Vampire: The Masquerade — Parliament of Knives Reviews

Amazing game.

Played it again for the first time in a couple of years - made different choices and the game felt almost entirely different, in a good way. Probably won't play it again straight away but look forward to coming back to it again and finding something that I hadn't discovered before. Lore heavy like you'd expect from WoD and VtM but mechanically it's quite light touch compared to some of the other CoG VtM RPGs.

The Parliament of Knives is yet another great Choice of Games game in the World of Darkness setting. As one of two V:TM books I've read I can't help comparing this to Night Road, and this book is radically different in point of view and story layout. PoK is very much a story about internal vampire court politicking and not being able to trust most people around you. It does make you feel like you have less agency over what is happening, that things are a little bit more on rails, but that does also show how it is to be in the position of being the underling of the vampire next in line to a painfully empty throne. And despite the [i]sense[/i] of lack of agency there's a lot of actual reactiveness in the story - entire scenes are swapped out depending on which side of the story you're playing as a result of the choices you make. There are some small criticisms I want to make. Mainly I think there's a bit too many choices you have to make without knowing what they actually mean. An example would be early on you're asked to either go investigate a vampire named Vivian or report in to your sire. Here you get two mutually exclusive scenes depending on which you pursue, but you have no idea what actually results from pursuing either task or which of your personal goals would be best helped by pursuing them. Similarly there's some side content that feels a bit difficult to discover. But this is very minor, and overall I think it's a very satisfying read. Oh, and I strongly recommend getting the DLC, it adds some really great content. Not only extra side content, but also being a Lasombra adds an extra layer of intrigue or three to the story, and then for a second or third play through being a Malkavian adds a huge amount of flavor and even more impact on the story.