Gehenna War Review || Vampire: The Masquerade 

Don't be too hard on the people who love the lore and metaplot. It isn't that we can't think for ourselves. Remember, back in the day there were entire series of novels published for the World of Darkness that people got invested in. Yes, it can be rather tedious when an ST or player treats it as some kind of inviolable canon. But not all of us are that way, or bring that kind of baggage to our games. I wasn't disappointed by Gehenna War because I don't expect big lore dumps from the RPG books anymore. That being said, when V5 was launched we were promised a big transmedia enterprise that has since fallen to the wayside. So there is a tad bit of disappointment with the WoD franchise in that there isn't a cohesive narrative to follow anymore. But that really has nothing to do with the RPG as far as I'm concerned. Tonally and mechanically, V5 is my favorite edition thus far.

I'm super lucky that our players enjoy the big combat that comes up every 3-4 sessions. I feel like it easily becomes a slog mechanically though. We're not playing an action-focused game, but I may have to check this out.

A very through review, it sounds like this is something I can definitely use in the kind of Chronicle I'm running, so thank you for this! I was already kind of doing "Zones" on my Vampire games with vague floorpans whenever I knew combat was going to be likely, and to better orient my players if they have a way to survey the area first. On the new mechanics for Hunger and Frenzies, I kind of have been doing something similar to it for my Werewolf games, more so in the sense that if I have a player shapeshift and fail their Rage chacks, I would let them get through their scene first BEFORE having them Lose the Wolf. I feel like losing the wolf in the middle of shapeshifting because of bad rolls more often than not feels anticlimactic and gets in the way of players having fun, and I'd rather have them deal with the consequences after. Are you going to do a review for Scent of Decay and Shattered Nation as well? (I am going through the latter and I am enjoing what Im seeing so far, which is refreshing for one of the few people who wants to see more W5).

Thanks for the honest and thorough review Bully! Any chance you will be covering the "Shattered Nation" source book for Werewolf 5e?

I found this really useful to turn combat into something interesting and impactful even outside of an action-centric game. If combat is not the center of your game, it's still probably going to come up, and probably at climactic moments. You probably want it to be more than back-and-forth dice rolls if your players are finally facing their rivals, and this got me in the right mindset for how to make that happen.

Bully, thanks for the video but whatever happened to the mcr innuendos?😂

I made a combat doc for my players right before this book came out... I won't update it yet because they're not interested in combat anyway. Thanks for the review. I like hearing your opinions and summaries of each chapter.