Excerpted from my full review at: http://www.acrimony.org/article_gehenna.php
Gehenna was foreshadowed in the original Masquerade books because they knew even then that every good story has a beginning (their foundation), a middle (our games), and an end. It would be anti-climactic to not write a chronicle game-setting for how to play The Last Night. I bought Gehenna without a second thought and took it home to read it. I swallowed it whole as I took in the meaning of it all.
It opens with a short story to set the stage. Typical for them, and as expected it was well-written. The artwork throughout the book also lives up to their standards for dark eye candy. The next chapter then breaks from the norm, and essentially spells out everything that you will read in the rest of the book. It is all very vague, intentionally one would presume, to act as a spoiler yet not give away any plot.
The rest of the book contains four meta-plots for how you can play Gehenna in your games. The first one was my favorite. It was the simplest to fold into a story, involving all of your players, and has a satisfying redemption in the end. It has a very Book of Revelations feel to it as it directly uses the comet Wormood as the tool of God’s wrath, thinning the blood of the vampires to non-existence. However, a group of vampires, including presumably your coterie of players, make their way to a church where they get locked in for 40 days. If they can survive in there, they can find salvation and become human again. This may be thick in Judeo-Christian mythology, but it is justified because the “origin” of these vampires borrows directly from Genesis.
In my mind, the satisfaction of the last three comes from finding Lilith playing the role of vengeful wrath-giver. But the satisfaction ends there, because as a player in a game that would use these tales for Gehenna, there is really very little to do. Your players end up following the main NPCs around, requiring little interaction for choices. They may make great fodder for White Wolf’s novels, but not a satisfying game. It might make a good movie, though.
The best advice then, it seems to me as a Storyteller, is to take all of the best elements of all meta-plots, throw in some of my own old stories, simmer in a pot, and serve up a new story. That is the best use of these chronicles, and White Wolf even encourages it.
Would I recommend buying the book? As a source book for playing the end of the world, it does a great job, does answer some questions and ties a few loose ends. But not enough loose ends. The stuff it misses makes everything that came before it seem like a red herring, and that is disappointing.
This gripe is the reason I did not give the book a perfect score. For the rest of the stories, the quality of the writing, the value of knowing at least a few ways Gehenna will come, and having a sense of closure, I give it 8 out of 10.
