The Crimson Gutter review

    THE CRIMSON GUTTER is an interesting book and one that I am willing to give props to Renegade for creating even though I have my issues with it. Basically, The Crimson Gutter is a "By Night" city book without an actual city applied to it. It is a generic city book with a bunch of NPCs, locations, and plot hooks that can be applied to virtually any urban area. I've had that idea percolating in my brain for decades but always thought it had significant downsides. Does this game book overcome them?

    Not really. The Crimson Gutters is probably one of my favorite non-OPP Fifth Edition supplements after Blood Sigils but it's probably a three star, three star and a half book as my highest praise. The NPCs it creates for it's "Anytown, USA" are pretty generic. There's one who wants to be a Camarilla bigshot, a hypocritical Anarch, and a guy who just wants to use his second chance to be extremely rich. Yeah, those kinds of people. Inexplicably, they also don't provide a Prince, Baron, or Sheriff for the city.

    Ironically, the NPCs are the least interesting part of the book even though they're all fine. No, the biggest appeal of the game is that it is one of the rare WOD books that actually focuses on down and dirty street level gaming. The book presents the kind of adventures you must have when you are not going to be saving the world from Ur-Shulgi, Caine, or even likely to encounter the Sabbat.

    These aren't adventures that are particularly deep: one of them is a multi-chapter investigation of tracking down who is a local Kindred that has become a wight and then destroying him. Other adventures are figuring out who murdered a Church of Caine deacon, throwing a party for a visiting Archon, and impressing the various factions in the city enough to make them accept you as a member. It's the kind of low stakes gaming that works perfectly for the setting and we rarely get represented in the books.

    I like that the book also raises the Church of Caine to the level of the other two sects. I admit this is mostly because I like the Church of Caine as the Sabbat-lite and representing all of their intellectual religious side divorced from the ultraviolence. Also, able to have conversations with the other two sects. However, it also kind of falls into the trap that, "If it was just back to the old ways, it'd be better." Still, the Church of Caine really was the best idea of Cults of the Blood Gods and I have no issue with its prominence in non-OPP work (take from the best).

    A nice bit is also the game actually provides some scenarios and scenes based around feeding. With all the attention V5 pays to feeding as a super important part of Kindred RPGing, this is one of the few books to actually provide interesting scenarios for Baggers, Alley Cats, Osirises, and so on. It also gives a lot of ideas for how to gain and lose domain in a city.

    Still, I feel like the book suffers from the fact that it is somewhat bloated describing fairly straight forward scenarios with twenty words when five would be fine. The NPCs are also slotted into the story when we don't really give them the kind of personalities that would make them stand out. I will give the writers credit for one thing, though: the NPCs have new sections where they list how the NPCs would be as the PC's sires and also what it would take to get the NPC to betray the PCs--which is perfect for vampire.

    So I rate it...okay.

    It is the unfortunate fact that I think Fifth Edition's design philosophy will never reach what it did under OPP. This is a matter of preference in that they were massive lore nerds the same as me (and still are for their own stuff) while these books seem deliberately designed to avoid lore as much as possible. Still, I've always felt that the gritty street level of 1st Edition was the best place for Vampire and I think OPP agreed since that was how they designed Requiem (and I may be giving them a bit too much credit here--though they deserve a lot--since that was always Requiem's thing). But if you have to pick up a supplement, I'd say Damnation City is probably a better choice for the same topic.

Available here