Constantinople by Night

Vampire: The Dark Ages

Reviewed by: Jon Rowe


Constantinople by Night Vampire: The Dark Ages
White Wolf Game Studios
126 pp. £ 10.99

Apart from the predictable cover art (vampire posing, de rigeur, on moonlit rooftop with the Hagia Sophia looming in the background), this first sourcebook for Vampire the Dark Ages is full of pleasant surprises. For starters, it's a city sourcebook for Constantinople I mean . . . Constantinople! Alongside Rome, absolutely central to any medieval chronicle - but who knows the first thing about the Eastern Empire? Shows how parochial my history education was, I guess.

So I settle down for a long hard read with a lot of eye-scrambling Greek names but, lo!, the book reads like a dream, putting campaign atmosphere and a sense of the city's texture way before dry lists of assassinated emperors and grain riots.

And what a city! The campaign date (1197 AD) sees Constantinople still basking in decadent glory, but poised on the edge of ruin, rife with historical irony for the cognoscenti but chocked with intrigue and skulduggery for the rest of us. Maps (yes!!! a White Wolf book with a MAP in it!) are clear and the city is broken into regions with a tourist-guide style tour of the important political, mystical or artistic sights. The vampiric perspective comes through the sidepanels, offering biographies of principal NPCs and first-hand accounts of empireshaking events.

So, the vampires. Here again Constantinople delights, particularly if you're fed up with the Prince-and-his-Primogen shtick which has been done to death in the Masquerade era. The Cainites of the Dark Ages are religious for one thing and motivated by fairly abstract visions of "their" Constantinople as a Heaven on Earth. The vampires live in the shadow of the so-called Trinity. Ancients established the city with high ideals and sanctioned dutybound bloodlines to make their dreams come true. Now the founders are diablerized, vanished or, in the case of the mightiest Methuselah, in torpor and the floundering families of Cainites are contending with the rise of the apocalyptic sects which are going to dominate the next looo years of vampiric history.

Everything here cracks along with imagination and no small scholarship and, mercifully, each faction and major NPC is described with a set of "hooks" explaining how PCs might be drawn into their conflicts.

Overall: Exemplary. Well-written campaign setting and a rare accomplishement-sense of period. Those NPCs don't think like moderns, having a distinctly medieval outlook. Top marks for this one.

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