Vampire: The Masquerade: Winter's Teeth discussion thread

[The young man in the cafe]

Necroing because the app my local comic shop uses for preorders listed issue 6 as coming out in march. Here is the sales description:

"Lick the blood off your lips...the next arc of Vampire: The Masquerade is here! After learning a disturbing fact about her fake childe's past, Cecily must keep her secrets close and Ali at arm's length. As she searches the streets of the Twin Cities for answers, a terrifying possibility surfaces: perhaps Ali has learned the Masquerade better than Cecily herself."

So it looks like this is going to be an ongoing series now, any thoughts?

[CTPhipps]

Necroing because the app my local comic shop uses for preorders listed issue 6 as coming out in march. Here is the sales description:

"Lick the blood off your lips...the next arc of Vampire: The Masquerade is here! After learning a disturbing fact about her fake childe's past, Cecily must keep her secrets close and Ali at arm's length. As she searches the streets of the Twin Cities for answers, a terrifying possibility surfaces: perhaps Ali has learned the Masquerade better than Cecily herself."

So it looks like this is going to be an ongoing series now, any thoughts?

I enjoyed the first arc pretty well. I don't LIKE Cecily as a character given she's a Judas Anarch but I don't dislike reading about her.

I also feel like there's plenty of subplots we didn't get fleshed out.

[CTPhipps]

I'm pleased to say that the series is continuing past its first arc!

Woot.

Issue 6# came out today!

https://www.amazon.com/Vampire-Masqu...5395000&sr=8-2

[CTPhipps]

4/5

http://booknest.eu/reviews/charles/2...dewintersteeth

VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE: WINTER'S TEETH VOLUME 1 is a collection of the first five issues of the Vampire: The Masquerade comic book by Tim Seeley, Blake Howard, and Tini Howard. It is set in the World of Darkness universe, popularized by the Vamire: The Masquerade tabletop and video games. We've been reviewing all of the issues here at Grimdark Magazine and think it would be inappropriate not to cover the graphic novel that was recently released. So, how is it?

In general, Winter's Teeth is a very solid and entertaining throwback to the Nineties Gothic Punk genre that eventually spawned things like Underworld as well as True Blood. It is a masqued world where the supernatural do their best to protect themselves from the prying eyes of mortals while carrying out sinister plots against, well, mostly each other. Vampires are fiercely competitive with one faction (The Camarilla) having a feudal structure and the other faction (The Anarchs) being, well, anarchic.

The comic is set within the Twin Cities of Saint Paul [editor: thanks, Erinys!] and Minneapolis. The cities have traditionally been considered separate domains but there's movement to combine them under one single Prince who will rule them all. Completely uncaring about these politics is protagonist, Cecily Bain, who is a former Anarch who has allowed herself to become a traitor to the cause in order to look after her ailing geriatric sister.

What follows is a complicated and entertaining set of events that reminds me very much of my tabletop RPG sessions for reasons both good as well as bad. There's a lot of really interesting storytelling going on but I also feel like the Storyteller (Tim Seeley in this case) occasionally throws in random crazy stuff to spice things up. At one point, a bunch of organ-harvesting cyborgs show up and I wondered if someone had been using their homebrew Mage/Vampire crossover material.

Cecily is a character that bounces between incredibly unlikable and entertaining in equal measures, which I think is the intent. She's someone who has become jaded on the conflicts of Anarch vs. Camarilla and it has burned her out. Unfortunately, that means she's unwittingly making enemies and does a few things that are just genuinely evil. Very true to the game but sometimes I felt like I wanted to see Cecily staked and left out for the sun.

Despite my issues, I absolutely did love the Byzantine plots and betrayals that fill up the story. Cecily recruits a young fledgling in hopes of restoring some of her lost humanity but secretly having let a snake into her home. There's a lot of humor to be had from the fact Cecily doesn't know how to deal with someone from the modern world even though she was Embraced in the Eighties.

Really, I actually enjoyed the back-up stories a bit more than the main story and I didn't dislike the main story. The Anarchs are a wonderful collection of oddballs and misfits trying to find their place in the world. Colleen is a fantastic Thin Blooded vampire (basically more human than monster) that is trying to serve as den mother to a bunch of dysfunctional monsters.

In conclusion, I really do recommend this book but with some caveats that a slower pace might have actually been better. I wanted to follow up Cordell's vengeance scheme and get to know the Prince more. Vampire: The Masquerade is frequently about getting to know the major players of a single city. Even so, I very much enjoyed this and will be picking up the series as it continues on.

[Erinys]

Oops. The Twin Cities are Minneapolis and St. Paul. St. Louis Park is a Minneapolis suburb.

[CTPhipps]

Oops. The Twin Cities are Minneapolis and St. Paul. St. Louis Park is a Minneapolis suburb.

Thanks for the heads up. Will fix it.

[Pears0n]

It was interesting to see

[Taggie]

I liked the central story of issue 2# where Cecily is trying to teach her "childe" a lesson by leading her to a degenerate drug dealer, not helping her hold back from killing her, and then driving to the degenerate drug dealer's mother's house. She's trying to impart a lesson about killing people not being righteous but there's no reason that her childe would think it was in the first place until it happened.

I feel like Cecily has lost her way and is in dire need of someone to call out her bullshit. "Oh, because he loved his mother he didn't deserve to die? God, please, how pathetic. You think Nazis didn't love their mothers? Or does making monsters less monstrous make you think its more normal when you kill innocents?"

Mind you, she'd then kill my Anarch character.

Or try to.

This is why I want the version of humanity where killing is a rating 2 sin (I thought it was 1 in first edition, just checked it was 2) doesn't matter why, you kill, degeneration check time. Either accept that or walk a Path

[CTPhipps]

I really enjoyed issue #6, we're getting some really big progress on the Alejandra plot.

[Frontline989]

Ive really enjoyed the series to this point besides a few minor gripes. The way the Nosferatu are portrayed is a bit stereotypical which has been disappointing because I feel all the other clans have been well represented to this point.

[CTPhipps]

Ive really enjoyed the series to this point besides a few minor gripes. The way the Nosferatu are portrayed is a bit stereotypical which has been disappointing because I feel all the other clans have been well represented to this point.

I like King Rat but he hasn't gotten much attention yet.

[CTPhipps]

Issue 7# is now out.

I'm very glad this series has been enough of a success that they continued past the first story arc. This issue is a lot of fun and contains some very good "vampire moral dilemmas" when Ali attempts to figure out a way to save some mortals from being used as disposable meals for the Tremere Justicar's arrival. We get some genuinely dark moments and just when I think Calder Wendt doesn't have it in him to be Prince and he has some decency--BAM, he proves to be a complete son of a bitch. Also, Colleen discovers Thin Blooded alchemy!

[CTPhipps]

Worked hard on updating the TV tropes site for the book:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...asqueradeVault