My guess is that most Storytellers will be somewhere in between, building out the NPCs presented, but not putting in the significant time that would be required to create an expanded cast of vampires to more fully cover things in the city (Fall of London is not a substitute for ‘London by Night’). There’s also material built in to the chronicle that the ST can use to expand things, letting the characters get to know modern London a bit more (the chronicle as written mostly seems to presume that vampires from the 1940s will not have much difficulty operating in modern days almost immediately after waking up). It’s certainly possible for a ST to run a ‘lean’ Fall of London chronicle, going from one relic to the next over a couple of in-game weeks, with minimal interaction with non-essential NPCs. Whether a particular group’s iteration of Fall of London will stick to just that quest for relics will depend on the Storyteller. I can see some Vampire players not loving the ‘fetch quest’ aspect of the chronicle, but, frankly, there always has to be some level of what some will label as ‘railroading’ to make any published chronicle work, and starting off by giving the characters concrete goals is about as subtle a way of doing it as there is. They have freedom in how they’re going to ‘deal with’ them, but there is enough structure for the chronicle to actually work (yes, it’s possible for the characters to just leave London at the first chance, but that really just means there are bad players in the group who don’t understand that one of their jobs is to make interesting choices). Fall of London handles this issue by coming up with circumstances where the characters almost certainly will take certain general courses of action – they have to find four ancient artifacts, there are four specific vampires who have those artifacts, and the characters are going to have to go deal with those vampires in order to complete their mission. A Vampire writer usually doesn’t have that luxury, but a lot of early chronicle books just assumed that the characters were going to decide to do exactly what the chronicle needed them to do, in exactly the way the chronicle needed them to do it – even if such a course of action was highly unlikely. This is fairly easy for something like Dungeons & Dragons – it really is overwhelmingly likely that, when presented with an assignment to go help those people or explore that area, the PCs will just go do it, and fight anything hostile. Writing an adventure/chronicle almost inherently requires some assumptions about what the characters are going to do, or it gets blown up. Vampire is a game that tends to have story that’s a lot more fluid. Historically, a lot of Vampire chronicle books have been a bit shaky, because they’re hard to get right. The Second Inquisition is around and is a problem for the vampires in the chronicle, but the chronicle is very much focused on Mithras. Fall of London is set in 2012, and the pitch for the chronicle also talks about how the story will explore the events that led to the fall. In canon, London today is a wasteland for vampires, the Second Inquisition having mostly wiped them out. Fall of London is the first chronicle book for the fifth edition of Vampire: the Masquerade. Because Fall of London is a chronicle book that is primarily for storytellers, most of this review is going to be below the ‘spoiler bar.’ But the basics here up top are aimed at players and will not include story spoilers beyond the sort of high-level concepts you might see on the back of the book.įall of London is about a coterie of vampires who were recently awakened from torpor for the purpose of obtaining several mystical relics for Mithras, the millennia-old vampire who once ruled Britain (and hopes to do so again, of course).
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