The Crimson Gutter

by Jose R. Garcia, Andrew Peregrine, Juhana Pettersson

You've been Embraced, brought into the night and left to fend for yourself with your coterie. Now what? The Crimson Gutter provides a starter chronicle, designed to help novice or experienced Storytellers run any introductory game of The Masquerade. The Crimson Gutter chronicle introduces core concepts during play such as feeding, the sects (Anarchs, Camarilla, and the Church of Caine), and the Masquerade itself while giving the players' characters a chance to carve a niche for themselves among the Kindred. The 21 highly adaptable stories contained within can be played in isolation or strung together to form multiple arcs of a chronicle. Experienced Storytellers can easily adapt these stories to their own chronicles, drawing from them to fill an evening of play or adapting whole story arcs. Also included is a city setting adaptable to any fictional or real city including eight recurring locations and more than 20 recurring Storyteller characters.

166 pages, ebook

Published March 27, 2024

Reviews

[C.T. Phipps · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE CRIMSON GUTTER is an interesting book and one that I am willing to give props to Renegade for creating even though I have my issues with it. Basically, The Crimson Gutter is a "By Night" city book without an actual city applied to it. It is a generic city book with a bunch of NPCs, locations, and plot hooks that can be applied to virtually any urban area. I've had that idea percolating in my brain for decades but always thought it had significant downsides. Does this game book overcome them?

Not really.

The Crimson Gutters is probably one of my favorite non-OPP Fifth Edition supplements after Blood Sigils but it's probably a three star, three star and a half book as my highest praise. The NPCs it creates for it's "Anytown, USA" are pretty generic. There's one who wants to be a Camarilla bigshot, a hypocritical Anarch, and a guy who just wants to use his second chance to be extremely rich. Yeah, those kinds of people. Inexplicably, they also don't provide a Prince, Baron, or Sheriff for the city.

Ironically, the NPCs are the least interesting part of the book even though they're all fine. No, the biggest appeal of the game is that it is one of the rare WOD books that actually focuses on down and dirty street level gaming. The book presents the kind of adventures you must have when you are not going to be saving the world from Ur-Shulgi, Caine, or even likely to encounter the Sabbat.

These aren't adventures that are particularly deep: one of them is a multi-chapter investigation of tracking down who is a local Kindred that has become a wight and then destroying him. Other adventures are figuring out who murdered a Church of Caine deacon, throwing a party for a visiting Archon, and impressing the various factions in the city enough to make them accept you as a member. It's the kind of low stakes gaming that works perfectly for the setting and we rarely get represented in the books.

I like that the book also raises the Church of Caine to the level of the other two sects. I admit this is mostly because I like the Church of Caine as the Sabbat-lite and representing all of their intellectual religious side divorced from the ultraviolence. Also, able to have conversations with the other two sects. However, it also kind of falls into the trap that, "If it was just back to the old ways, it'd be better." Still, the Church of Caine really was the best idea of Cults of the Blood Gods and I have no issue with its prominence in non-OPP work (take from the best).

A nice bit is also the game actually provides some scenarios and scenes based around feeding. With all the attention V5 pays to feeding as a super important part of Kindred RPGing, this is one of the few books to actually provide interesting scenarios for Baggers, Alley Cats, Osirises, and so on. It also gives a lot of ideas for how to gain and lose domain in a city.

Still, I feel like the book suffers from the fact that it is somewhat bloated describing fairly straight forward scenarios with twenty words when five would be fine. The NPCs are also slotted into the story when we don't really give them the kind of personalities that would make them stand out. I will give the writers credit for one thing, though: the NPCs have new sections where they list how the NPCs would be as the PC's sires and also what it would take to get the NPC to betray the PCs--which is perfect for vampire.

So I rate it...okay.

[Michał Przestrzelski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kampania na pewno nie wybitna, ale przynajmniej z pewnymi konkretami. Generalny zamysł podziału na trzy frakcje ok, chociaż w szczegółach już to różnie wygląda. Najbardziej nie podoba mi się zakończenie historii Anarchistów, brutalne niszczenie pozostałych „gangów” nie ma sensu w przypadku dwóch z nich.

Jeżeli chodzi o Kościół Kaina, to sam nie wiem. Już przy Krwawych Bogach, a nawet przy Requiem, idea rozmodlonych wampirów wydawała mi się kuriozum. Ale nic to niech będzie, ciekawi mnie, jak często gracze będą chcieli do niego przystąpić. Sama idea kościoła jako miejsca spotkań dwóch sekt ma sens. Motyw fabularny ze zleceniem zabójstwa kapłana, a zwłaszcza motywacje części osób, sensu nie mają.

Zdecydowanie bez fajerwerków, ale za to chyba dość łatwe do zaimplementowania, również dla początkującego narratora.