Pyramid Review: The Ashen Knight (for Vampire: The Dark Ages)

Pyramid Review

The Ashen Knight (for Vampire: The Dark Ages)

Published by White Wolf Game Studio

Written by Robert Barrett, Bruce Baugh, Richard E. Dansky and Wendy L. Gash

128 pages, $17.95

Knighthood has been referred to before in Vampire: The Dark Ages books. Given the increasing importance of knights and knighthood during the historic medieval period, it was perhaps inevitable that White Wolf would release a sourcebook dealing specifically with knights in the Dark Medieval World. The Ashen Knight isn't exclusively a book of Cainite knights, but is intended to cover the whole range of interactions between chivalry and vampirism.

The opening chapter concentrates on an overview of mortal knighthood, with references to Cainite viewpoints of a certain factor or belief. The discussion of knightly virtues may be a little more advanced than the official time period of V:TDA, but would be useful to anyone running a knight. The topics, ranging from the economics of knighthood to female warriors, are covered in broad outline, but would provide enough information to start more detailed research.

The second chapter is another overview, but this time of the concerns of vampiric knights. It ranges from explaining why one cannot take part in a daylight tournament to which clans have the most knights among their numbers. This chapter goes into a bit more detail, since the topics are not ones that can be checked into at the local library.

The following two . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: June 9, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.