Buckle up, this is going to be a bumpy few paragraphs.
Here's the main problem with this book, or I should say, with the concepts that drive it: It isn't Vampire. Not really.
Recent interviews with the new guiding minds at White Wolf lamented the turn the games took away from horror and into urban fantasy. Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand went even further than that, divorcing Vampire -- the World of Darkness game always tied most closely to existing within the world and its immediate perils and politics -- from that world entirely. And this book is very much an update of that title.
There is some value to be had in the exploration of esoterica that have always been hinted at in other game lines, including the Cults of Lilith, Infernalists and those who hunt them, and so on and so forth. This book is a cobbled together patchwork of all of those things, and is arguably as much or more crossover material than content for a straight-up Vampire: the Masquerade game.
But that doesn't adjust the important point:
When this book comes into play, you're no longer playing Vampire: the Masquerade, you're playing a fantasy adventure game with vampires in it.
This is the supplement Vampire doesn't need, and the fact that it was published before a "Lore of the Antitribu" or another book the line DOES need rankles a bit. Between this and the Anarch Movement getting the longest chapter in the new blood magic book, I can't help but worry that Onyx's Path's vampire division is off the rails.
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