I’ve heard that Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand (1994) is maybe the most hated Vampire: The Masquerade sourcebook. It apparently takes all that intricately plotted lore and takes a sledgehammer to all of it. I love a good catastrophic paradigm shift, so lets see if it measures up, eh?

Up to this point, the Black Hand was a faction within the Sabbat, a secret militia. Dirty Secrets reveals that the Black Hand is actually much older and only pretends to be Sabbat. Which, OK, the basic power dynamic is that the Sabbat embrace their inner beast and want to feed on humanity and destroy the ancient vampires (who would, if awoken, feed on vampires) while the Camarilla are your Anne Rice types, who want to live among humanity and pretend the ancients don’t exist (and are maybe serving the ancients in keeping a large portion of vampires soft and veal-like). The Black Hand actively serves the ancients, because doing so helps protect…humanity (because the ancients will eat all the vampires). And they do this with help from werewolves, wraiths and mages.

So, at this point, there were four World of Darkness lines – Vampire, Werewolf, Mage and Wraith – all set in the same world but, because of lore on the narrative side and power levels on the mechanical side, there wasn’t much room from crossover, despite the systems largely working the same. Dirty Secrets seems to have been an attempt to provide players with a way to run a mixed party, which is maybe a good idea in principle. Or at least you can see why some folks would want to try that. But in practice, it breaks pretty much everything that has been established in four lines of games up to that point.

Which might have been fine if this book was coherent and presented a good case, but it doesn’t. Its all over the place and regularly makes little sense, both in terms of the World of Darkness at large, or just internally, page to page. So yea, the hate seems justified, alas, and Dirty Secrets was actively disavowed by White Wolf soon after release.