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The Resurrectionists Collection
White Wolf Publishing
By Will Hindmarch, Christopher Lee Simmons and Eddy Webb
106 pages

The thing about being a Storyteller is you always need more stories for your players. How often you need new material depends on how efficient your players are at having their characters conclude business from night to night. There are plenty of adventures out there, but few are so nicely tailored to dropping into any campaign like those from The Resurrectionists Collection.

The first adventure, “The Resurrectionists”, involves the PCs in plot to resurrect a torpid elder – a scenario that will likely result in more questions than answers by the end. The characters are recruited to find where the old man is buried, wake him, and return him to safe environs where he can be debriefed and brought up to speed on how the world has changed in the 70+ years he’s been a sleep. Quite the troublemaker in his time, it may puzzle the players as to why this elder is being revived – and well it should. As it happens, the characters aren’t the only ones looking for this elder. While the other searchers don’t have the clues the characters have, they know enough to follow at a discrete distance…

This elder was powerful and connected, but also had more enemies than friends, and went torpid to avoid the blood hunt called against him. If your Chronicle uses the wonderful World of Darkness: Chicago setting this adventure fits in beautifully, as the torpid elder is Rafael Pope, Daeva, heretic, and former member of the Lancaea Sanctum. This Daeva, also know as “The Liar,” built a cult of personality around himself among the Kindred in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, and traded his knowledge of Theban Sorcery for tutoring in Cruac, which earned him few friends from the adherents of either religion. Pope’s connection to Chicago shouldn’t discourage a Storyteller from setting the action elsewhere; he disappeared into hiding, after all, and no one is sure to where.

The second scenario, titled “Criminal Intent” finds the character again recruited for some dirty work. A strong proponent of the Masquerade seeks to employ the characters to clean up a potential breach: a human artist is displaying a painting showing a Kindred feeding on a human, and the Kindred’s face is recognizable. The story takes a few turns along the way, including unsurprising information that the Kindred who hired them may have lied to the characters for reasons of his own.

Criminal Intent, like The Resurrectionists, is a scenario that will have the players asking a lot of questions about the motivations of others, especially their “employers”. Likewise, this adventure also can be resolved in a number of different ways, many of which will include some degree of unpleasantness for the characters. These two adventures are all about the choices the players make on behalf of their characters, and the consequences to their humanity that will result.

The final chapter in this collection details a coterie of five Kindred (one from each clan) and their complicated relationships with one another. Each of them individually could be used seamlessly as NPCs in an existing campaign, or they could be easily adopted by players as an easy way to introduce them to a new chronicle. Novice and experienced versions of the characters are provided for flexibility, and decent background information is given for each to offer some solid roleplaying hints. This chapter is also available separately as a PDF-only packet, titled Ready-Made Player Characters (Vampire: The Requiem).

Featuring two stories and five NPCs/pre-gen characters, The Resurrectionists Collection can readily function as a quick-start pack for an experienced Storyteller to get a new campaign off the ground. Even with a coterie of players unfamiliar with the World of Darkness, this collection can get things moving at full speed in no time at all.

Rating: Four out of Five Stars

Reviewed by Bill Bodden

Tags | vampires, white-wolf, world-of-darkness