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There was a time during the beginning of Justin Achilli's tenure when it was suggested that one of the major vampire clans would perish, leaving only twelve behind. Achilli, remaining his usual impish self, suggested something to the effect that the lamest clan, the one with the least reason to exist, would bite the big one.
As it turned out, it was the Gypsy-themed Ravnos, whose happy-gypsy origins were something of an embarassment to the new developers of White Wolf. But the Giovanni came in as a close second; stereotypical Italian gangsters with a dash of necrophilia thrown in for cheap shock value.
Clanbook: Giovanni does a nice job of taking that stereotype into the street, kicking out its knees, and then shooting it in the back of the head with an appropriately sized weapon. It's an excellent book, briefly stopping by the more familiar material before expanding it into something much more evocative - fucked up, but fucked up in a consistent and well-thought-out manner.
Of course, they're still going to be the next clan on the chopping block; not because they're a lame clan, but because the members of their clan are dumb. There's no sense of the cold calculation that goes along with the Tzimisce, or the spiritual reveries of the Lasombra, or even the impassioned debates of the Brujah; they're mostly inbred, arrogant fools formed in a personality cult around their founder, largely ignoring the astonishing array of threats to their position. It's a tribute to the skills of the author that he makes the Giovanni's arrogance and stupidity entirely natural; they're clueless without being straw men for the author's conception of studpiity.
The opening story is almost pitch-perfect - in tone, it feels like a cross between a Charles Addams cartoon and the Ray Bradbury story where a kid's relatives - all vampires - pay him a visit. It's a potent look at the Giovanni from an insider's perspective - everything's creepy and sepuchral, but it all seems normal because you've been around it since your birth. Of course, in the same story, there's an inter-family homicide, a near-rape, a savage beating which almost ends in homicide, and enough inter-family bickering to fill a warehouse. The Giovanni are family in all the worst ways.
The next chapter discusses the Giovanni's history, and there's a lot of meaty details in here. Besides a discussion of the Giovanni family's origins and actions through the years, there's discussion of a fairly powerful Giovanni artifact (although it's not made clear as to whether or not it was destroyed or not), some of the reasons for the Giovanni becoming incestuous, the fate of the Giovanni who were embraced before Augustus Giovanni became an Antediluvian, the ultimate goal of the Giovanni clan as a whole, and a run-through of the three other families that were brought into the Giovanni - my particular favorite is the Millner, whose vendetta against the Kennedy family would be more realistic if it weren't for the fact that the Kennedys do a beautiful job of screwing themselves on their own.
The chapter is enlivened substantially by having it told through the viewpoint of a Giovanni sire to his childe - it's bitter, sardonic, sarcastic and arrogant, all at the same time. I realize that it's not a major innovation when it comes to RPG supplements, but it just feels right - the voice is so distinctive that it carries what could otherwise be a savagely boring chapter.
The next chapter briefly discusses the ways that the Giovanni pick their childer, and there's a hell of a lot more politicking here than you'd expect within a family - embracing your favorite nephew gives you an automatic ally, so the Giovanni elders have to carefully manage who gets blood-bonded and/or Embraced by whom. Unfortunately, this thread is dropped - later to be picked up to much better intent later on in the book - to discuss Giovanni elders, their ultimate goal and how the Sixth Great Maelstrom of Wraith; The Oblivion affected it. (Not well, but the Giovanni are spinning a convincing line of bullshit anyhow.)
The other families within the Giovanni clan are also given a fair amount of time - and the more I look at the Millners, the more they appeal to me; blue-blooded New Englanders who are getting sick of playing second fiddle to the Giovanni themselves. There's a beautiful discussion of infantilism as it affects the Giovanni - you're seventy-five years old, you look twenty, and you're baby-talking your sire 'cause you need to reinforce a sagging investment. There's discussions of the family traditions, including the Proxy Kiss, what's expected of potential Embracees (in short: the world), how the Giovanni get around the clan weakness of an extremely painful bite, and a complete breakdown of how the Sixth Great Maelstrom affected both wraiths and the Giovanni, including an important warning that the Giovanni have received from the other side - from one of their own, a slain ghoul - that the Giovanni have chosen to ignore.
The bits on the Maelstrom and wraiths - what the Giovanni call spiriti and spettri, depending on the karmic attitude of the wraith - will be very familiar to those who are fans of Wraith: The Oblivion. It'll also be a major surprise, mostly because the aftereffects of the Sixth Great Maelstrom are so sweeping. Fetters are assigned randomly, and ghosts can't act more than a hundred feet away from them; meanwhile, the afterlife has become a permanent Maelstrom. It's easier to work with the other side, but it's also easier for ghosts to reach across it to mess around with unlucky Giovanni sorcerors. I doubt that anybody who's going to be playing Wraith is going to take these changes into account, since they're incredibly limiting to the average PC, but it's kind of cool to see what the afterlife looks like in the wake of Ends of Empire. In case you're one of those unlucky people who didn't see Wraith: 2nd Edition, there are complete rules for how the Maelstrom affects the necromantic arts.
There's the usual "what does the Giovanni clan think about clan X" section, entertainingly titled "Everybody is Stupid But Us". There is one point where the Giovanni casually dismiss the Harbingers of Skulls, but it's not here; if you're wondering why I call the Giovanni stupid, that's reason number one right there. The Harbingers are, as far as I can tell, the Cappadocians, returned after a long sojorn in the afterlife. The Giovanni don't get that. The Giovanni are, in all likelihood, not going to get to see Gehenna.
The character templates are pretty nice - the featured celebrity portrait is Sarah Michelle Gellar, if my eyes don't deceive me. (Insofar as I know, every clanbook has a celebrity as a portrait in the book; the Tzimisce get Tom Cruise, the Tremere get James Gandolfini, and so forth.) One of the, the Bitter Matron, is just perfect for representing the Giovanni at a glance; a sweet-faced grandmother who accuses somebody of being an ungrateful whore in her flavor quote. Some of them don't quite follow up; the Dunsirn bully looks like he's going to be the favorite for anybody who wants to be Begbie from Trainspotting without actually putting any effort into it, for example. Those two actually reflect the highs and lows; the rest are pretty decent, ranging from the uninspired (Fiduciary Wizard) to the remarkable (Failure).
The book closes off with a list of notable Giovanni - nothing terrifically out of the ordinary, or worth noting.
One of the problems that I had when I was reviewing this book was that I was practically spoiling every single surprise or interesting idea that the book has - for example, the heated competition for the blood within the family is a major subtext of the book, and it's something that you could torture players with for years, but I found myself practically repeating the book's points word-for-word.
And it's because the book is that good that I'm doing so; there's so many good themes, good ideas running through the book as a whole that it'd be a crime not to use them. I'd say that this is one of the best, if not the best, revised clanbook that Vampire: The Masquerade has to offer.
-Darren MacLennan
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