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Gehenna: The Final Night review...
"... The bookcases, the tables, the chairs, the chandeliers—everything was sculpted with meticulous care from the flesh and bones of living and unliving things. It was even remotely possible, though he didn't want to think on it, that some of them were living still, trapped in an eternity of torment... Beckett was torn by conflicting desires, his yearning to to preserve the assembled knowledge here for possible future use warring with his need to set the place alight as soon as they were finished..." (p. 240, "A hidden library")
With the ending of the game line, White Wolf felt it best to put aside its previous incarnations of fiction to make way for the next World of Darkness setting. Gehenna: The Final Night is the last entry into the fiction world of Vampire the Masquerade, tying in to the Time of Judgment scenarios presented in the final roleplaying supplement Gehenna.
The Final Night deals with one vampire’s (Beckett, Clan Gangrel) exploration of the world in search of answers to the cause of the weakening of the Kindred. Tracing his way back to where an old friend was trapped during an earlier expedition. After freeing him, Beckett turns to find more answers and ends up locating an old Kindred (Kapaneus) and falls in league with him.
The novel is a good picture of the ending of the Masquerade’s Vampire–showing several Clans as they try to maintain their own sense of worth, and showing the vampiric sects as they collapse (the Camarilla feeding grounds, for example). These pictures help get across the feel of the roleplaying supplement, but doesn’t present all of its facets. The basic picture in this novel is that the vampires are doomed, its just how they deal with it that matters.
Also in this novel, several of the Clan Novel Saga characters are eliminated from the uprising of the Antediluvians and their own blood weakness. With the end (of the world) at hand, it was only natural to believe that some would want to know these characters’ fate. An item of interest was the Nosferatu that changed back to his pre-Embrace appearance as his blood weakened.
Overall, The Final Night is a nice entry to the now-closed realm of Vampire the Masquerade fiction. The plot was finely crafted to encourage the reader ahead, as well as keeping the tension riveting, both solid elements of story in spite of knowing that the world’s doomed regardless of character action.
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