This is the second edition Vampire Players Guide (1993). It isn’t an earth-shattering book by any means – its your basic sort of rules companion, with a potpourri of new stuff, clarifications, expansions, essays and more. I picked it mostly for Clyde Caldwell’s cover painting, which feels iconic to me, and also for Tim Bradstreet’s interiors. Bradstreet and Vampire: The Masquerade are indelibly linked for me and I think he did more to establish the goth-punk vibe than any other artist.

Couple other stray thoughts about Vampire: The Masquerade. It is often referred to as a game of personal or political horror. This doesn’t strike me as true. Sure, you do play as monsters who struggle a great deal with their  natures and the things they must do to survive, but at the end of the day, you’re playing immortal, romanticized monsters with magic powers. Because of this VtM (and the other World of Darkness games) always felt more like a low level, dark superheroes game rather than horror. YMMV, of course.

Another thing: early White Wolf books sure looked good, and they produced lots of hardcovers. But they suffer the same bad binding curse that early D&D and Games Workshop books were afflicted by. You can look at a VtM book wrong and its binding would just vanish. Rude.