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A little while ago, I got an offer from White Wolf to write an essay for the Vampire Player’s Guide; the idea was that I could pick out whichever topic I liked and write an essay about it. Lacking in any particular direction, I decided that I’d work outside the envelope and write up my own bizarre little version of Gehenna just as an example of how to stretch Vampire beyond its limits. I had stuff like Caine killing Abel in the womb, so that he was basically a malevolent infant – well, you know, the usual craziness.
Needless to say, it didn’t quite go over like I’d hoped.
So anyways, Gehenna is a good example of how to do the end of the Vampire line right, with mixed results. The book wisely separates Gehenna into four exclusive scenarios, each of them dealing with a different Gehenna; one of them is quiet and introspective, while the other three are apocalyptic and world-changing. The question of whether or not to buy it is kind of moot. For long-time fans of Vampire, there’s little question as to whether it’s worth purchasing. It’s the culmination of the entire game line, and whether it’s any good or not, it’s something that they’ll have to pick up just to see how it all ends.
So, how does it end?
The book opens up with a short introduction which includes the design document for the state of the Antediluvians as according to White Wolf and the final fates of the Sabbat and the Camarilla; their final fates aren’t determined by the strengths of their sword arms, so to speak, but by the thinness of their blood.
The next chapter is problematic. We get a partial explanation of the Book of Nod and its prophecy, as well as a series of case studies of various facets of the coming Gehenna. The problem is that the material presented here conflicts with the material found in later chapters; Absimiliard, for example, is described as trying to commit suicide after millennia of self-loathing, but his appearance in The Crucible of God has him trying to diablerize his fellow Antes just like everybody else. We’re given a vague description of where Ennoia – the Gangrel Antediluvian – might be, only to learn exactly where it is in Crucible. It seems like a major waste of time, at least to my mind, to spend three paragraphs hinting that Malkav may have made himself part of the Malkavian Madness Network – and then to say yes, he’s the Malkavian Madness Network some two chapters later.
It’s an astonishingly odd chapter, to be honest; it’s a lot of information that’s promptly contradicted by the rest of the book. We learn more about what the Inconnu could be, who the Last Daughter of Eve is, and so forth, but it’s rendered moot by the rest of the book – for that matter, if it’s designed to be a toolkit for Gehenna, it’s one that’s rather pale in comparison to the rest of the scenarios in the book. A lot of it is "It’s up to you to decide", when we can already do exactly that by picking and choosing from the rest of the book to make our own personal Gehenna.
Before I continue, I just want to mention that the book does draw fairly heavily from Judeo-Christian myth, including but not limited to:
- The idea of a wrathful, Old Testament God.
- The idea of original sin
- The idea stated as fact that the world is only eight thousand years old.
- Cloning as acting against the will of God
- Angels, and their appearance on Earth as judges
- The idea that if you are making a face at somebody, and somebody else sneaks up behind you and slaps you on the back, then your face will stay that way forever. (This is how the Nosferatu Antediluvian came to be, for example.)
To be sure, Vampire was always a game that drew from Christian theology/mythology, but it occasionally gets a little thick. If you’re a little leery of soaking your games in Christian theology, then you might have to do some hacking before the book’s usable. Then again, that’s the best way to use the book anyhow.
Anyways. The first scenario in the book, Wormwood, is the best of the book’s four scenarios. Rather than the climactic explosion of the Antediluvians rising up from their graves to take over the world, God simply decides to wipe every vampire off the face of the Earth, Caine included; after all, as the book explains, Caine’s had every chance to accept redemption, and has refused it every time. Meanwhile, the progeny that he’s spawned have delighted in making themselves monsters and making humans miserable, so they’re all going to die by the Wormwood star, which thins blood down until the Kindred simply can’t exist anymore.
There’s a wonderful two-page explanation that makes the relationship between God and Caine absolutely clear, as well as answering the nagging question of "Why did God inflict vampirism on the human race as a punishment for one man?" – the short answer is that God didn’t; Caine did. It is occasionally a little heavy-handed with the Christian/Catholic theology, especially with the notion of baptism washing away original sin (a theological concept I disagree with) but since the game is steeped in Judeo-Christian mythology, it’s not entirely unexpected.
What the scenario boils down to, essentially, is a riff on the Noah’s Ark story. The Wormwood star explodes, wiping out every vampire on the face of the Earth – and in Malfeas, the Tempest, and so forth – by thinning their blood until they can’t exist. The only survivors of Gehenna are the vampires who are chosen by God to get a second chance to prove that they’re worthy to survive; that they can repent their sins and live as humans again. They get their chance when they’re trapped for forty nights inside of an abandoned church, with whoever else has been chosen by a pair of vampires who’ve got a direct line to God. After the forty nights are over, they have a chance to justify their existence to God, or face utter annihilation.
In short, it’s just about one of the best scenarios that White Wolf’s ever done – not because of what it does, but because it sets up the players and the Storyteller to put their characters at the absolute center of attention. The Storyteller can lock whomever he wants in with the characters – a regretful elder, a Sabbat diablerist, a cringing Tzimisce toady, a flighty Toreador, a thin-blooded seer – and have them interact with the characters as the clock ticks down to the final confrontation with God. And, while the characters can’t leave the church without falling prey to the same Withering that’s destroying Cainites worldwide, there’s nothing preventing a GM from having important characters stumble into the church when dramatically appropriate – say, if the cruel sire, minutes from death, stumbles through the front doors and collapses. Does the childe say goodbye? Forgive him? Throw him back outside for being a dick? Who can say?
I should point out that the vampires in the church only lose one point of blood per week, rather than per day as the standard. (Otherwise, all of the vampires within the church would either frenzy or go into torpor by the tenth day – that, or diablerize the living shit out of each other in an attempt to get the last few drops of blood. Shades of the vampires locked in the Devil’s Casino in Matt Wagner’s Grendel, actually.) As a result, if the characters want blood, then they’re either going to have to take it by force, or bargain for it – either way, it’s an excellent way to see just how the characters react when blood’s in short supply, but not necessary. Sort of like "What will you do for a Klondike bar?", except that in this case, the answer could be "Eat somebody’s soul." While it isn’t mentioned in the text, I think that it would be fascinating to see one of the Antedilvuians appear in the scenario – as a withered, ancient corpse, its hand crumbling from the impact as it bangs its arm against the door of the church, its blood nearly spent.
The scenario also has a series of moral tests that the Storyteller can put the players through, if the Storyteller feels that it’s necessary – do they risk going out of the church to save somebody’s life, or let him die? Do they kill the bag lady that discovered their haven, or do they let her bring back the police?
The scenario does end with the Storyteller having to make a very hard choice about which characters will live and which will die, but hell, after going through a scenario like this, I can’t imagine anybody bitching about how their character died unfairly. It’s interesting, too, to see all of the moral wiggle room in Vampire – the Paths of Enlightenment, the justification for the monstrosity of the Sabbat – suddenly stripped away to reveal a simple truth: That there’s no excuse for being a monster in the eyes of God, no justification that can prevent him from burning you to ash save absolute repentance. I do have to admit that I find the emphasis on Christian principles of forgiveness and Old Testament wrath to be a little grating at points, but the sudden shift from subjective morality to an objective morality is interesting, given the context.
Okay, I’ve been spending too much time in English Lit classes. Back to the foul language and questionable links.
The next chapter deals with Gehenna as it deals with the vengeance of Lilith. Actually, one thing that I should mention is that the Days of Fire book – supposedly written by Lucifer himself – describes the various fates of the clans. Well, apparently Mr. Satan has yanked the football away from us seconds before we were about to kick it yet again; none of them fates described for the various clans show up at any point in any of the four scenarios involving Gehenna. It’s entirely possible that some of them are designed to refer not to clans, but to sects – for example, the one about the clan that cannibalizes itself out of existence could easily refer to the Sabbat’s fratricidal diablerie-fests – but his little speech is apparently designed either as a red herring or as inspiration for non-canonical Gehenna chronicles. The clan weaknesses being to exaggerate themselves in this scenario, including the Tremere growing third eyes and the Lasombra getting the impulse to take to the sea, but the stuff described by Satan just doesn’t happen.
The Lilith scenario isn’t a single scenario/event; it’s actually a loose framework describing the events of Gehenna, describing Lilith’s attempt to take her revenge on Caine on account of him generally acting like a dickhead. Helping her out with this little task is a young girl who’s been directly ghouled by her blood, and no fewer than seven different Antediluvians – not the familiar ones, but vampires who survived the flood but chose not to sire their own clans. (Or who sired familiar clans, but who never took the credit.)
The chapter doesn’t go for a single narrative sweep, like the preceding chapter; instead, it splits the end game into separate events, allowing the Storyteller to present them in whatever fashion he sees fit. The content of the campaign itself is actually pretty decent, ranging from exploring one of Lilith’s gardens, to fighting the hideous creatures she dredges up from the bowels of the earth, to Saulot’s own plots, to the Lasombra Antediluvian’s strange metamorphosis into pure shadow A lot of them are more frameworks than fleshed-out adventures, most likely due to space requirements; work will have to be done before they’re ready to play. Some of them, like "Underworld Mayhem", maddeningly make reference to the death of Augustus Giovanni and Set, but leaves the details to the GM because of the crossover potential with other White Wolf games.
And, to be honest, some of the adventures come off as silly more than creepy – mostly the big combats between monsters that Lilith summons and the PC’s coterie. Vampire has always tread the lines of being a superhero game with fangs, and while the monsters do "fit" within the scenario, they’re not going to be of much use to a campaign in which the subtle and the personal are really important. I keep getting the feeling that the adventure would make a lot more sense, and would feel more internally consistent, if it wasn’t for the space limits. It does provide for a very dramatically appropriate ending for Caine, involving a crossover with Wraith, which scores the scenario points, but…it seems like a mishmash of plots that don’t involve the characters, save at the most peripheral, and ends without really needing the PCs. That’s always a risk when you’re writing world-ending scenarios with the signature characters of the entire line, but there just doesn’t seem to be much for the PCs to do.
There’s also a rather amusing note included on languages. A sidebar justifies Caine and Lilith speaking ancient Sumerian dialects by pointing out that characters who didn’t twink out can now get some use out of the points that they spent in Linguistics. If one of your players did take ancient Sumerian as one of the languages that they got from those dots, then you should immediately shoot them, because there is no way short of precognition that they could know that ancient Sumerian would come in handy, and we don’t need precognitive genes bouncing around the human race’s gene pool. (Well, maybe if they were archaeologists, but really, what are the odds? Better to say that Caine and Lilith both speak the language of Babel, which all humans understand intuitively.)
Nightshade: Somebody described this adventure as being very pulp-adventurish. I can see where the idea comes from; there’s lots of globe-hopping, fights with both Antediluvians and regular vampires, the rise of ancient cities, clones, and cackling villains who receive their comeuppance. Described that way, I suppose that you could describe it as pulp, but that doesn’t convey the uneasy mixture of action and mythology that goes into the chapter. The chapter abandons some of the subtlety and necessary quiet of the Vampire game line to allow all Hell to break loose.
For example: The scenario opens up with the Tzimisce Antediluvian, a mutable chunk of flesh approximately the size of Candlestick Park, rising up and threatening the lives of the PCs, along with most of New York. As they fight it, alongside a Tzmisce elder, they’re caught on tape by a nearby news crew. The net result is that the PCs are directly responsible for breaking and ending the Masquerade, cementing their importance in the overall scheme of things. As a result, vampires come out into the public eye just as Gehenna starts. At the same time, the blood weakens, so that only those who commit diablerie can make use of the blood.
The scenario assumes that the characters will be content to follow orders from Jan Pieterzoon, who forms a new sect called the Nepthali. (The PCs are actually invited to aid in the creation of this society, including laying down ground rules and so forth, but Pieterzoon acts as the plotgiver.) The PCs essentially bounce from location to location at the behest of various characters - Jan, Tremere, Sascha Freakin’ Vykos - in order to be present for, or to participate in, various situations. There’s a nod to a very old book in the Vampire line - Berlin By Night - in which the characters meet up with a vampire who once successfully imitated Caine, a scene in which Tremere and Tzimisce slug it out underground, and even a visit to the massive tomb complex in which Cappadocius trapped some twelve thousand members of his clan. The characters take part in the situations, including deciding the fate of Tremere and Augustus Giovanni, but, unfortunately, there’s no stats for either, forcing the GM to waste time coming up with his own stats. (And they are meant to be fought; they’re not at full power, but it wouldn’t have wasted that much space to stat them up. Actually, a lot of the stats in the book are either unnecessary (Alia, the two Heralds of Gehenna) or have been done before (Dr. Netchurch (I think) and Sascha Vykos,) so it’s not as if they didn’t have the room.
The scenario also has the characters finding Saulot, this time in the form of a cloned human child with a third eye. Fortunately, the kid isn’t wise beyond his years; just confused and amnesiac.
However, the book veers into Looney-Tunes territory when it starts describing the child’s apathetic state to its lack of a soul - thanks to cloning - and describing cloning as "the vilest and most unholy of acts, a mockery in the face of God". You too will find yourself mouthing "Huh? What the fuck?" as you consider that in a world where eleven-year old girls get yanked off the street and murdered, where such a thing as rape camps can exist, obviously the worst possible mockery is artifically reproducing something that happens in nature anyhow. This kind of Luddite, half-baked nonsense should have gone out with Mage 1st edition; as a matter of fact, if you think it through, if being a clone means that you have no soul, then it would stand to logic that identical twins would always consist of one normal person and one soulless monster. It would serve to explain why those identical twins conventions always end in a bloodbath of incestuous necrophilia and cannibalism, I suppose, but doesn’t quite explain just what the hell the authors were thinking.
The ending of the scenario is actually probably the worst of the four scenarios. It doesn’t allow the characters to do much of anything except sit around and watch as Saulot saves the day, and then frenzy/burn in the subsequent holocaust. Admittedly, when all of the surviving Antedilvians are having a pow-wow, it’s going to be difficult to affect even one of them, much less all of them at the same time. But the focus drops from the characters and devolves to just watching Saulot tie the whole thing up, which is kind of unfortunate. It’s not a bad scenario, but it’s the weakest of the three.
Speaking of the Antediluvians, the next chapter, Crucible of God, is where they run rampant. This has the Antedilvuians as the proto-Great Old Ones that they appeared as in the revised edition of Vampire; alien and insanely powerful. It’s the chapter with the most special effects, ranging from the destruction of humanity to a three-week long night.
Of course, it starts off with the Masquerade breaking – this time, it’s potentially the fault of the player-characters, but it’s not required for the plot. Once the existence of vampires is revealed, society slowly adjusts to the notion, right up until they find the first Camarilla diablerie camp. These diablerie camps – which, to my knowledge, have never been described before in any White Wolf product – are where the Camarilla sends staked vampires until they can be diablerized by higher-generation vampires. I’ll say, first off, that the existence of these camps came as a complete surprise to me; they also strike me as something that’s absolutely brilliant at revealing just how nasty the Camarilla can be, and I wish that they’d been described earlier so that I could work them into my games. I’m also a little puzzled as to how humanity’s able to make peace with vampires when all of the people who lost family members to vampires – whether to the Sabbat or Camarilla – have perfect reasons to demand an accounting, if not the deaths of vampires worldwide. Maybe the "kewl" factor outweighs the ick factor, I don’t know…
In any case, humanity essentially declares war against Kindred everywhere, resulting in a lengthy war which results in the eventual destruction of the human race. I am hard-pressed, however, to believe that elder vampires are able to sabotage the structures of human civilization to the point where it collapses entirely. It’s taken as a given for the adventure to work that the elders will use Dominate, Presence, and their vast financial resources in order to destroy civilization - it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t seem credible. I’m sure that vampires could do so if they could hide, but we’ve had it pounded into our heads over the last two years or so that vampires can’t control; only influence, and then, only specific people, or only in specific ways. Now, we’re told that they can topple civilization if they’re desperate enough, and in a time when people are going to be utterly paranoid about any sort of vampiric influence. I don’t entirely get it.
In any case: As the war draws to an end - and as the Setites, the favorite whipping boys of Gehenna, eat yet another bullet - the Antediluvians wake and start gobbling up their descedents in a manner suggestive of me at a pancake bar. We get to find out what the tenth level of each Discipline does, which is whatever the Storyteller wants it to do. (It’s actually called "Plot Device", believe it or not.) After noshing down a few Methuselahs, the Antediluvians begin the Reign of Blood, which has the remnants of humanity collected into concentration camps in order to feed the hungers of their undead masters. Manhattan is drained dry overnight by the massive bulk of the Tzimisce Antediluvian; the Lasombra Antediluvian creates eternal night; the Nosferatu unleashes titanic monsters onto the land while he crouches in their belly. There’s all sorts of neat stuff getting unleashed here, but the sheer scale of it all is going to require careful handling by the Storyteller to prevent it from getting silly. The characters do have a part to play in all of this, of course, including deciding what they’re going to do in the Reign of Blood. One thing that I’m not entirely...I don’t want to say that I’m unhappy with it, but if the characters go along with some aspects of the plot, such as helping a mysterious Antediluvian regain her powers, they’re going to have to take actions which may cost them a fair amount of humanity.
For example, the mysterious Antediluvian asks the characters to find her a Methuselah to diablerize, but I’d have to say that acting as a hunting hound for somebody who intends to eat somebody else’s soul is going to call for at least one Humanity check. The same holds true for Tremere’s plan, who demands that the characters feed until they’re full in order to cast a particular ritual - but that means that they very well might have to kill somebody, requiring more Humanity checks. It definitely shifts the game from horror to...I don’t know, dark adventure? It lacks the moral sense that’s informed Vampire for so long, and I think that the scenario suffers because of it.
The scenario caps off with Saulot, again, and gives the characters a chance to end Gehenna all by their lonesome; then it’s a struggle to revive what’s left of the world. I don’t know if I agree with the Road-Warrioresque description of the world after Gehenna, but since I don’t agree with the idea that elders can cause that much destruction in the first place - well, que sera sera, I suppose. There’s also a bit of goobyness in that the characters can wind up with their faces sculpted into the side of a mountain, in crystal, as a parting thank-you from one of the Antes. It’s going to tickle a lot of people, to be sure, but if a vampire’s ego wasn’t big before...
There’s a short, meandering, somewhat pointless discussion about how to Storytell the end of the world - mostly "no duh" advice like "focus on the characters, not on the overall action" and "work your character’s flaws into the scenario" and what-not. I wasn’t much impressed with it, mostly because other products have covered the same ground much, much better. We get stats on the characters from the first scenario, Wormwood, along with beautiful artwork from the original Vampire artist, Josh Timbrook. (I really hope that I got the name right, because I would hate to miscredit the guy.) There’s definitely a rush of nostalgia that comes from seeing the same artist close out the series that began it - or, at least, defined it. (Actually, also noteworthy is the ankh that we see at the close of each chapter, fragmenting and breaking more and more every time we see it.)
So, is it worth buying?
Absolutely, but here’s why: It’s an excellent gestalt product. If you want a different version of Gehenna, then all that you have to do is grab little bits out of each scenario and put it together into something unique. If you want Gehenna to start with the resurrection of Set, there’s two different versions of his return - or not. If you want to start with Nightshade, continue into Crucible of God, and then end with Caine confronting Lilith, the descriptions are included here.
And, to be honest, there’s something liberating about White Wolf closing the door on the whole thing. The Nictuku, for example, are revealed as being giants, the same kind that inhabited Canaan in the Bible; at least, that’s what I remember reading, and I can’t check back to see where I did; there’s no index. (Boooo.) That detail alone is enough for me to come up with my own scenario regarding the Nictuku.
I’ve heard this basic sentiment coming from White Wolf many, many times: It’s your metaplot, not ours, so if your stuff diverges from the canon, that’s fine - that’s the right way to do it. However, it wasn’t until I found out who the Nictuku actually were that I was able to envision being able to use them in a game - at least, what their stats were, how they would behave, and so forth. In other words, it wasn’t until White Wolf had finished their story that I felt comfortable enough to start writing my own - well, let me rephrase: comfortable enough to use the stuff that they’d left somewhat ambiguous. It’s a weird feeling, to realize that all the times that I nodded my head and said “Yeah, yeah, it’s my game,” I was really waiting for White Wolf to drop the other shoe.
I also want to point out that the Giovanni, especially Augustus, don’t get nearly the attention that they deserve. One of the major things that I was waiting for in Gehenna was for them to finally drop the Shroud, the only thing seperating the real world from the afterlife - and then to be slain to the last vampire, or borne off to the Labyrinth by angry ghosts who were finally able to get their mitts on the vampires who had tormented them for so long. Alas, while Augustus Giovanni gets his once or twice, the entire loathsome clan doesn’t get the good kicking that it deserves, so it’ll be up to the humble Storyteller to find the appropriate fate for them. (Which is to have them all dragged off into the Labyrinth, screaming and kicking. To quote Nelson: “Ha ha!”)
One last thing: Not that I’m complaining, but I’ve never heard of the authors of any of these scenarios. Either they’re pseudonyms by existing White Wolf staff, or they’re people that are new on the scene, or they’re authors whom I haven’t been paying attention to. They did a great job on the book, but I’m wondering if why, for example, Bjorn T. Boe was picked to write a Gehenna scenario, while Justin Achilli didn’t.
Is it worth buying? Yes, although the odds are good that you’ve already got your copy in your hands right now. It’s a satisfying conclusion to a lengthy game, and it gives the Storyteller enough information to create the Gehenna that he thinks is best. It isn’t a perfect product, but it’s a good one.
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