Authors: Darcy Ann Anastasia, Carl Bowen, Rick Chillot, Ray Fawkes, Ian Price and Chuck Wendig
Release Date: 2005-04-28
On Sale: Yes
Price: 26.99
ISBN: 1-58846-256-0
Product Type: Splat Book
Product Style: Hardcover
Page Count: 144
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Review by: Charles Phipps
Rating: 5/10
So, just so we're clear. Ghouls are utter freaks.
The opening fiction summarizes it pretty well. Ghouls are messed up, arguably more than the Kindred they serve. Junkies for blood, suffering all those human needs for various types of stimulus, possessed of the Beast, and living with creatures that dine on the living. Ghouls are all a little bit round the bend. Frankly, your mileage may vary on this book since it's a very specific type of horror that they try to invoke. Anne Rice is less emphasized than House of 1000 Corpses.
Vampire: The Masquerade's Ghouls: Fatal Addiction was towards the end of Revised and it's fairly close to what White Wolf was going for when they created Requiem. Ghouls had been a long neglected portion of the game and the book went all out in describing what a miserable and loathsome state it was. Vampire: The Requiem's Ghouls is very similar in a number of ways. Most of the information is identical. Thus, before we go any further, if you already own Ghouls: Fatal Addiction then this book won't add very much. The Thralls' adaptation to the New World of Darkness is almost seamless. Almost.
If there's one thing that bugs me about this depiction, it’s the fact that its significantly more hardcore than it really has to be. Requiem Kindred tend to be creatures that are a lot more subtle than the 'tear into humans like a rotten banana in a blender' Cainites. This book repeatedly drives home that ghouls are mostly psychotic nutcases, irregardless of whether their Kindred abuses them or not. The very act of being servant to a blood sucking horror, their hidden knowledge about the world, the act of drinking blood, the stresses of night to night life, and their reaction to the Vinculum is enough to drive them insane (Author's note: I wish they'd just kept calling it the Blood Bond, Vinculum always makes me think of the old use of the term).
The descriptions of ghoul psychology are a bit out there but basically boil down to human beings need to cope with the craziness of their life in whatever way makes sense. A couple of new things that I liked were the fact that it acknowledges that ghouls need sleep. Serving masters in the day and then expected to do the same at night is one of the major contributing factors to their insanity. The whole scatter brained nature of ghouls is partially because they never get to rest. Plus, its nice to see an acknowledgment of the fact that ghouls actually have each other as a social circle. Did you ever imagine the Mekhet's ghoul might go out drinking with the local Ventrue ghouls? No, I never did and their vampires probably have no idea either.
The Clans section of Ghouls doesn't bring much that couldn't be figured out on one's own. The Gangrel choose independent loners, the Ventrue choose servile types, the Mekhet choose exactly the same type of people the Tremere chose, the Daeva choose people they can vicariously live through until they're degenerate burnouts, and the Nosferatu choose people that can handle their social business. Wow, that really took a lot of effort on the part of the authors *sarcasm*. There's no Bloodline information amongst these descriptions and its unlikely they would have been more than stereotypes, either.
The Covenants section is a bit more interesting. The Carthians are troubled by the fact they preach of equality and reformation to Kindred society yet they need their slaves just like everyone else. Thus, they struggle between giving them too much freedom and not enough. The Invictus act like Ventrue, you obey like a dog in exchange for immortality. Weirdly, that's the second nicest Covenant you can serve. The Circle of the Crone seems to delight in screwing over their human cultists. They lure them in with promises of hidden knowledge, drive them crazy with blood rites, then abandon them when they're of no more use. The Lancea Sanctum, true to its Sabbat roots, has the view that ghouls are human beings and thus deserve all the scorn that a Kindred might give them.
Weirdly, out of the Covenants, it’s the Ordo Dracul that comes off as the most humane to their ghouls. Which is odd since the description of their lifestyle is based on the Old Clan Tzimisce. The Ordo Dracul treats their ghouls as servants and beneath their notice but don't sexually or mentally abuse them. At least on purpose. The ghouls do enough of that on their own to each other. Also nicely done is the fact that a frequent aspect of my own campaigns, mentoring ghouls for the Embrace, is included as an act of the Order. There's an interesting inverse of V:TM's themes with V:TR as the least human groups seem to be the ones that are the least malevolent versus the opposite in the previous game.
Ghoul Physiology talks about what disciplines its difficult and easy to learn. Mostly, ghouls have a very hard time learning disciplines because their bodies aren't made for it. There's some hint about how ghouls can use these abilities to benefit themselves but not nearly enough. Still, some of the comments echoed those of my players. Why would a ghoul want to learn Nightmare? Becoming ungodly hideous does not rank very high in character's fantasies.
Ghoul Families are given their own section. I don't think I need to mention its still the depiction of them as the freaks amongst the freaks. This makes less sense than it did in V:TM because the Tzimisce are no longer the only family that can create Ghoul Families. Instead, any Kindred that does the Blade thing to get a woman pregnant while she's a ghoul is enough to potentially create a new ghoul family. It's just 99/100 that its a miscarriage. In one of the few kind things I have to say about the book, its nice to see them tone down the incest angle. Not everyone is immediately hoping their daughters or siblings. The ghouls need to breed within their line due to decreased fertility with regular humans and the difficulties of interacting with regular humans.
The example ghoul families are fairly typical H.P. Lovecraft 'evil families' for the most part. The Alley Men are a bunch of homeless and fundamentalists that hunt vampires for their vitae since their patron was killed. They're also cannibals. The Angustri break all sorts of laws of good taste by being products of the Nazi Final Solution. The Crassus are actually tolerable as a Ventrue bloodline of the world's finest families. The Gravenor were the villains in Deliverance. The fact that a single vampire can create a ghoul family is something that changes a lot of the feel of ghoul families but they're all straight out of Dunwich, it seems. The exception of the Children of Nirriti, a big huge blood cult that will satisfy your inner Follower of Set.
Ghoul Psychology is another part that seemed like it could have been done better. Basically, it keeps drilling home that it’s the Vinculum and the addiction to vitae that drives a ghoul. This makes sense but it makes them terribly one note. With a vampire, he's driven by Blood and the Beast but that doesn't mean he's a creature that has nothing else in his life. It's just two of the most important things here. I would have felt some variance in the depiction would have helped. More about ghouls that want to become vampires themselves or whom somehow have high enough wills to work with their masters as equals. There were a nice few bits here and there but they seemed overshadowed.
One thing that really bugs me in this book is the blatant V:TM creation of Mandragora. It's something that's a leftover from the Old World of Darkness that has no place with the more low-key Kindred of Requiem. It's cannibalistic vampire plants. Yes, your Kindred too can have Audrey Junior growing in his haven for disposing of the inconvenient body or two. Now, I too have occasionally wondered what the effect of vampire blood on plants would be but this is something out of the developer's private stash of wacky weed.
The book also gives a bunch of sample pathetic wretches and the rules for player characters creating their own ghoul families. The first worked very well in showing ghouls with personality beyond their addiction, more so than the entire rest of the book. The rules for creating ghoul families makes it certainly possible for Kindred player characters. However, the deed is a Humanity sucking activity and one that reaps the dubious reward of creating a degenerate family of slaves that they won't benefit from save in a generational game.
The big problem with Ghouls is the fact that this book is primarily geared towards Storytellers. Unless every Kindred in their campaign is a Humanity 3 or 2 utter monster, I don't they're going to be that interested in treating ghouls in the way that most of these are described as enduring. The books seems to reflect the perspective that the old Werewolf supplements had on Formori. Utterly irredeemable wastes of humanity that have been eaten away by the Wyrm. While that might fly with the Old V:TM Cainites, the Requiem Kindred are much more bound by their humanities. Can I imagine players treating their ghouls like disposable henchmen and furniture? Hell yes, I've seen it in game. Do I see them ghouling their parents then having sex with them? Not so much (Author's note: Yes, that was in this book).
Overall, the book depends on shock value over substance. There's no real information about player characters relationships with ghouls or why they might choose to create one. Given the disgusting depiction here, you think the book's purpose would be to convince Player Characters to use Dominate instead. Taking away a subject's free will by mesmerism seems positively tame by comparison. Plus, there's less information in this book about Ghoul consorts than there was in Fatal Addiction. This, despite the fact that Vampires can have sex and enjoy it in Requiem. I can't say I'm not disappointed in this book even if it was, barely, worth the cover price.
5 Blood Drops out of Ten
