What the actual fuck is up with people in the last few pages hating on the non-Vampire WoD settings? Are you the sort of people who enjoy having the vast majority of CRPGs be medieval high fantasy?
Every other wotc line (the ones I know at least) has real problems that Vampire either avoids or at least ammeliates.
Mage: while there is a bunch of gnostic crap in Vampire, here the scale is turned to 11. This is bad not only because gnosticism is ultimately self-contradictory, but also because this is done as a way to make magic "clean". Sure, there are evil mages who have "fallen" from the correct path, but magic itself is presented as neutral and in fact as an integral part of being human, to the point where "science" itself is a kind of magic (which is another aspect that doesn't work for the setting). This takes away any kind of "horror" inherent to magic. A much better choice would have been to use the tale of Faust as a template for what a mage should be; as they are the mages of WoD don't have anything to connect them to what we cal magic in the real world, except for some rather thin veneer.
Furthermore, the different magic traditions don't really work together (in fact, the technocracy works better as a group of traditions) and the power level is too absurd. In Vampire at least, the real movers and shakers were a select few, maybe less than a 100, and they are all either sleeping in their coffins or have hordes of servants to deal with the outside world. In mage, any odd cabal with a master of force could in theory nuke a whole city.
Werewolf: you start thinking, yay, a game about werewolves and the end of the world! How could anyone bungle this? Then you read it and discover it is really Planeteer: the Climate Change.
Wraith: While it suffers a bit from the gnosticism of the setting in general, with the annoying division of the wraith in two parts and the non-sensical wraith society. The major problem with the book, however, is that ghosts working together, especially for a long stretch of time, doesn't work well, it just takes too much away from what ghosts are understood to be in ghost stories or similar fiction.
Changeling: The idea of changelings doesn't work very well, or at all, with the idea of hidden horror from world of darkness. Also, take this phrase from the white wolf wiki: "The
Inanimae are wakening from their long
slumber, the Twilight
Trods are opening, and the
Adhene are coming back". With this many made up words, is it a surprise that people who play this usually make snowflake characters?
Demon: gnosis, gnosis, gnosis, gnosis, gnocchi, gnosis, gnosis...
I've never read the mummy sourcebook, so I dunno what they are like. I only got to play Mage, which is why it has a longer description. Still, by the end of the day, the only real worthwhile line besides Vampire was Streetfighter.
