Though the material is expansive and has promise, what is frankly poor presentation makes it an unpleasant read and currently unsuited as a product in my opinion. The writing, often one of the main selling points of the WOD universe, feels coarse and rough in many places. As if someone did a first pass to translate a lot of it, but never went back to finish the job. Furthermore, the book is filled with odd syntax, spelling errors, mistranslations (sometimes comically so, substituting "The Hug" for "The Embrace") and here and there entire paragraphs stay untranslated (Page 57, Ravnos for instance). In one or two places entire pages are missing. It feels very much like paying full price for a product that is still in Alpha or early Beta.

Furthermore, the PDF does not come pre-bookmarked, the content table does not provide a hyperlink structure and there is no index. This makes the book fairly useless as a sourcebook during play.

The content of the book, once you get past the poor writing, is actually quite competent. There's a lot of information, rituals, disciplines and clans. There's good basic information on Roman life and a few interesting hooks to run a game set in the period. The artwork is high quality and would make the book quite enjoyable, if not for the aforementioned problems. It's this potential that keeps me from entirely hating it. I do feel that making the entire vampire mythos Christian based in a setting where Christianity is far from the mainstream was a missed chance to explore the world of Vampire and the conflict of monotheism and polytheism, but I can understand not entirely wanting to rewrite an entire existing lore system.

TLDR: The book has promise, but don't buy it at full price before it's finished.

Edit: Having downloaded the book again after a series of months, I am still finding that the translation is not up to standard and that pages are still missing. The publisher seems unwilling to deliver a finished product. I have therefore downgraded my already low score.

«Vampire» in a Roman Empire in Nero’s time always sounded like a good idea. As for me, this is a very interesting era with a lot of topics for disclosure. Unfortunately, apparently the book's editing was just horrible. It's almost painful to read because of the many mistakes. This is quite annoying and does not allow me to fully immerse myself in a given topic. So the book, unfortunately, is a deplorable example of a good idea completely ruined by an extremely poor implementation.

First of all I love the IDEA of the setting. This book contains a bunch of good information. I was hoping this would shed some light on the time period. If you can get past the translation it is well worth having. Ive spent time just rewritinig parts of this book. The author of this book obviously put a ton of blood, sweat, and tears into this. It is an amazing work and can help you establish this time period as a setting in your home games.

First off, going in... there's no denying it, the english translation is pretty rough. It's understandable, but native english speakers will struggle a little bit at times to read it. Additionally, it wasn't a developer in the lore that wrote it, so some of the finer details are hit or miss on lore specificity. They are, in broad strokes, very faithful to the lore, and they should be commended for that, but there are a few places that are inaccurate, but nothign major. However, its to make the story more cohesive as a whole. Now, onto the good things.

It's well put together and has an amazing visual style. The writer knew precisely what they were doing. Mechanically, things make sense, and barring the rough translation, it could very well be an official product. He has some excellent ideas in there, and its clear a ton went into it, and it is a remarkable passion project. It provides an excellent foundation to properly immerse yourself in the time period, and gives Storytellers a much easier time. Moreso, he has made a lot for the time period. The time frame its set in, feels lived in, and like the Cainites actually care, and in connecting themselves to Rome, they are also shaped by it. While not a masterpiece (I'd argue very few books are), it is still an excellent product, I do not regret buying their supplements in the slightest, and its the main thing that inspired me to write a chronicle set in the time period. It fleshes out one of the more 'barren' time periods of the setting, and alongside the parallels with

Yes, if you're a native english speaker, it can feel a bit wonky at times, but it's also a 419 page pdf in a time period with very little canon lore. It was well worth the purchase, in my opinion, if you want to run a gane during the classical period.

I'll start with the positive: this is a very interesting book as far as lore and world-building is concerned. I especially love the concept of applying various philosophies from Antiquity to vampire characters, great idea.

However, the poor quality of the writing (in terms of narrative tone, grammar, and typos) is very surprising for a White Wolf product. It really detracts (and distracts) from the material, which at times reads like the first draft of a translation into English and/or like a high school history essay.

Here's a short sample from the introduction to illustrate my point: "Before the Dark Ages, humanity went through a period called the Classical Era. The Classic Era was a period known to mankind when we evolved in many ways […] As a society, we developed architecture in many ways, featuring the well-known Ionic, Doric and Corinthian columns […] Our agriculture, navigation, artistic representation of paintings and sculptures and of course, we developed military tactics that were also very well used […] Great wars have occured. The Trojan War is still debated today if it was a myth or if it really existed."

This is the first time I'm seriously considering asking for a refund on a White Wolf product. I can only hope there will be a comprehensive update in the future.

Edit: the lack of bookmarks or other ways to navigate the book's content is another sticking point which I hope will be solved.

The art is amazing and I love the history. The grammar could use some correction and there are quite a few typos, but overall it's amazing. My biggest gripe is page 87, the second page on Striges is completely missing.

An excellent book with much potential. However it needs a good re editing, as there are ,any minor errors. I put most of these down to translating mistakes. It also still has some passages in portugese. If these were corrected I would have given it five stars. I especially like the disciplines, showing an interesting flexibility with a good rationale for why this is so. Worth a look.

Wanted to really like this. The classical age seems to be a really great setting for Vampire, and I would really like more expansions and sourcebooks, similar to the Dark Ages, but it's clearly not a finished product. It's clear the author doesn't speak english as a first language and it shows with the grammatical errors. I understand that he's regularly updating it, but as it stands, there are still entire paragraphs that are written in portuguese throughout it. Presentationwise, it's beautiful, like any of the other professionally made V20 products. Content wise, I was a little bummed out about the mythology of a largely still pre-christian society of vampires. Apparently, the Noddist Vampire creation myth has pretty much remained very similar since antiquity, but it would have been interesting to see a different variation of the same "Dark Father" origin, maybe incorporating polytheism, with the prevailing Noddist doctrine becoming more dominant as the years go by, just like how Christianity gradually superseded paganism. That's just a stylistic preference. It's still a good product and I hope it's expanded upon.

Vampire the 20th Anniversary Classical Age is an huge "core" book for a new setting of Vampire. This product was very ambitious and covers pretty much everything you would need to run a game in the Classical Age of ancient Greece. The book is similiar in design to the Official Dark Ages core book. Now this book was originally publishes in Portuguese, and the English version does suffer from translation issues, but none of the translation issues subtract to much from the final product. ((It should be noted that the author has been updating and fixing the translation issues on a regular basis, so many of these issues might be resolved.)).

There are so many great things in this book, such as clan and bloodline write ups, new merits and flaws, that there is just to much to cover. The Tabletop Gaming club has used this product to run an one shot game set in anicent rome and the players had a ton of fun. Actually, we enjoyed it so much that we have started a new Vampire the Classical Age play group. We strongly recommend this book to every vampire player.