviction has a Touchstone, a human connection your vampire draws strength from, and you have to defend your Touchstones or risk losing the Conviction.
V5 conflict systems are, by default, extremely streamlined. By default, you don't even have initiative; everyone just declares an action, rolls simultaneously, and the higher roll does damage. Damage in combat hurts your health, as you would expect. The good news is that vampires can heal near-instantly...the bad news is that doing so makes you very hungry very quickly. As a result, getting in a fight is really expensive, even if you win. In social conflict, damage is dealt to Willpower instead of health, with the audience acting as the "weapon", and because vampires can't regenerate Willpower any better than a human, this cost feels real too.
The system of "superficial" and "aggravated" damage is a simple way to show how tough vampires are relative to human, but the rule about how superficial damage gets halved before actually being marked down is terrible. It's just ripe for miscommunication, whether the GM communicates the damage before or after halving, and if the player remembers that rule.
While your Clan is the most recognizable aspect of your character, it also contributes relatively little to a build mechanically. Your Clan gives you three points of Disciplines, which are cool vampire powers, and gives you your clan Bane, a weakness specific to your vampire family. The book mentions that there were 13 clans, but only 7 are listed in the core book, with them releasing the other 6 one-at-a-time in future sourcebooks. These clans range from the hideously deformed Nosferatu to the beautiful Toreador to the animalistic Gangrel. One special "clan" is the Thin-Blooded, people only half-cursed, who only get fewer cool vampire abilities, but can avoid some of the costs (like being able to walk around in broad daylight, or eat food without barfing).
Lastly, you also have a coterie type. This is analogous to your Predator type, except that it answers the question of "why is your group of vampires working together". I appreciate this, since it avoids the awkward "we meet in an inn" scenario, I just think that groups should choose their coterie type before building individual PCs, to avoid incompatible character groups.
But I was, indeed, quite impressed. I don't think I can ever go back to the "gas tank" approach of using blood as mana, when the Hunger mechanic is so much more immediately appealing. The use of group-defined Tenets instead of designer-dictated sins feels freeing, and opens up the game to a wider variety of styles without losing that core focus on the price of Hunger.
My final caveat, though, is actually the first thing in the book. This game is dark, by intention and by design. But, the level of darkness in your game is something you have to very carefully calibrate; what is thrilling for one player might be either boring, or overwhelming for another. This game isn't mechanically too difficult, but thematically you can get into hot water real fast. For example, maybe you don't know that one of your players was a victim of sexual assault in real life, and then you have their character's vampire sire start acting in a way that reminds them of that trauma. This is a game about pushing boundaries, not steamrolling over them, so you need to calibrate your expectations beforehand.
As a vampire you suffer the pangs of the Hunger, the relentless and terrible thirst for human blood. If you refuse to deal with it, it will overcome your mind and drive you to terrible acts to slake it. You walk this razor's edge every night.
Like the Kult: Divinity Lost 4th Edition - Black Edition, the book starts with 32 pages of fluff containing stories, narratives, letters, e-mails and extracts about the World of Darkness, a world where vampires exist and thrive. It is our world, not another; mortals are simply not aware of it. Who cares about them however? The players play the Vampires, they are the predators and not the prey, the bad, and not the good guys. The group should be considerate about the horror themes and subjects a chronicle will touch upon so that all the players feel comfortable, all in all however the themes that the game explores are dark, horrifying and malevolent. The Concepts chapter describes the story so far: the Camarilla, the disappearing Princes, and their dwindling authority, as well as the Anarchs, the Sabbat, and the human Second Inquisition.
Kindred Society discusses ancient and contemporary outlooks of the vampires, like how the vampires kept on adapting or why at times they remained stuck in a rather harmful way of reasoning. It tackles the Jyhad, the Camarilla, and the six traditions, the core of governance among the Kindred: the Masquerade (not revealing their true nature), the Domain (respect the vampire Prince of a city), the Progeny (creating more vampires only if elder vampires allow it), the Accounting ('the sins of the sons shall be visited upon the fathers'), Hospitality (presenting yourself to another domain's Prince when you visit it), and Destruction (vampires should not kill one another, unless lex talionis allows them to). One learns of vampire fashion in and out of court, their symbols and icons, the Anarch movement and the Autarkis; apparently, not every prince is Camarilla or Anarch. The whole material is rounded up in a 4-page Lexicon of the Damned with 100 entries.
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