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World of Darkness
World of Darkness: Blood-Dimmed Tides
Blood-Dimmed Tides (A World of Darkness Sourcebook)
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 22, 1999
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July 18, 2018
Blood-Dimmed Tides is one of those World of Darkness books I've wanted to read for a while, ever since I saw it on the shelves at Borders, flipped through it for a bit, but couldn't justify paying for it. The sea has plenty of opportunity for horror. It's poorly explored--we've known about giant squid for centuries, but didn't get images of them in the wild until less than a decade ago--it's isolating, it's as hostile to us as deep space in its own way, and unlike outer space it's filled with life that is alien to most land-bound life. All of those together form an excellent basis for a horror story, so how does that convert to the World of Darkness?
Well in some ways, poorly in other ways. The book covers the five gamelines and a few extras all in 128 pages, and some concepts are less well fleshed out than others, partially because they're less-well-suited to the kind of games that take place on or under the sea in the first place. For example, Mage: the Ascension is well-represented, mostly through the Technocracy and the Void Engineers, whose talent and drive for exploring is well known. Here they even have an experimental arcology on the ocean floor, "Project Deepwater," that's testing itself out with the goal of rolling out underwater arcologies to the masses by 2010 or so. Note that they brought in outside contractors on this project...and those contractors are subsidiaries of Pentex, with the appropriate consequences. That provides another possible avenue for the game other than exploring mysterious undersea caves that open onto the Deep Umbra--dealing with treachery at home because half of your coworkers knowingly or unknowingly serve the Wyrm.
For Vampire: the Masquerade, the sea serves less well. Vampires are defined by their requirement for blood, which means that isolation and mystery of the sea is by itself a danger. Without humans around to provide life-giving vitae, vampires have no reason to go to sea at all. The book provides two examples of ways to mitigate this, one of which works okay and one of which is kind of silly. The okay one are Lasomba pirates, who feel the call of the sea in their blood, possibly because of a connection between the Abyss called on by Obtenebration and the utter blackness of the fathomless depths, who prey (literally and figuratively) on shipping worldwide and conduct a war against their antitribu counterparts. That kind of game sounds like fun, in a "pirates + vampires = heavy metal" kind of way.
The silly one are the Mariners, aquatic vampires (primarily Gangrel) who live under the sea and eat fish. Or sharks, or whales. Or occasionally surface and attack ships or coastal communities. It's a horror scenario, sure, but I can't imagine getting much that's gameable out of being a solitary predator who hunts down whales and never talks to anyone.
The Changeling section offers up entirely new kiths who live underwater, the murdhuacha and the merfolk, the first of which are hideous monsters based on squid and lobsters and so on, and the second of which are the sirens who lured sailors to their doom. They live in ruins of human ships or in fabulous underwater coral cities, except not much anymore because human exploration of the ocean is killing them because Banality is cancer and if they suffer chimerical death they implode due to pressure or drown. You might think that the Void Engineers aren't banal at all because the wonder of the vasty deep fills their souls as they gaze at the unexplored horizons, but you'd be wrong because scientists are banal because of bad memories of math class or something. Banality has never made sense in any Changeling book ever written, and that's more of a problem here than usual because the only reason the mer are coming to the surface at all is because of Banality killing them.
Also, they don't need humans for Glamour because they get it from living freeholds called Rorqual, who are also living caerns and living nodes. The undersea is surprisingly collegial between different World of Darkness factions.
I'm less familiar with the other Wraith or Werewolf setting suggestions. Wraith is mostly about ghost pirates doing ghost pirate things in either the Shadowlands or the living world, which sounds like a fun game in the same way that Lasombra pirates are fun, and werewolves are hampered by the Rokea, who are doing just fine under the waves, are much better adapted to live there than Garou are, and aren't particularly interested in Garou coming down and ruining everything they way they're doing above the waves. There's something stirring in the Arctic under the ice...but this makes me think the designers got the Arctic and Antarctic confused. "Under the Arctic ice" is just the ocean--it's less than 10 meters thick in most places. Surely the Rokea could just swim under it and check? And indeed, in later books I remember stories of something stirring in Antarctica, which makes a lot more sense.
The book ends with the introduction of another weird supernatural mutation virus creating a group of beings called Chulorviah, which affects cephalopods, humans, and no one else. It mutates humans, making them more and more aquatic, until like Deep Ones they must take to the water and descend to the depths, pursuing their inscrutable goals. And I mean that literally--the book gives no hint what the Chulorviah actually want, making it somewhat difficult to use them in a game in anything other than a monster-of-the-week fashion. And as far as I know they don't really show up in other books later on, making them an interesting concept that's nothing more than a skeleton.
Which is a good summary of Blood-Dimmed Tides as a whole, really. It tries hard to be inclusive, but some concepts just don't lend themselves very well to nautical games, and definitely not to submarine ones. It would have been a stronger book if it had spent more time on the hooks that worked and less time on the hooks it had to include because it was trying to cover everything, and while there are good ideas here, there's a lot that falls flat. I'd only recommend it to people who are determined to run World of Darkness games at sea, and even then, know that a lot of what's in here won't be that useful.
Well in some ways, poorly in other ways. The book covers the five gamelines and a few extras all in 128 pages, and some concepts are less well fleshed out than others, partially because they're less-well-suited to the kind of games that take place on or under the sea in the first place. For example, Mage: the Ascension is well-represented, mostly through the Technocracy and the Void Engineers, whose talent and drive for exploring is well known. Here they even have an experimental arcology on the ocean floor, "Project Deepwater," that's testing itself out with the goal of rolling out underwater arcologies to the masses by 2010 or so. Note that they brought in outside contractors on this project...and those contractors are subsidiaries of Pentex, with the appropriate consequences. That provides another possible avenue for the game other than exploring mysterious undersea caves that open onto the Deep Umbra--dealing with treachery at home because half of your coworkers knowingly or unknowingly serve the Wyrm.
For Vampire: the Masquerade, the sea serves less well. Vampires are defined by their requirement for blood, which means that isolation and mystery of the sea is by itself a danger. Without humans around to provide life-giving vitae, vampires have no reason to go to sea at all. The book provides two examples of ways to mitigate this, one of which works okay and one of which is kind of silly. The okay one are Lasomba pirates, who feel the call of the sea in their blood, possibly because of a connection between the Abyss called on by Obtenebration and the utter blackness of the fathomless depths, who prey (literally and figuratively) on shipping worldwide and conduct a war against their antitribu counterparts. That kind of game sounds like fun, in a "pirates + vampires = heavy metal" kind of way.
The silly one are the Mariners, aquatic vampires (primarily Gangrel) who live under the sea and eat fish. Or sharks, or whales. Or occasionally surface and attack ships or coastal communities. It's a horror scenario, sure, but I can't imagine getting much that's gameable out of being a solitary predator who hunts down whales and never talks to anyone.
The Changeling section offers up entirely new kiths who live underwater, the murdhuacha and the merfolk, the first of which are hideous monsters based on squid and lobsters and so on, and the second of which are the sirens who lured sailors to their doom. They live in ruins of human ships or in fabulous underwater coral cities, except not much anymore because human exploration of the ocean is killing them because Banality is cancer and if they suffer chimerical death they implode due to pressure or drown. You might think that the Void Engineers aren't banal at all because the wonder of the vasty deep fills their souls as they gaze at the unexplored horizons, but you'd be wrong because scientists are banal because of bad memories of math class or something. Banality has never made sense in any Changeling book ever written, and that's more of a problem here than usual because the only reason the mer are coming to the surface at all is because of Banality killing them.
Also, they don't need humans for Glamour because they get it from living freeholds called Rorqual, who are also living caerns and living nodes. The undersea is surprisingly collegial between different World of Darkness factions.
I'm less familiar with the other Wraith or Werewolf setting suggestions. Wraith is mostly about ghost pirates doing ghost pirate things in either the Shadowlands or the living world, which sounds like a fun game in the same way that Lasombra pirates are fun, and werewolves are hampered by the Rokea, who are doing just fine under the waves, are much better adapted to live there than Garou are, and aren't particularly interested in Garou coming down and ruining everything they way they're doing above the waves. There's something stirring in the Arctic under the ice...but this makes me think the designers got the Arctic and Antarctic confused. "Under the Arctic ice" is just the ocean--it's less than 10 meters thick in most places. Surely the Rokea could just swim under it and check? And indeed, in later books I remember stories of something stirring in Antarctica, which makes a lot more sense.
The book ends with the introduction of another weird supernatural mutation virus creating a group of beings called Chulorviah, which affects cephalopods, humans, and no one else. It mutates humans, making them more and more aquatic, until like Deep Ones they must take to the water and descend to the depths, pursuing their inscrutable goals. And I mean that literally--the book gives no hint what the Chulorviah actually want, making it somewhat difficult to use them in a game in anything other than a monster-of-the-week fashion. And as far as I know they don't really show up in other books later on, making them an interesting concept that's nothing more than a skeleton.
Which is a good summary of Blood-Dimmed Tides as a whole, really. It tries hard to be inclusive, but some concepts just don't lend themselves very well to nautical games, and definitely not to submarine ones. It would have been a stronger book if it had spent more time on the hooks that worked and less time on the hooks it had to include because it was trying to cover everything, and while there are good ideas here, there's a lot that falls flat. I'd only recommend it to people who are determined to run World of Darkness games at sea, and even then, know that a lot of what's in here won't be that useful.
May 10, 2018
Pretty good for an omniversal splat. This one details, as may be obvious, the oceans and their contents. There's a great deal of information here for Changeling and Wraith games, while the other CWoD games take distinctly secondary positions. (Werewolf Storytellers who don't wish to cross-pollinate from other games may wish to stick with Rokea: Changing Breed Book 8 and other, Wyrm-related supplements.) There are plot hooks and story/chronicle hooks provided for all represented games, as well as supplemental rules including combat, swimming, and new Merits/Flaws. It also presents a new (to me, at least) threat in the form of Chulorviosis. Lovecraft fans might enjoy that one.
Properties not at all represented, for either publication date or irrelevance reasons are: Mummy, Demon. I would also argue that Hunter as a property is absent, but Hunters are mentioned in passing as they related to other games, such as Vampire.
All in all, pretty solid as far as environmental expansions go. Probably not something you want to get if you're new to WoD. Stick with the land for now; the horrors of the depths are more than patient enough for you to come to them.
Properties not at all represented, for either publication date or irrelevance reasons are: Mummy, Demon. I would also argue that Hunter as a property is absent, but Hunters are mentioned in passing as they related to other games, such as Vampire.
All in all, pretty solid as far as environmental expansions go. Probably not something you want to get if you're new to WoD. Stick with the land for now; the horrors of the depths are more than patient enough for you to come to them.
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