A video of this review is here.

Greetings from the Enoch – they have a great coffee bar here, even if it attracts too many damned bloodless hipsters.

This week we are reviewing "Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand," a notorious book from the early days of White Wolf publishing. Worse gaming material exists than Dirty Secrets – for example, 4th Edition Forgotten Realms is a part of the anti-life equation and justifies my hate. In any case, Dirty Secrets had the potential to be a great book and it is not and is worth examining.

Released in 1994 Dirty Secrets was part of the original Vampire the Masquerade line – White Wolf released the original Masquerade game book only two years before. The game itself revolved around players running vampire characters, existing in the modern world and dealing with other vampires and the humans upon whom they fed. Game creators Mark Rein-Hagan, Andrew Greenberg and company designed it to be about people coping with the moral and spiritual compromises necessary to survive one more night as a monster. By 1994, the Masquerade game presented a grab bag of vampire types – called clans – and the two major political groups among the bloodsuckers, the Camarilla and the Sabbat, hated each other. Like the vampires in Near Dark, the Sabbat existed as unapologetically violent creatures, dedicated to dominating humanity and killing ancient vampires. By comparison, the Camarilla existed like the vampires from Anne Rice stories, who expected worship of their entitled status quo and enjoyed being passive aggressive bitches at parties.

Further, the vampires – Camarilla and Sabbat – shared the world with creatures such as werewolves and mages... and everyone hated everyone but everyone hated vampires just a little more than they hated everyone else.

On the technical end, Dirty Secrets saw release as a hard copy, before PDFs became a common thing commercially and it is generally rare on the second hand market. It is 126 pages long, divided into six chapters and two appendices, each with an ambiguous title and the work does not include an index. The chapters cover everything from the history of Black Hand, to its organization and purpose and provide new types of vampires and new vampire powers, little of which is compelling or useful.

Art throughout the book is decent though often static, frequently depicting characters who appear to be just standing around waiting for something interesting to happen. The art comes from Jason Felix, David Ferber, Lief Jones, Joshua Gabriel Timbrook, Dave Allsop, Stuart Beel and Nicholas Ruskin

Steven C. Brown wrote Dirty Secrets, which saw publication at the tail end of the run of Andrew Greenberg as the vampire line developer for White Wolf. Greenberg had produced good material before that point, including the Book of Nod and after his time with White Wolf, he acted as a co-creator of the Fading Suns game. The man is not a hack, but with Dirty Secrets, he is responsible for hackwork. Even if Brown went off the rails, it was Greenberg's responsibility to keep things under control and maintain a consistent tone and quality level with the Masquerade books.

Originally the Black Hand – according to Masquerade books before Dirty Secrets – was the name of special combat groups in the Sabbat, an elite group of fighters, assassin and sauciers called in when the usual Sabbat pack of violent, psychotic, undead assholes were not enough to get a job done. The idea of more information about them and the Sabbat legitimately served as an interesting hook.

Right, so according to Dirty Secrets... the elite fighting force of the Sabbat, those vile baby-eating vampires, actually like people and want to protect them from bad vampires and to be good servants to ancient vampires. Not only that, the Black Hand does this with their best buddies... mages. The tone of Dirty Secrets takes the established tone of Vampire, as well as the tone of Werewolf and Mage and turns them inside out. The Black Hand seems less like something in the World of Darkness than the Undead Super Friends, where everyone simply has cool powers and hangs around like Bros when not punching evil in the face.

Dirty Secrets had some interesting ideas mixed amid bad ones and one such idea was that the headquarters of the Black Hand are the ruins of Enoch in the underworld. When some people or things die, they can go into the underworld and apparently, the original vampire dominated city made the transition into the underworld following its destruction during the Biblical flood. However, for some reason Enoch was on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic – or at least the underworld version of the Atlantic – rather than the plains of Mesopotamia.

Dirty Secrets possessed logical flaws in addition to tonal ones. Despite constituting only 300 or so members, the Black Hand managed to infiltrate every other sinister and secret organization in the World of Darkness, or at least those that existed in 1994. The Black Hand exerted control over all these groups, which were diametrically opposed to each other, but this was not enough for the Black Hand to do with their time and so in arguably the book's biggest flaw, these yahoos also battled flash altering monsters called Souls-Eaters which originated from beyond time and space and that the Black Hand brought to the Earth and distributed in the first place. The book's inclusion of these monsters radically redefined an existing vampire group and their powers for no reason other than ripping off the Necropscope novel series.

Dirty Secrets includes several new types of vampires, including vampire that must eat human flesh – rather than drinking blood – and possess necromancy powers. They are interesting and potentially useful. The book also includes badly thought out rules of creating old vampires and vampires with time travel powers.

So, Dirty Secrets was all about a group of hero vampires, who are secretly part of a monstrous vampire group, with their best friends who have no reason not to hate them, and when not hunting the Necroscope rip-off monsters that they actually summoned, they hang around their underworld city with time traveling vampires and this was all supposed to be integrated smoothly into the classic World of Darkness.

The muddle of the book exacerbates the issue, as it has mediocre organization and it tries to provide a guideline for running PC groups featuring a mix bag of vampires, werewolves and mages, but it does so badly. Further, numbers and terminology in the book are inconsistent, making everything harder to follow and thus harder to understand and digest.

Some of the basic ideas in Dirty Secrets were intriguing, such as the concept that the Sabbat was as controlled by ancient vampires as was the Camarilla. In the end, the main difference between the two groups was the Camarilla possessed better table manners. Further, the game revisited idea of the flesh-altering monster – once it was it properly adjusted – during the Gehenna supplement that specified the flesh altering powers were not extra-terrestrial but were utterly horrific.

In the end, I give Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand a one on a d20 roll. It is like bad home brew material, not a professional supplement and does not match the tone or story arc of the rest of the material from the company. The book provides some decent material – Enoch, flesh-eating vampires, necromancy – that is so surrounded by poor material, with an overall apparent lack of giving a damn on the part of the producers, that it sours the entire work. It is a junk drawer of a RPG – yes, there is a corkscrew in there somewhere but it is real pain in the ass to find it amid all the rubbish crammed in as well. However, a diligent person can harvest useful bits from the work.