Post originally by Viktor Haag at 2004-08-09 11:12:35
Converted from Phorums BB System

In spots, I liked your review. However, I've owned Whispering Vault and Dangerous Prey for years and don't remember them as being particularly difficult to read or understand. Nor did I think the game system was particularly obtuse or in danger of neutering the group's referee.

Like the SAGA system, WV's mechanics place all the die rolls onto the players' side of the table. This is an interesting notion, and as far as I know, only SAGA and WV have ever really built games around this notion. So, if a player wants to attack a beastie, he rolls his "Attack" skill. If he wants to avoid getting hit by the beastie, he rolls his "Avoid Getting Hit" skill. The referee rarely (never?) needs to roll anything.

Frankly, I thought that Whispering Vault packed the same kind of spooky, otherworldly horror, as all the World of Darkness games but in a more succint, elegant little bundle.

The game does depend on a background cosmology, and the players have to learn how this works in order to make sense of the world; however, I don't think they need to know all about the cosmology at the start of a campaign. A clever referee familiar with the game could introduce the cosmology to them in bits and pieces as they progress in their new jobs (as otherworldly guardians of the barrier between the realm of flesh (i.e. our world) and the beyond). And at any rate, the cosmoloy presented in the game is clearly no more complex than those presented in any WoD book, or Tribe 8, or Kult, or any other (post-)modern fantasy world.

I'd probably rate the game a solid 4/4 on the RPGnet scale.

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Viktor