Reviewer: odilon from Oak Park, IL USA

Here we have an example of the RIGHT way....
This supplement for VtM offers five very relevant game adventures. Two stories deal with two relatively new toys in the World of Darkness- the Kindred of the East and the Hunters. Another gives the players' characters front row seats for the destruction of Baba Yaga. There is a free form night club story which might be a good way to generate ideas for how things should go after the big realignment of the East Coast cities. Yet another story is set in the Sabbat city of Montreal and updates that setting- one of my favorites. Las Vegas and San Francisco are also developed in the Hunters and Kuei-jin stories respectively. I haven't playtested any of this material but it looks very, very good.

The section innocuously titled "Introduction" is a real gem. This deals with something called the "metaplot"- the overarching storyline of the World of Darkness. (The CLAN NOVEL series is based on the metaplot and so are THE TRANSYLVANIA CHRONICLES.) It discusses several important developments- the current problems facing the Assamite and Ravnos clans, the destruction of the Tremere antitribu (including some insights about the whole Tremere-Saulot thing) and gives a blow by blow on the Fall of New York to the Camarilla. You need to read this if you want to keep up at all.

A good thing about this is that alternate possible scenarios are frequently offered- different reasons why things are happening, for example. This book also backs off somewhat at a couple points from insisting that any player characters of certain clans would have to be destroyed in certain situations. The metaplot described here also diverges in small ways from what was described in the CLAN NOVEL series (so far) and in the TRANSYLVANIA CHRONICLES. There's a certain fuzziness in which there's plenty of room for storytellers to make their own decisions. I hope no one takes it into his or her head to fix that.

A word about this whole metaplot thing. When official game materials declare even one important storyteller character destroyed or give even a small glimpse of an Antedeluvian's machinations, it can go a long way in terms impact on existing storyteller chronicles. I'm currently really enjoying the metaplot but I can see that there's going to be a limit. Right now, I've got enough ideas from it to last me a couple lifetimes and it's great. At some point, though, anxiety about taking my chronicle in a direction that turns out to be at odds with furture developments in the metaplot is either going to get very inhibiting or I'm going to end up saying "to heck with the metaplot". In general the more open-ended, supportive way the metaplot was handled in this book was very encouraging.