So, then: Arabic vampires, in the Dark Ages.

                  Of course, or so I’m informed by Veil of Night, the Dark Ages were actually a golden age for the Middle East; a sort of mini-Rennaissance without the Borgias, where science and the arts flourished and the values of civilization were foremost, coupled with a religious flourishing in the form of Islam.

                  And this, gentle readers, is about all that I know about the history of the period. Unfortunately, the MacLennan curse of “not having enough time to properly study history” has kicked in yet again, and so I’m left to read a White Wolf book for a picture of the place and time.

                  Which, in this case, isn’t that bad of a deal. Veil of Night is, as far as I can tell, a fairly studious overview of the Middle East during the Dark Ages, including a pretty good history of the birth and development of Islam to boot. For vampires, the Middle East is a pretty dangerous place – as the birthplace of three major religions, True Faith is most likely everywhere, and the Black Rock of Mecca emits a wailing that makes sleep impossible for vampires. (It’s been dimmed by the time that the Dark Ages roll around, by vampiric thaumaturgy – but more on that later.)

                  The opening fiction makes it pretty clear when a particularly powerful attempts to make Muhammad a blood slave, winds up getting the holy smackdown laid on him and converting on the spot. I confess to enjoying this story immensely; I’m not a Muslim, but there’s some gleeful element of the evangelical preacher in me that comes out whenever a vampire tries something and gets a whipping from the Stark Fist of Allah.

                  Of course, this being White Wolf, it’s promptly followed up on with a short fiction piece, and then the most gratuitous White Wolf boob shot in the history of White Wolf boob shots – I believe that there’s no fewer than six full frontal shots, as well as three or four butt shots and a female vampire with blood trickling down one side of her mouth and across her chest. I assume that it’s supposed to be a harem, since they’re lounging around a bathing pool, but, I mean…damn. I wasn’t sure if I was looking at a White Wolf book or an issue of Lady Death.

                  Anyways. The book makes one crucial error that makes it very difficult to use for the casual Storyteller, and this is an error that I think that pretty much upsets the book: Instead of calling the clans by their standard names, such as Gangrel, Brujah and so forth, they’re called by their Arabic names – so the Gangrel become the Wah’Sheen, the Brujhah become the Bay’t Mushakis and so forth.

                  And it’s damned near impossible to remember who’s who, especially since more than one clan starts with the same descriptor. There’s Bay’t Mushakis, Bay’t Majnoon, Bay’t Mutasharid, and the Bay’t Mujrim – the Brujah, Malkavian, Nosferau and Ravnos clans, but it’s like trying to remember the difference between Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum, Tweedle-Dink and Tweedle-Republican. The book would have been far better if they’d simply gone with the original names, rather than rewriting them for a particular setting.

                  The setting, however. You could milk this thing for years and not entirely get through with it. As the book points out, this is the birth of Islam, right when it’s passing through from its earliest conquests to being the ruling faith – so instead of the relative stagnation of, say, the Ottoman Empire, we get a series of countries who are hitting their Rennaissance and running with it. This won’t last, of course, but it’s good to be aboard the wave while it lasts.

                  The history of Islam is actually a pretty decent introduction for the novice to Islam, mostly focusing on the history of Muhammad himself and the path that he took to becoming one of the major religious figures of human history. While it’s understandably brief, I have the impression that there’s a lot of major points that are underplayed in the description, more focused on getting across the information that conveying the flow of the story. It’s kind of like recounting a synopsis of the Lord of the Rings; you get all of the facts of the story, but not the tone or the nuance. (On the other hand, trying to convey the tone of a story like this – and failing to get it – could cause misunderstandings. I think, perhaps, that their approach was best.) It’s a good primer to the history of Islam, although understandably brief.

                  The subsequent chapter deals with the Islamic sect of vampires, called the Ashirra – instead of accepting their damnation and behaving like monsters, the Ashirra try to follow the precepts of Islam as closely as they can. According to Veil of Night, Islam actually offers spiritual redemption to supernatural creatures – and while I’m not sure if it’s canonical for the religion itself, it’s at least useful as a way to have Islamic vampires without forcing the issue.

                  The longest chapter of the book is my favorite, dealing with the journeys of the Cainite merchant Abu Fahim Kateb, across the Middle East and parts of Africa. It’s really, really good, exploring the Middle East without becoming a dry, dull travelogue culled out of a history book. It accomplishes this by having a fairly interesting central character as the teller – Kateb comes across as restrained, utterly devout, fussy, almost nebbishy at times, more interested in getting a good price for his goods than he is in the eternal war between vampires. Compared to the blood-drinking fiends of Europe, he’s a very refreshing change, and, to be honest, I wanted to hear more from him.

                  The areas themselves are described fairly well; they’re left highly subjective and somewhat brief, but there’s a lot of clues dropped throughout the travelogue to give Storytellers a quick guide to the area. There’s also a lot of weird supernatural events bouncing around thanks to the Setites and the remnants of the Salubri; in his travels, Kateb encounters Mongol vampires, a slave girl given by a Setite who looks exactly like his lost love, an monstrous aquatic vampire, a church dominated by the presence of an ancient vampire, an shipbuilder’s apprentice whose master skipped out on him, djinn trapped in small bottles – and that’s all that I can think of right off the bat. Nothing’s resolved, leaving it open for Storytellers to resolve.

I like the openness, but there’s points where I have absolutely no idea what’s going on – is the slave girl the subject of a Discipline that I have no idea of? Has she been treated with Vicissitude? A weird magickal ritual? Is she his lost love reborn? What the hell is going on? There’s a mystery, yes, but why doesn’t White Wolf ever give us little hints as to what’s actually going on? The character lists at the end of the story help with the details of who’s who in the vampiric Middle East, but an explanation of exactly what’s going on wouldn’t break my heart.

The clan briefs: Except for the fact that they’ve been relabeled with their new names, the clan stereotypes basically rehash the information that we already saw in the original Dark Ages book. Actually, I think that the Assamite and Setite clans actually suffer from their greater description here; they were typically posited as the mysterious outsiders to European society, whereas they’re right at home here.

Of course, since they’re right at home, the book has the double task of both explaining them to those who don’t have the Assamite and/or Setite books, while simultaneously explaining how the Setites and Assamites fit into the Middle East. Ditto for the Salubri – the clan has filled a book on its intricacies, but here we get a snapshot of the clan and its current destruction by the Tremere. And again, the alternate names for the vampiric clans is disruptive to the flow of the book – sure, the Bay’t Mustarhid are reveling too much in their monstrous nature, but that doesn’t mean anything to me until I look up the Mushtarid and find out that they’re the Nosferatu.

There are the occasional changes. The Baali apparently got their start in this area, so they get some nice art and a decent writeup; the Malkavians are suggested to be possessed by djinni rather than being cursed by their founder; the Nosferatu embrace their curse and become monsters. It’s worth a read, but the clanbooks are better just for the amount of space that they can devote to a particular clan.

The new roads; they’ve been changed to reflect the attitudes of the Middle East, so the path of the Warrior enjoins its followers to fight ruthlessly until dead, but to honor Allah’s compassion by showing mercy to a defeated foe. The Road of Heaven gets detailed from a Muslim perspective, which is actually pretty useful, and, most interesting, the Road of Community, which attempts to make vampires an integral part of their community – to the point where failing to pay the yearly tax to the caliph could cause a breach in a vampire’s Road. You could really get some mileage out of the idea of a vampire who’s so much Cairo that he’s practically become a City Father…

More helpful to the task of creating a character from a Middle Eastern setting is…well, the character creation chapter.

That sentence looked much cooler when I was writing the first part of it.

Anyways, it’s helpful because it actually breaks down listings of the various ethnic groups in the region, how age is regarded vs. generation, a list of Muslim names that you can make your own name from, a list of careers, and some new skills. The breakdown of different pre-Embrace occupations, complete with recommendations for Roads, skills, backgrounds and so forth is fantastic, so that unfamiliar players can just grab one of the templates and pick what they like instead of being swamped by the massive amount of detail available to them.

On the other hand, the skills section shows more fragmentation – I’m not sure if there’s a need for, say, a Strategy skill when you could file it under the universal battle skill from the normal V:DA book, or why you need to buy Shar’ia law as a skill when you could just buy Theology instead.

We get some Islamic blood magic, including a Islamic-based blood magic that the Ashirra use to inspire their followers and smite the unrighteous, and another that uses prayer for a variety of seemingly unconnected effects.

There’s some stuff on Islamic weapons – all good, standard stuff – but we also get lengthy sections on Islamic society and how you roll dice to get through it. If you ever find yourself in a position where you’re not sure what dice you need to roll in order to remain the favorite wife – I mean, besides Manipulation Empathy – you’ll be happy to know that there’s rules here. It seems awfully strange to be able to reduce a major facet of life down to a series of dice rolls – you can even dice off to see if you’ve got a compatible partner in the person that you’d like to marry. Weird. In addition, stuff that makes for good, frantic role-playing, like hiding a body, or finding a safe place to hide before the sun comes up, is treated as a dice roll again.

Weird, weird, weird.

The True Faith of the region is given a pretty decent treatment; as a matter of fact, an apt comparison would be to a minefield of faith. Without the blocking wards on the Black Stone, every vampire in the Middle East would be unable to sleep thanks to the piercing wail that the Stone generates. (As it stands, the Black Stone’s noise is used by Islamic vampires as a form of alarm clock; when it starts up, the sun is rising and it’s time to find shelter.) There are True Faith ratings for each part of the Middle East; the Black Stone has a whopping 10, while the Prophet’s Tomb has a True Faith rating of 8. (Worse, some of them radiate outwards, making the nearby countryside unsafe.) I’m a little disappointed that White Wolf didn’t create specific effects for each site – falling to the influence of the Prophet’s Tomb, for example, could send a vampire into a deep, peaceful sleep until the sun rises the next morning to usher the vampire into the next life. Then again, I imagine that life is tough enough on vampires in the Middle East as it is.

Damascus by Night: Pretty decent, as city books go. This is probably the Veil of Night equivalent of, say, Gary, Indiana – it’s not the central base of operations for the average vampire, but it’s a good place for vampires to cut their teeth before moving onto someplace bigger, and there’s a lot of little plots that need resolution before the PCs need go somewhere else for fun. Of course, there’s also a number of Baali, and a fairly powerful Baali artifact in the city as well…

The book on other denizens of the World of Darkness is good – and, even better, it’s genuinely funny at points, being the stories of a vampire who met most of the other supernatural creatures of the WoD and lived to tell the tale. For example:

Eventually, drunken on vitae, I bravely suggested that his djinni were nothing but imagination, and that at best he was a pathetic, self-deluded charlatan. And tomorrow night, if I can find another blank sheet of paper, I will describe my eventual escape from the great eastern desert in which his djinni thoughtfully deposited me in the few hours before dawn.

Heh.

Is it worth buying? I’d say that it is if you’re interested in playing in the Middle East; but it’s not really good as a reference for those passing through. It is a good book, with a few errors aside, but it won’t talk you into playing in the Middle East if you weren’t interested in the first place.

P.S I also have to apologize to White Wolf for the tardiness of this review, since they were kind of enough to loan it to me a year ago and also kind enough not to unleash Justin Achilli on me when I didn’t deliver.    ;->

-Darren MacLennan