I really don't understand the disdain some people seem to have with this book. It is clean, well organized, beautiful, and fun. It is almost 500 pages, just shy of the page count of the V20 Core Book and it has all of the info you could want to run a V20 Dark Ages game. All the rules, all the clans, perfectly archived and ready to go.

To me, this book fell flat. Yes, it is nice to have most everything you need to run a game set in the century at your fingertips, but I suppose my big complaint is I wanted a 20th anniversary of Dark Ages: Vampire; not Vampire: the Dark Ages. Beyond that, the artwork is good, the chapters are nicely organized, and the index is a vast improvement from White Wolf material. The inclusion of the Salubri Sentinels was a great bonus, and mechanics for dirtier, more primitive versions of the Cainite sorceries was nice too. I backed the project on Kickstarter, so I got to see the evolution of the pdf from a draft to a finished product. My quibbles with the product are all vastly personal opinion, as I hinted at in the first paragraph. If you like romantic historical fiction, are a fan of vampires, or an experienced V:tDA, I recommend this book.

The book is somewhat eye pleasing, but unfortunately it's one of the worst Vampire book to date. They tried to cram every rule and power into the book, and they both miss the whole point of a Vampire corebook and fail at their objective. Fundamentally I don't think it's possible to play the Dark Ages of Vampire's World of Darkness with only this book: there is by far not enough information on the medieval setting and how the Vampire interact with it.

You'll need a few very good history books to dive into the Middle Age and have things like descriptions, mentalities, how things work and why. As for the Cainite side of things you can either dig in old sourcebooks like the Player's Guides to Clans (but a lot of things have been changed in VDA20, good luck to tie it all neatly) or do the work yourself.

And as for their objective of cramming a lot of bling into one book, the result is shady at best:

• A lot of typos.
• There's a lot of copy&paste directly from old book. Like Hunting for blood says you might use the Streetwise ability, only there is no Streetwise in this edition.
• There's new abilities, some borderline supernatural, but no explanation whatsoever as to what they do exactly and how to handle them.
• Powers were modified left and right, and failed. Like they wanted to reduce Vitreous path power, but the actual writing made it more powerful.
• New takes on Discipline change things “just because”. Sometimes with good ideas, but not enough words to explain it and poor editing; like the new koldunic magic that per the rules do not have access to rituals anymore even if it wasn't the actual idea of its writer.
• No playtest or thinking through rules. Like for example putting on heavy armor will render you motionless unless you have Olympic level agility.
• New take on clans and lineage that goes against canon and previously published material. Like the new Nictuku that goes against everything published in the last 20 years and remove one of the central theme of the Nosferatu, or the numerous changes of the Salubri that created some uproar in the community.

And so on. And the worst is the backers sent truckloads of errata during the book's development, but a very sizable portion of it was ignored and later on flatly refused to be corrected by developers because of “lack of time and especially money”.

To me, not a decent book at all. I would advise to keep using old books to play the great setting of Vampire Dark Ages, and if you have money in your pocket buy a good old sourcebook you don't have yet, or good history books. Those would be much more useful to your gaming table than this one.

This book is extremely flavorful and thematic. It has some of the most evocative writing I have ever had the pleasure of enjoying in any roleplaying book. The explanation of the endless cycle of the hunt for blood is superb and really drives home what it might feel like to be a vampire in the Dark Ages. This historical portions are well researched, and where they deviate from history they follow a pattern which makes sense.

Unfortunately the mechanics are scattered at best. The Disciplines are inconsistent in the extreme, particularly the three Physical Disciplines which are not remotely comparable in terms of power level or ease of use. The multiple-actions system is confusing and probably would have been better left out, though I can understand the desire to make Celerity not a must-have for any type of character who wants to win a fight.

These shortcomings do not come close to the fantastic quality overall of the book, however, and I can still strongly recommend this to anyone with an interest in dark fantasy or the World of Darkness in general.

This book is everything that I wished for when it was announced by Onyx Path Publishing, and that is to say it is a proper new edition of a beloved classic! For the PDF, the price-per-page is a steal, and the quality of the contents quite makes that price almost embarrassingly low. That's all you NEED to know, but there's more I'll tell...

First, know that I've played Vampire since Second Edition came out in '92 (I was too much of a 'vampire snob' to even look at the First Edition... thanks Anne Rice!), and when Vampire: the Masquerade Twentieth Anniversary Edition was announced, I jumped on the opportunity to support it. The result was lovely, but in comparison to later Twentieth Anniversary releases (e.g. for Werewolf: the Apocalypse and the as-yet-to-be widely available Mage: the Ascension), the V20 wound up looking less like a 'new' edition than a polished omnibus collection with gorgeous new art. I do so love that book, no doubt, but V20 does not QUITE live up to what it could have been as a new edition.

Now we have V20 Dark Ages, and THIS book takes what started in V20 to create something both familiar and brand new. The whole experience of the Dark Medieval (a/k/a classic World of Darkness circa AD 1200-1300) comes across in vivid (un)living detail, and the overall LOOK is quite wonderfully vitalised with full-colour borders, art, and Clan heraldry. Rules have been added and revised for Disciplines and schools of blood magic (oh yes, the Koldunic Sorcery and Thaumaturgy rules ARE fantastic!), and new Bloodlines appear with some wider view of the Dark Medieval beyond western Europe. Additional information on the Roads of morality and antagonists handily round out the rules. For all of this, though, the CORE of what I adore about Vampire remains: the ability to take what's here and make it your own.

...It seems like a small thing, that so-called 'Golden Rule' that White Wolf introduced in Mark Rein•Hagen's first Vampire core book in 1991, but the idea that all of these rules are here as a guide, for you to interpret or disregard to change as you will, it suffuses this V20 Dark Ages book. Indeed, the chapter on Storytelling is far more of a love letter to the entire hobby of roleplaying games than dry directions on what to do. Yes, there are a LOT of directions, but what David A. Hill, Jr (Developer) and crew have created here is less a book of rules than an ideal jumping-off point for your games, for your world (of medieval darkness).

I could list all of the things that I do NOT love about this book (and yeah, there's plenty), but in light of the above, that's not necessary. What is here is all quite lovely, and even the parts that are not perfect are easily dismissed or changed. Even if you're only looking for the bits you remember from the first Vampire: the Dark Ages, you ought to enjoy this title enough to make it worth your while.