Promethean: The Created Book

Man, I remember mocking White Wolf's X: the Y series with this concept. It's up there with lagoon creatures and mummies with monsters I never suspected White Wolf would actually make a game about.

Then, White Wolf began releasing Promethean teasers, and I was slowly, slowly swayed. Prometheans weren't just frankenstein's monsters, they were zombie alchemists on a pilgrimage to achieve humanity, hounded at every step by their failed creations, their own unbalanced personalities, and the rejection of both humanity and the natural world.

What finally sold me for good was the way one of the developers described it to me at GenCon, while I stood at the White Wolf booth with the book in my hand. Promethean: the Created is a horror game with the hope of redemption. It's about playing monsters who want to be human, and will probably make it, one day.

If Promethean has weaknesses, it is that it is too much, that the game's goals are somewhat counterintuitive, and that it's story lines are, by nature, finite. By too much, I mean that it is very easy for a Promethean game to explode into a shower of misery. If that's your thing, then it's now problem; if it's not, then a little discipline should handle that problem nicely. The goal of Promethean is counterintuitive in that instead of questing to become more influential and powerful, a Promethean is striving to become the World of Darkness's most pitiful creature: an ordinary mortal. For some gamers, this can take some mental acrobatics to get used to. Finally, all Promethean games end. Mortality is a real, reachable goal, and a game that doesn't include it is cheating the setting out of it's most poignant moment. Of course, for all gamers out of college, a finite game is less of a problem than it is a relief.

Anyway, I recommend giving this game a chance if you're into intense character-driven roleplaying and modern horror games.