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Bordeaux by Night - Storytellers Guide $19.99
Publisher: White Wolf
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by Rissa D. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/10/2021 19:49:07

I was really excited to crack into this product, since it got good reviews and came highly reccomended by the author. However, what I saw very much did not live up to the hype.

The book is very poorly edited. I know English is not the author's first language, but it badly needs to be read over by someone more fluent. Some parts are fine, but others are borderline unreadable. Formatting is also not great, with third- to half-pages regularly left blank and wide margins inflating the page count unnecessarily.

History section is probably the most useful bit; I got some ideas there for certain.

The section on local folklore and important dates is lacking. There's nothing wrong with the details themselves, but the focus is all wrong for a Vampire chronicle. Bank holidays and when school children go on their lunch breaks are cool, but they're not useful to an average game at all. The Player's Guide is better in this regard, but I shouldn't have to buy two separate books just to get basic info about the city. I'm also not sure what the logic is between what of this info got into the Player's Guide and what got into this book.

Most of the rest of the book is NPCs. And they're... not good. Many of them are quite bland, with generic backstories and one-note personalities. "I am a racist and don't like minorities", "I am a serial killing creep", "I am an all-around nice guy", etc. A few others feel very unlikely - Lyle, Claudia, and Victor in particular border on the rediculous in one regard or another.

On the bright side, I like the idea of the surface vs hidden Nosferatu, as well as the detailing of a few important ghouls and of some of the local other supernaturals - a good call for STs who might want to focus on that sort of thing. There was a few NPCs I liked as well.

Coterie breakdowns are fine, a bit oddly formatted and suffering from the same problems as the NPCs that make them up. The story hooks are OK, but many of them lack depth. I'd like to see a bit more complex stories suggested - there's really only one or two that work as a major chronicle plot, rather than a sidequest.

The influence explanations at the end are good and helpful, as is the timeline. The table of contents is linked to the sections it references which is really nice, although for some reason it's at the end of the book?

The biggest problem here, though, is the pricing. This book costs $20 US, or it's availible as part of a bundle with the Player's Guide for $35. This is the same price as a meaty V20 suppliment like Lore of the Clans. I understand pricing it up a little bit because they likely will sell fewer copies than "official" work and you want to get actual return on your time investment, but considering that the ST Guide alone is around twice the price of the official By Night sourcebooks, with less content, it's very underwhelming.

Overall, there was a few interesting ideas in here, but if I hadn't gotten it on a good sale, I'd feel like I wasted my money.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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Creator Reply:
Hi!

Thank you for having taken the time to review my book, and I'll fully take the "English is my third language" criticism. I suck at prose :')
I'm sorry you didn't feel like it was all that good to you, and especially about the characters, I'm sorry you thought they were bland or unrealistic, but considering I'm working with a franchise which has Totentaz and Enkidu, I can only invite you to re-read them and try to see why they're "a racist" and "a serial killing creep", what's their potential roles to the players, and what is rooted in their motivations. They're not just that, and that's the problem.

I won't comment on what's a matter of pure opinion, however I would like to talk about some of the elements you've pointed out:

- The margins. They're the official margins of official templates, using the official fonts with the official spacing between lines, paragraphs and so on. I did not modify anything about text placement and columns in the official template (I only changed the original frame to my vine one). You may call it page inflation if you'd like but it is White Wolf's doing, not mine.

- Partly blank pages. That's page breaks, which is a common practice to avoid crammed content. I chose to insert a page break for each character, as they can be used as PCs and as such, need to be printed/extracted without elements of another's background in the page. It also allows for better accessibility of the contents, and it's more consistent.

- The Table of contents. It's at the end because it's the full ToC, while the one with just the first two levels is at the beginning (that's the Summary). Using a whole bunch of pages at the beginning with the full display of all title levels is useless, hence why it's with the index. This is a very common practice in many publications which are meant to be referenced.

- The price: I believe you miswrote your "$35", as the bundle (before the addition of the Revised of this ST guide) was $25, not $35. I will not argue with you on pricing politics in TTRPGs, but you're comparing a fully crowdfunded book with a whole lot of preorders with someone doing everything out of pocket, and I do not think that comparison is fair to either party.

- Long games. It's a sandbox setting where the PCs are the missing piece. The long-campaign type of games will happen from there, and from the domino effects caused by the first few elements they find out. There's no "side quests", but everything meshes into one big story: the PCs' story. I'd also like to point out that this book is a By Night, not a Campaign/Chronicle.


Feel free to contact me on social media so I can send you a review copy of the revised version of this book, perhaps you'll find the organization more relevant to your interests and I believe I fixed most of the poorly written moments.

Thanks again for having taken the time to share your thoughts, they're appreciated. Take care!
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Bordeaux by Night - Storytellers Guide
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