VtM - WhiteWolf: Genealogy

VtM - Review: The Erciyes Fragments
was almost like she was intimately familiar with the setting already.
at a glance
The book has a brown cover, oddly enough. I was half-expecting the same old black, and this was a nice
change. The text inside is nicely laid out and well illustrated (some very nice pictures indeed). A variety
of fonts are used to distinguish between different commenters, and that works well also. There are none
of the formatting errors from the Book of Nod, like having backgrounds too dark to read the text or
having lots of wasted space. The only problem was there some pages did not have a comfortable margin
towards the spine, making it a little harder to read.
upon examination
I found that The Erciyes Fragments to be better than I had hoped. This is the kind of thing I've been
waiting for from Vampire for a while now, more occult documents that both manage to cloud the issue
and reveal more truths at the same time.
The book is the story of a ghoul of the Cappadocians by the name of Niccolo Giovanni who finds an
almost frightening number of fragments of the Book of Nod at a remote monastery. After translating the
texts (and the comments of older scholars that he found scribbled in the margins of the books), the monk
is found as a pile of ash. For those aware of the conspiratorial interplay between the higher levels of the
Cappadocian clan and the Giovanni family, the implications of some of the notes and letters in The
Erciyes Fragments are instructive indeed.
I was also pleased to find that there were no repeated passages from the Book of Nod, everything was
fresh and new. Much of it was the same story, but worded differently, and with different details
(including a different number of Second Generation). This new telling of the story, while perhaps
clearing up mysteries like that of Brujah and Saulot, adds more questions about Caine, the Second
Generation and the Salubri. Some of the most memorable sections of the book include the section where
Caine curses the Antediluvians as well as the later prophecies. Throughout the whole book, flavor and
mood nearly stains your finger. The Lamentation during the Flood is eerie and creepy, almost sending a
shiver down the spine as the mind imagines the scene.
Furthermore, the running commentary throughout the volume serves well to add further insight (and
futher questions) as well as provide some context for the book, and emphasize how centralized
knowledge is in the Dark Ages, and in the World of Darkness in general. Questions that I could answer
in a snap are puzzled over by characters who don't have the advantage of way too many White Wolf
books.
The reality that the World of Darkness is a world of mystery and lies is something that is often lost by the
wayside in published material as well as many games, I'm glad that The Erciyes Fragments managed to
muddy the waters some.
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