What do you think?
Vampire Ancient Mysteries
Flashpoints in the Fog
In a society made up of liars and murderers afflicted by a slowly eroding grasp of their own existences to date, who can trust the concept of history? Understand, then, that there is a scale upon which all Kindred are precariously balanced. As personal power weighs more heavily, the ability to rely on that monster’s memory of the past is lightened. How do the Kindred navigate this Mystery of Ages?
The Mystery of Ages
• Explore the flashpoints in history that have shaped Kindred society – for better or for worse. Discover the mysteries of elder Kindred and how they navigate the Fog of Ages and their own thickening Blood.
• Players will find a selection of rules for playing characters from non-modern times as well as truly hoary ancients among the undead, with powers and Merits to match.
• Storytellers are given useful advice for how elders navigate the Fog of Ages, and how to use elder characters, historical periods and the lassitude of age among the undead for the best effect in her games.
In a society made up of liars and murderers afflicted by a slowly eroding grasp of their own existences to date, who can trust the concept of history? Understand, then, that there is a scale upon which all Kindred are precariously balanced. As personal power weighs more heavily, the ability to rely on that monster’s memory of the past is lightened. How do the Kindred navigate this Mystery of Ages?
The Mystery of Ages
• Explore the flashpoints in history that have shaped Kindred society – for better or for worse. Discover the mysteries of elder Kindred and how they navigate the Fog of Ages and their own thickening Blood.
• Players will find a selection of rules for playing characters from non-modern times as well as truly hoary ancients among the undead, with powers and Merits to match.
• Storytellers are given useful advice for how elders navigate the Fog of Ages, and how to use elder characters, historical periods and the lassitude of age among the undead for the best effect in her games.
- GenresRole Playing Games
192 pages, Hardcover
First published April 15, 2009
About the author
Filamena Young
63 books30 followersI’ve spent the last ten years writing freelance fiction, non fiction, and game design as well as independently publishing my own game work. Now that I have the time, I’ve returned to my first love, fiction.
I live and teach English as a second language during the day in rural Japan, birthplace of all things Mecha. (Giant Robots.) I’m raising three clever future mech pilots, though hopefully more Gundam Build Fighters than Gundam Universal Century 😉
You can contact me a few places.
Facebook
Drop me a line here on Goodreads Filamena Young
Or, you can sign up here and I'll send you letters every now and again to tell you what I'm up to, let you know about sweet books you might enjoy, and cute pictures. Plus sales or deals or other stuff like that.
I live and teach English as a second language during the day in rural Japan, birthplace of all things Mecha. (Giant Robots.) I’m raising three clever future mech pilots, though hopefully more Gundam Build Fighters than Gundam Universal Century 😉
You can contact me a few places.
Drop me a line here on Goodreads Filamena Young
Or, you can sign up here and I'll send you letters every now and again to tell you what I'm up to, let you know about sweet books you might enjoy, and cute pictures. Plus sales or deals or other stuff like that.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
May 5, 2015
This book was… mixed, at best. I basically read it to see whether this could shed some light on the periods in history that were chosen for the bloodlines in the book "Ancient bloodlines" because in that book I really did not get why some of them were so significant to the vampires.
And yeah, the short story at the introduction was overall good, but they usually are with these books according to my knowledge. Albeit I do wonder what time period it was referring to as the text seemed to have suggested 1840s due to the date, but what was said about the temperature dropping once when that strange vampire was near would suggest a bloodline that came to be in the First World War according to "Ancient Bloodlines." And that was strange.
I had some reservation early on in the section about historical storytelling as the book basically stated that it is good to write something that flies in the face of real world folklore and myth, let alone history, and have fun with it. Well I have my limits in that regard. It must still fit local folklore and history. If not, I am not willing to suspend my disbelief, since the premise of such settings is that it could still happen within the known history. Not to mention that the statement that "this sort of thinking won’t help you pass any history exams, but then, storytelling games are not history exams. They’re entertainment," is used by a lot of authors as an excuse to not do their homework, especially considered that the "important details" are for many the ideas they have of history, not how history actually was. The book basically says that in an historical setting in ancient Rome it's totally ok to propagating myths about generally deadly gladiatorial fights despite that barely happening because gladiators were too valuable. In their eyes it would kill atmosphere. Which is nonsense in my eyes, as you can always introduce a highly valuable but instable gladiator that got away with a killing or two once in a while.
It got better on the topic of elder vampires and it was funny to see the trope of forgetting your past used as a way of selfishly avoiding responsibility as "if they don’t remember that they did it, they reason, that’s as good as not having done it in the first place." Which is something used so much in vampire and general novels, except there the authors and fans treat it as something positive.
The chapter on vampires entering and experiencing torpor was ok, but really dry, and I hoped the one about those ancients awakening would be better. However there were some strange things occurring very quickly. It seemed like the authors did not really know history half as well as they claimed they did. For instance if that one vampire is "young enough" to know carts, chances are she knows "breeds" of dogs and cats (so would not be surprised to see them bred into distinct shapes) and noisy, foul smelling cities.
However on the other hand the examples about the social withdrawal of elder vampires would be a good storytelling material, not just for vampire stories but e.g. ghost stories or nature fights back stories as well. After all if you suffer from nightmares in a certain places or you are constantly chased by predators or small birds in a certain stretch of land, how would the outsider know that a vampire was causing it? Also the different positions and examples regarding memory loss and dealing with it were amusing. However at this time the artwork was of lower quality and it would rise and fall constantly over the course of the book.
But on the other hand it did have solid and sound advice on tent pole moments in character history and storytelling in general. But I wasn't really interested in them and blood rituals to clear the mind and recall long lost memories, to stay conscious during torpor or temporarily lower/raise your Blood Potency is more interesting to me. Just like Theban sorcery rituals of storing memories in your blood, being hidden while being in torpor (possibly turning into air) and experiencing the torpor without nightmares (at the price of eating a human brain) and the "coils of slumber" to somewhat control when you awake out of torpor and those devotions for elder vampires that harden your skin and heighten your strength, that let you turn into a statue, make you react instantly, rob memories or even temporarily shift your skills are pretty good.
However when the book got to the actual elder vampires that have awakened from torpor, there were some problems again that stuck out to me. Apart from the fact that the book never got more precise regarding skin-tone than "dark-skinned" but the artwork often didn't match the described characters. For instance one was referred to as having piercing dark eyes that never cease moving, but the picture showed a guy with glowing yellow eyes (in fact all of them have those) and I wouldn't call that skin white as salt either. In another case the picture definitely did not fit skin that looks as if it was chiseled from a slab of granite, grayish off-white and coarse. In just another case (the only case that was definitely not white, the rest were from the Mediterranean area or Western Europe) the picture was supposed to show a girl with hips slender and her breasts barely budded. Based on the picture I would say she is a woman in her mid to late 30s. Make-up or not, you cannot make a teenage girl of that apparent age look like a 30 something woman. The next two women after her were at least better but both aren't terribly original: 1) doomed mother, 2) dangerous whore.
The other ancient vampires weren't interesting either and in fact once again the information about history is pretty screwed as well (no announcing your fight or using lawsuits and demonstrations, or suicide bombs, aren't anything a French vampire from the earliest day of the empire wouldn't know). Sometimes I asked myself what idiots wrote these characters. At least the big picture at the end of the chapter was pretty good.
But the book completely wrecked itself when it finally came to history section and oh boy did that one have problems. The best still were the ones on Ancient Egypt and Babylon as those were clearly made up from scratch but the ones referring to historical events were pretty screwed over.
It would have been nice to know how on earth the vampires were prepared for World War II but not for World War I when conflicts were brewing for some time in both cases. And once again the British Empire is named as such during World War I, like Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman, but no one names France here (only later possibly because they couldn't ignore it) or the USA as colonial powers. They even mention the Vietnam War later and yet... Hypocrisy is the only word I can think of here. Also based on what is written here about how the trenches of WWI could be a real danger for vampires (ghosts, spirits, hunters, weapons etc.) it makes no sense whatsoever that they were better prepared for WWII. I think this is just a cheap way of saying "we do not want to use that war." Too bad, the ideas here are not too bad (e.g. using a tank as a vampire haven).
Furthermore, not only can the book be understood as if WWI turned most British into non-Christians but it also states that only then did vampires realize that weapons of human science can harm them... so cannons and explosives did not harm them before or what?
Other things might sound like good ideas but they really weren't, e.g. using a water skin for holding blood is a dumb idea since it would coagulate, there is a reason it is stored specifically. Also I don't think the explanation for how the 15 vampires travelled with the Monrose party in the wagons does not really hold up if you ask me. I don't think leather canvases are such good protection against the hostile elements described, plus they are conspicuous. Not to mention that you would probably need a few more powers for these vampires to make all of this work and the story of how some always caught up with the party doesn't make sense either since they could have easily lost their horses then. However the biggest failure of that chapter was that even after reading it I had no idea why on earth the Moonrose Party was a "flashpoint in Kindred history." That they survived to begin with seemed pretty unlikely and they weren't the first cooperating vampires either. (Btw. in "Ancient Bloodlines" the Sta-Au were described as pretty interesting vampires but here they seem to be represented in the typical "savage Native and civilized English" stereotypes).
Also even though they mention Mongol rulers in India, apparently nothing they did was important enough to be one of those flashpoints. In addition this book doesn't romanticize Indian people outright but it does have a strong element of it if you ask men (no word of pollution and population density). Also the claim that the "the Indian Kindred can no longer be seen as savages" is plain bullshit in my eyes, after all the Japanese were seen as savages by the USA despite being an industrialized country. But at least the Indian vampire caste system is interesting and this here made sense as a flashpoint in history.
When it came to the Haitian Revolution I would also say that it is rather a localized event and not something as big as they make it out to be. Also the ideas of vodoun vampires are nice but seriously when it comes to history this here sucks. They have the Haitian revolution but do not even mentioned wealthy Freedmen and Mullatos who had been orchestrators of the revolution and became the elite of Haitian society after the war's end. You would think it was only the slaves and the vampires and no one else.
The 30 years war afterwards makes sense as another flashpoint but its seriously underdeveloped and in the next chapter they seriously stated (at the start of the 15th century) that "the end of the world was supposedly not far away, allowing unprepared ships and crew to fall off of the Earth and into Hell." And here is the thing: The educated people at the time in Europe no longer believed the earth was flat. Plus the entire chapter barely dealt with vampires and all these bloodlines supposedly having an impact on these events or being influenced by them barely feature in this book. At best they are shortly mentioned.
In the chapter on Thailand the writing style suddenly changed, from third to first person perspective, and afterwards reverted to its original style. Furthermore they are strongly implying that Dracula was a scholar of the founder of these Buddhist monk vampires and while, I get that this Buddhist vampire order is important in Thailand, which seems to be it. "Flashpoints in history" was apparently pretty liberal of a definition since the order doesn't seem to have spread past Thailand.
However as if this weirdness wasn't enough, these morons wrote a pretty bad translation into German here and I really don't get how anyone could have made such a stupid mistake. The covenant called the "Invictus" was translated as "Die Unbesiegt" even though the correct spelling would need the syllable "-en" at the end of the word; they even spelled it wrong several rimes. But this was nothing in comparison to the translation for "the Holy Night Empire" which they translated as "Das Heiligen Nacht Reich" even though it should be spelled "das Heilige Nachtreich" and even that is a rather vulgar sounding translation, a probably more fitting one would be "Das Heilige Reich der Nacht." And it's not as if they always made such mistakes, the terms "Nachtkaiser" and "Kurfürst" (even though this one was falsely defined) were spelled correctly. Apart from the terrible "German" names that they used this chapter was probably the best up to that point, even though I would have liked to read about Viking vampires that can meld into their longboats. I guess the reason is the same as with the chapter on Egypt and Babylon, it's mostly made up and history only rarely referenced, so it cannot be messed up as easily and you can concentrate more on the ideas for a completely fictional setting. Sure Babylon as a vampire infested city is not exactly original but it works and they did include the topic of the Edimmu (spirits that were created or summoned to hunt and destroy vampires). However why would they call themselves Dammed when some even pose as minor gods?
The last chapter on the vampire cults of Ancient Egypt before and during the reign of Ramses the Great is ok. I mean vampires more or less running Ancient Egypt has become quite a cliché by now, together with the whole "secret knowledge" thing.
In the end I can safely say that while this book did have some good ideas, I overall did not like it and think it's badly planned, has hiccups in spelling and art and is for the most part not interesting. Unlike its companion book "Ancient Bloodlines" this here felt pretty much like a waste of time for me.
And yeah, the short story at the introduction was overall good, but they usually are with these books according to my knowledge. Albeit I do wonder what time period it was referring to as the text seemed to have suggested 1840s due to the date, but what was said about the temperature dropping once when that strange vampire was near would suggest a bloodline that came to be in the First World War according to "Ancient Bloodlines." And that was strange.
I had some reservation early on in the section about historical storytelling as the book basically stated that it is good to write something that flies in the face of real world folklore and myth, let alone history, and have fun with it. Well I have my limits in that regard. It must still fit local folklore and history. If not, I am not willing to suspend my disbelief, since the premise of such settings is that it could still happen within the known history. Not to mention that the statement that "this sort of thinking won’t help you pass any history exams, but then, storytelling games are not history exams. They’re entertainment," is used by a lot of authors as an excuse to not do their homework, especially considered that the "important details" are for many the ideas they have of history, not how history actually was. The book basically says that in an historical setting in ancient Rome it's totally ok to propagating myths about generally deadly gladiatorial fights despite that barely happening because gladiators were too valuable. In their eyes it would kill atmosphere. Which is nonsense in my eyes, as you can always introduce a highly valuable but instable gladiator that got away with a killing or two once in a while.
It got better on the topic of elder vampires and it was funny to see the trope of forgetting your past used as a way of selfishly avoiding responsibility as "if they don’t remember that they did it, they reason, that’s as good as not having done it in the first place." Which is something used so much in vampire and general novels, except there the authors and fans treat it as something positive.
The chapter on vampires entering and experiencing torpor was ok, but really dry, and I hoped the one about those ancients awakening would be better. However there were some strange things occurring very quickly. It seemed like the authors did not really know history half as well as they claimed they did. For instance if that one vampire is "young enough" to know carts, chances are she knows "breeds" of dogs and cats (so would not be surprised to see them bred into distinct shapes) and noisy, foul smelling cities.
However on the other hand the examples about the social withdrawal of elder vampires would be a good storytelling material, not just for vampire stories but e.g. ghost stories or nature fights back stories as well. After all if you suffer from nightmares in a certain places or you are constantly chased by predators or small birds in a certain stretch of land, how would the outsider know that a vampire was causing it? Also the different positions and examples regarding memory loss and dealing with it were amusing. However at this time the artwork was of lower quality and it would rise and fall constantly over the course of the book.
But on the other hand it did have solid and sound advice on tent pole moments in character history and storytelling in general. But I wasn't really interested in them and blood rituals to clear the mind and recall long lost memories, to stay conscious during torpor or temporarily lower/raise your Blood Potency is more interesting to me. Just like Theban sorcery rituals of storing memories in your blood, being hidden while being in torpor (possibly turning into air) and experiencing the torpor without nightmares (at the price of eating a human brain) and the "coils of slumber" to somewhat control when you awake out of torpor and those devotions for elder vampires that harden your skin and heighten your strength, that let you turn into a statue, make you react instantly, rob memories or even temporarily shift your skills are pretty good.
However when the book got to the actual elder vampires that have awakened from torpor, there were some problems again that stuck out to me. Apart from the fact that the book never got more precise regarding skin-tone than "dark-skinned" but the artwork often didn't match the described characters. For instance one was referred to as having piercing dark eyes that never cease moving, but the picture showed a guy with glowing yellow eyes (in fact all of them have those) and I wouldn't call that skin white as salt either. In another case the picture definitely did not fit skin that looks as if it was chiseled from a slab of granite, grayish off-white and coarse. In just another case (the only case that was definitely not white, the rest were from the Mediterranean area or Western Europe) the picture was supposed to show a girl with hips slender and her breasts barely budded. Based on the picture I would say she is a woman in her mid to late 30s. Make-up or not, you cannot make a teenage girl of that apparent age look like a 30 something woman. The next two women after her were at least better but both aren't terribly original: 1) doomed mother, 2) dangerous whore.
The other ancient vampires weren't interesting either and in fact once again the information about history is pretty screwed as well (no announcing your fight or using lawsuits and demonstrations, or suicide bombs, aren't anything a French vampire from the earliest day of the empire wouldn't know). Sometimes I asked myself what idiots wrote these characters. At least the big picture at the end of the chapter was pretty good.
But the book completely wrecked itself when it finally came to history section and oh boy did that one have problems. The best still were the ones on Ancient Egypt and Babylon as those were clearly made up from scratch but the ones referring to historical events were pretty screwed over.
It would have been nice to know how on earth the vampires were prepared for World War II but not for World War I when conflicts were brewing for some time in both cases. And once again the British Empire is named as such during World War I, like Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman, but no one names France here (only later possibly because they couldn't ignore it) or the USA as colonial powers. They even mention the Vietnam War later and yet... Hypocrisy is the only word I can think of here. Also based on what is written here about how the trenches of WWI could be a real danger for vampires (ghosts, spirits, hunters, weapons etc.) it makes no sense whatsoever that they were better prepared for WWII. I think this is just a cheap way of saying "we do not want to use that war." Too bad, the ideas here are not too bad (e.g. using a tank as a vampire haven).
Furthermore, not only can the book be understood as if WWI turned most British into non-Christians but it also states that only then did vampires realize that weapons of human science can harm them... so cannons and explosives did not harm them before or what?
Other things might sound like good ideas but they really weren't, e.g. using a water skin for holding blood is a dumb idea since it would coagulate, there is a reason it is stored specifically. Also I don't think the explanation for how the 15 vampires travelled with the Monrose party in the wagons does not really hold up if you ask me. I don't think leather canvases are such good protection against the hostile elements described, plus they are conspicuous. Not to mention that you would probably need a few more powers for these vampires to make all of this work and the story of how some always caught up with the party doesn't make sense either since they could have easily lost their horses then. However the biggest failure of that chapter was that even after reading it I had no idea why on earth the Moonrose Party was a "flashpoint in Kindred history." That they survived to begin with seemed pretty unlikely and they weren't the first cooperating vampires either. (Btw. in "Ancient Bloodlines" the Sta-Au were described as pretty interesting vampires but here they seem to be represented in the typical "savage Native and civilized English" stereotypes).
Also even though they mention Mongol rulers in India, apparently nothing they did was important enough to be one of those flashpoints. In addition this book doesn't romanticize Indian people outright but it does have a strong element of it if you ask men (no word of pollution and population density). Also the claim that the "the Indian Kindred can no longer be seen as savages" is plain bullshit in my eyes, after all the Japanese were seen as savages by the USA despite being an industrialized country. But at least the Indian vampire caste system is interesting and this here made sense as a flashpoint in history.
When it came to the Haitian Revolution I would also say that it is rather a localized event and not something as big as they make it out to be. Also the ideas of vodoun vampires are nice but seriously when it comes to history this here sucks. They have the Haitian revolution but do not even mentioned wealthy Freedmen and Mullatos who had been orchestrators of the revolution and became the elite of Haitian society after the war's end. You would think it was only the slaves and the vampires and no one else.
The 30 years war afterwards makes sense as another flashpoint but its seriously underdeveloped and in the next chapter they seriously stated (at the start of the 15th century) that "the end of the world was supposedly not far away, allowing unprepared ships and crew to fall off of the Earth and into Hell." And here is the thing: The educated people at the time in Europe no longer believed the earth was flat. Plus the entire chapter barely dealt with vampires and all these bloodlines supposedly having an impact on these events or being influenced by them barely feature in this book. At best they are shortly mentioned.
In the chapter on Thailand the writing style suddenly changed, from third to first person perspective, and afterwards reverted to its original style. Furthermore they are strongly implying that Dracula was a scholar of the founder of these Buddhist monk vampires and while, I get that this Buddhist vampire order is important in Thailand, which seems to be it. "Flashpoints in history" was apparently pretty liberal of a definition since the order doesn't seem to have spread past Thailand.
However as if this weirdness wasn't enough, these morons wrote a pretty bad translation into German here and I really don't get how anyone could have made such a stupid mistake. The covenant called the "Invictus" was translated as "Die Unbesiegt" even though the correct spelling would need the syllable "-en" at the end of the word; they even spelled it wrong several rimes. But this was nothing in comparison to the translation for "the Holy Night Empire" which they translated as "Das Heiligen Nacht Reich" even though it should be spelled "das Heilige Nachtreich" and even that is a rather vulgar sounding translation, a probably more fitting one would be "Das Heilige Reich der Nacht." And it's not as if they always made such mistakes, the terms "Nachtkaiser" and "Kurfürst" (even though this one was falsely defined) were spelled correctly. Apart from the terrible "German" names that they used this chapter was probably the best up to that point, even though I would have liked to read about Viking vampires that can meld into their longboats. I guess the reason is the same as with the chapter on Egypt and Babylon, it's mostly made up and history only rarely referenced, so it cannot be messed up as easily and you can concentrate more on the ideas for a completely fictional setting. Sure Babylon as a vampire infested city is not exactly original but it works and they did include the topic of the Edimmu (spirits that were created or summoned to hunt and destroy vampires). However why would they call themselves Dammed when some even pose as minor gods?
The last chapter on the vampire cults of Ancient Egypt before and during the reign of Ramses the Great is ok. I mean vampires more or less running Ancient Egypt has become quite a cliché by now, together with the whole "secret knowledge" thing.
In the end I can safely say that while this book did have some good ideas, I overall did not like it and think it's badly planned, has hiccups in spelling and art and is for the most part not interesting. Unlike its companion book "Ancient Bloodlines" this here felt pretty much like a waste of time for me.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review