Clan Novel: Ravnos by Kathleen Ryan review

    CLAN NOVEL: RAVNOS is the eighth novel in the Clan Novel series for the Vampire: The Masquerade line of tabletop RPGs. I’ve been re-reading the series for the past couple of years and enjoying the world of conspiracies, action, and interlocking plotlines. The series is not without its flaws and wildly changes tones as well as themes depending on the characters. However, it is still something that I think to be quite fun. I also note that the twelve book series has its own smaller series within the books, effectively following authors continuing their own stories when they do two or more books. In this case, Ravnos is a sequel to the Setite novel.

    The premise is that Hesha Ruhadze, Follower of Set high priest, has managed to finally acquire the Eye of Hazimel. The Eye is effectively the One Ring of Sauron (or Eye of Vecna) in that it bestows fantastic powers to its wielder but eventually warps your mind into a parody of itself. It also attracts the attention of Hazimel himself, who is restricted to using Khail Ravana as a minion in order to retrieve it. Khail finds himself stumbling on the erstwhile childe of Hesha, Elizabeth Dimitrios, and the Gangrel Ramona, who all have their own stake in the quest.

    The biggest flaw of this novel is Khalil Ravana himself. He is, deliberately, a complete scumbag. He’s a thieving, scheming, snivelling, cowardly irredeemable piece of ****. You can be a bad person as well as a protagonist in Vampire: The Masquerade, it’s almost mandatory, but Khalil is closer to Gollum rather than, say, Saruman. This is a book written by a woman but there’s a scene where Khalil waits in a woman’s apartment, watches her undress, then forcibly restrains her before draining her dry in a scene deliberately meant to remind you of what it does.

    Indeed, the fact that Khalil gets away with so much awful evil crap is something that makes the book a chore. Vampire novels almost inevitably work best when their condition is a curse and Khalil doesn’t have enough self-awareness to be cursed by it. He’s a living argument for why Paths of Enlightenment aren’t really appropriate for a vampire game or, at least, would be if he cared enough about the Path of Paradox to be anything more than “the path of what I was going to do anyway.” Indeed, the best part of Khalil’s story is when he chides Ramona for racism against Romani people, saying, yes, HE is a murderous thief but that’s just him. His family is rightfully ashamed of him.

    The best parts of the books are Hesha, Ramona, and Elizabeth’s sections. Hesha may be every bit as evil as Khalil, being a literal priest of a god of evil (which Set wasn’t in RL but is in V:TM) but he has far more depth as a person. Ramona is a vampire who wants to be “good” but is rather easily led astray by Khalil’s transparent lies. Elizabeth seems to have fallen in from another genre of horror entirely and is as terrified of Khalil as she is of Hesha despite the former being more Buffy vampire than Dracula in terms of intelligence.

    If it sounds like I’m insulting the book, I’m not, well, not entirely. None of this is due to bad writing. Kathleen Ryan is fully capable of writing fantastic vampire fiction. I know, because she’s the author of Setite and that’s one of my favorite V:TM books. However, the protagonist is someone she tries to contrast against all of the others and he’s just not a great place to be in the headspace of. Despite this, I found myself still interested in the plotline between them. The Eye of Hazimel is the most D&D-like artifact in V:TM but it’s very strangeness is one of the reasons the plot works. No one else really looks for magical artifacts in the setting, so the one-eyed man is king.

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