Cults Of The Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Okay. Check all the boxes for content warnings on this one. This supplement to Vampire: The Masquerade’s modern rules is filled with sex, cults, all of the blood, vampiric torture, sex, sex, and did I mention blood? Because there’s a lot of it.

Vampire is often a game of politics, and Cults of the Blood Gods doesn’t shy away from that. This book focuses on the inner workings of vampiric religions and cults, and besides offering a ton of fantastic lore to bite your way through, there’s some great material here to offer a twist on the usual struggles for power between the establishment of the Camarilla and the rebellious Anarchs.

The book is also filled with some great prose. It provides a nice taste of how these kinds of characters may speak, or how we ought to describe a setting in luscious, sanguine detail. Some of its pretty intense (again, the blood, the sex, the torture), but it dives into the nature of vampire society way more than just dealing with what the core book gives you.

Since it’s a modern World of Darkness book, it’s also fully compatible with Hunter: The Reckoning. There may be some player options that are more meant for vampires here, but this book can easily serve as source material for a Hunter chronicle that sees the party take on a vampiric cult. It’s not a bad way to open the world up to those new to World of Darkness, as these religions are smaller vampiric networks than those of the world-wide Camarilla and its opponents.

Also, and this may be in another modern World of Darkness book I haven’t gotten to just yet, but the “General Difficulties” section on page 15 is a stellar approach to simplifying NPC stats for those running the game.

Oh, and there are vampire influencers here. Go, read it!