by Carrie Schutrick

Created on: May 01, 2009

They call it the World of Darkness, and then they decide that there has to be an even darker part, called the Shadow. The Shadow and its inhabitants, and how they interact with the "real" world, are the subject of "Book of Spirits". Given this focus, it's not surprising that most of the setting-specific stuff in the book is for either Werewolf or Mage; spirits play a large role in the former, and easily can in the latter as well. Vampire's not much represented, and Promethean, Changeling and Hunter are entirely absent.

Chapter One is all about what mortals think about the Shadow. The reality of a parallel world gets twisted through whatever cultural views the mortal already has, and given that this is the World of Darkness the result is rarely pretty; it generally ends up giving the mortal in question a reason to be miserable, frightened, angry, homicidal or any combination of the above, and rarely gives the poor sap any reliable ways of handling the problems that this causes. But that's OK; the second chapter gets into what the Shadow's really like. Things like the nature of the interface between the Shadow and the real world, how the denizens of Shadow interact with others of their kind and with mortals, and what it's like to live in a food chain where new links could be formed at basically any time are all here. It's the sort of thing a character needs some serious dots in Occult to know, but the players don't have to be ignorant.

Chapter Three contains most of the mechanics in the book, with new Merits, powers and items meant to ease interaction with the Shadow and those who live there. Pretty much everything is useful to otherwise-ordinary mortals, who may thereby be tempted to forget that being able to get to the spirit realm is not the same as being able to survive once there. Which, in the context of a game, is all good fun.

Last but not least there's the bestiary of the book, presenting all sorts of spirits which range all over the scale in terms of power. There are also systems for making your own custom spirits, presuming you don't want to just take the worked-up examples and change their names to make the color fit your campaign. Everything you need to know about spirits is here, including some new powers they can have.

"Book of Spirits" is probably more of a Storyteller book than a player one, though there's nothing to say a player couldn't use it to define his mage character's spirit buddy or give stats to a pack totem. Still, in general it's more useful to those who are doing the planning of a game. If you're looking to run a game with spirits any time soon, this is the resource to get.

Learn more about this author, Carrie Schutrick.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.