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Year Of The Scarab #1
Heralds of the Storm
The Ghost Storm Rages
Drawn into a struggle against the forces of darkness, Thea Ghandour encounters and enigmatic figure who shares her same immodest goal: the ultimate destruction of evil. Maxwell Carpenter has tracked an entity of incredible power to an obscure temple in the heart of Chicago. Only with the aid of Thea and her fellow hunters can Carpenter hope to stand against its dark might
An Ancient Force Awakens
But Thea learns that Carpenter has not yet revealed everything - not about his actual goals, nor about the mysterious entity's true nature. Only by entering the formidable Temple of Akhenaton can Thea hope to discover the truth - and uncover a revelation that may change the world
Heralds of the Storm is the first novel in the Year of the Scarab trilogy. This three volume epic reveals the rise of an ancient power thaqt threatens to forever alter the World of Darkness... the immortal beings known as mummies.
Drawn into a struggle against the forces of darkness, Thea Ghandour encounters and enigmatic figure who shares her same immodest goal: the ultimate destruction of evil. Maxwell Carpenter has tracked an entity of incredible power to an obscure temple in the heart of Chicago. Only with the aid of Thea and her fellow hunters can Carpenter hope to stand against its dark might
An Ancient Force Awakens
But Thea learns that Carpenter has not yet revealed everything - not about his actual goals, nor about the mysterious entity's true nature. Only by entering the formidable Temple of Akhenaton can Thea hope to discover the truth - and uncover a revelation that may change the world
Heralds of the Storm is the first novel in the Year of the Scarab trilogy. This three volume epic reveals the rise of an ancient power thaqt threatens to forever alter the World of Darkness... the immortal beings known as mummies.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 7, 2022
In my continuing quest to follow Beckett through White Wolf Publishing, I read the Year of the Scarab Trilogy. The Trilogy served as part of a year-long introduction to the Mummy: the Resurrection game line. In addition to Mummy, the story incorporates lore from Wraith: the Oblivion, Hunter: the Reckoning, Vampire: the Masquerade, and smidgen of Mage: the Awakening. I gotta be honest, folks: this trilogy was my second worst White Wolf reading experience ever. Since I bought these books as a bundle on DriveThruRPG and therefore only have one review slot, I’m going to review the series as a whole here. The other books' GoodReads entries have the same review pasted in.
In broadstroke, and cutting out a lot of filler, Year of the Scarab Trilogy chronicles a comedy of terrible errors performed by terrible people as they seek the Heart of Osiris, the book’s McGuffin. We have Thea Ghandour and the Chicago hunters, who represent the worst of America in their blind hatred and stockpile of guns. It’s fine to not know things—unlike me, the hunters can’t look things up on the White Wolf Wiki—but it was total disinterest in learning (even about their own powers!) that got me. Compassion for anyone besides themselves isn’t just rejected, but totally alien. One hunter, Jake Washington, pipes up that “hey, maybe we shouldn’t commit genocide?” but it’s a token protest.
Next, we have Maxwell Carpenter, a former leg-breaker for the Chicago mob, who is now a Wraith. His initial mission is to murder the entire Sforza bloodline. These plans are complicated when it turns out the last Sforza heir, Nicholas, is a Mummy. Nicholas, meanwhile, wants to repatriate the Heart of Osiris to Egypt to prove his Mummy-ness. This desire seems laudable until you remember he’s a pasty white man who basically wants to be brown. Beckett also appears, for marketing reasons I guess? His actions have little to no impact on the actual plot. His zero impact has the weird bonus of at least he’s not as involved in all the racism. The later books have a higher star rating because Beckett's sections were halfway enjoyable.
I’m not kidding when I say that Bates put in so much racism and sexism in the novels, both with and without intent. Incredibly tedious and boring to read. There’s an attempt to make Mummies not racist wet dream fodder, but the story, and Nicholas in particular, never quite overcome the feeling of white guys playing Egyptian dress-up.
But! Those aren't the only elements that made me want to pull my hair out! The plot’s a mess! There’s a rumor floating around online that the White Wolf novels are, in reality, novelizations of the original staff’s game chronicles. After reading Year of the Scarab, I believe it. These books have an incredible amount of just…logistics. A subplot about Beckett getting a cell phone. Two pages of intricate details about Carpenter’s digestive system and sexual biology. The hunters navigating bus/train schedules and schlepping their guns. These sections read like game notes, or perhaps an outline that Bates barely filled in.
Some genres—heist novels come to mind—thrive on logistics. Details of how something’s done are part of the fun. Here, however, logistics don’t reveal character, are irreverent to the work's themes, fail to evoke mood, atmosphere, or setting, and slow the novel down to a snail's pace. I read soooo many boring pages about people getting places. Bates must have had city maps and enjoyed tracing paths for the characters to travel. Some of his only details about the cities are bus schedules and driving directions. I don't feel like I know Cairo, Las Vegas, or Chicago any better after reading. The descriptions are generic, without sensory details. He doesn’t bring them to life. All that, AND the minutiae often leads nowhere in the grand scheme of the series. Entire arcs are closed loops: the character travels to a place and nothing with lasting consequences happens. Those chapters feel like busywork.
My final note is on the Beckett-ness. If my research is correct, Lay Down with Lions is his first long-form appearance. And my goodness, has this guy changed over the years. Year of the Scarab’s Beckett is a Low Humanity moron. He’s bumbling, arrogant, and scatter-brained. I guess I know where some of the “off beats” in the Diary come from now. Over the course of Lay Down with Lions and Land of the Dead, Beckett makes many of the same mistakes my friends and I made when we were first playing Vampire. He forgets to feed, what powers he has, how to avoid frenzy; what quest he’s on. To extend one iota of an olive branch to Bates, he had a tough gig. Not only was he introducing newly minted Mummy: the Resurrection lore, he juggled Wraith and Hunter characters. Lay Down with Lions adds Vampire: the Masquerade. But, goodness gracious, sometimes it’s painful how unfamiliar Bates is with Kindred, Gangrel, and Beckett in particular.
It left me wondering. Did Bates not read the Book of Nod's footnotes? Was Beckett's initial character concept to be an idiot and it later changed to be the One Sane Man, the Single Good Dude? There are some moments where I recognized Cuthbert amongst the mess. Should I be thankful that the VTMB writers drew more from his Victorian Trilogy self than this one? What happened here?
Mostly, I mourn what this trilogy could have been. We could have had a meditation on monstrosity and redemption. Who/what is a monster? Can the monster be redeemed? What does redemption look like? Who grants absolution? When is it ever enough? Unfortunately, this nice feast of questions had to go through the Andrew Bates’ digestive tract and it came out of his ass a pile of shit.
From plot to character, the Year of the Scarab Trilogy has a lot of problems. Reading it was the epitome of White Wolf Publishing for me. It stunk, yet something compelled me to go on. I wanted to read mediocre vampire fiction. I wanted to be blown away by how bad it was, to witness the depths it could sink; to believe there was some point to critiquing bad art. We could have had a horrific, thrilling adventure and mediation on the makings of a monster. Bates’ work is a car determined to launch itself off the freeway and into the ocean.
In broadstroke, and cutting out a lot of filler, Year of the Scarab Trilogy chronicles a comedy of terrible errors performed by terrible people as they seek the Heart of Osiris, the book’s McGuffin. We have Thea Ghandour and the Chicago hunters, who represent the worst of America in their blind hatred and stockpile of guns. It’s fine to not know things—unlike me, the hunters can’t look things up on the White Wolf Wiki—but it was total disinterest in learning (even about their own powers!) that got me. Compassion for anyone besides themselves isn’t just rejected, but totally alien. One hunter, Jake Washington, pipes up that “hey, maybe we shouldn’t commit genocide?” but it’s a token protest.
Next, we have Maxwell Carpenter, a former leg-breaker for the Chicago mob, who is now a Wraith. His initial mission is to murder the entire Sforza bloodline. These plans are complicated when it turns out the last Sforza heir, Nicholas, is a Mummy. Nicholas, meanwhile, wants to repatriate the Heart of Osiris to Egypt to prove his Mummy-ness. This desire seems laudable until you remember he’s a pasty white man who basically wants to be brown. Beckett also appears, for marketing reasons I guess? His actions have little to no impact on the actual plot. His zero impact has the weird bonus of at least he’s not as involved in all the racism. The later books have a higher star rating because Beckett's sections were halfway enjoyable.
I’m not kidding when I say that Bates put in so much racism and sexism in the novels, both with and without intent. Incredibly tedious and boring to read. There’s an attempt to make Mummies not racist wet dream fodder, but the story, and Nicholas in particular, never quite overcome the feeling of white guys playing Egyptian dress-up.
But! Those aren't the only elements that made me want to pull my hair out! The plot’s a mess! There’s a rumor floating around online that the White Wolf novels are, in reality, novelizations of the original staff’s game chronicles. After reading Year of the Scarab, I believe it. These books have an incredible amount of just…logistics. A subplot about Beckett getting a cell phone. Two pages of intricate details about Carpenter’s digestive system and sexual biology. The hunters navigating bus/train schedules and schlepping their guns. These sections read like game notes, or perhaps an outline that Bates barely filled in.
Some genres—heist novels come to mind—thrive on logistics. Details of how something’s done are part of the fun. Here, however, logistics don’t reveal character, are irreverent to the work's themes, fail to evoke mood, atmosphere, or setting, and slow the novel down to a snail's pace. I read soooo many boring pages about people getting places. Bates must have had city maps and enjoyed tracing paths for the characters to travel. Some of his only details about the cities are bus schedules and driving directions. I don't feel like I know Cairo, Las Vegas, or Chicago any better after reading. The descriptions are generic, without sensory details. He doesn’t bring them to life. All that, AND the minutiae often leads nowhere in the grand scheme of the series. Entire arcs are closed loops: the character travels to a place and nothing with lasting consequences happens. Those chapters feel like busywork.
My final note is on the Beckett-ness. If my research is correct, Lay Down with Lions is his first long-form appearance. And my goodness, has this guy changed over the years. Year of the Scarab’s Beckett is a Low Humanity moron. He’s bumbling, arrogant, and scatter-brained. I guess I know where some of the “off beats” in the Diary come from now. Over the course of Lay Down with Lions and Land of the Dead, Beckett makes many of the same mistakes my friends and I made when we were first playing Vampire. He forgets to feed, what powers he has, how to avoid frenzy; what quest he’s on. To extend one iota of an olive branch to Bates, he had a tough gig. Not only was he introducing newly minted Mummy: the Resurrection lore, he juggled Wraith and Hunter characters. Lay Down with Lions adds Vampire: the Masquerade. But, goodness gracious, sometimes it’s painful how unfamiliar Bates is with Kindred, Gangrel, and Beckett in particular.
It left me wondering. Did Bates not read the Book of Nod's footnotes? Was Beckett's initial character concept to be an idiot and it later changed to be the One Sane Man, the Single Good Dude? There are some moments where I recognized Cuthbert amongst the mess. Should I be thankful that the VTMB writers drew more from his Victorian Trilogy self than this one? What happened here?
Mostly, I mourn what this trilogy could have been. We could have had a meditation on monstrosity and redemption. Who/what is a monster? Can the monster be redeemed? What does redemption look like? Who grants absolution? When is it ever enough? Unfortunately, this nice feast of questions had to go through the Andrew Bates’ digestive tract and it came out of his ass a pile of shit.
From plot to character, the Year of the Scarab Trilogy has a lot of problems. Reading it was the epitome of White Wolf Publishing for me. It stunk, yet something compelled me to go on. I wanted to read mediocre vampire fiction. I wanted to be blown away by how bad it was, to witness the depths it could sink; to believe there was some point to critiquing bad art. We could have had a horrific, thrilling adventure and mediation on the makings of a monster. Bates’ work is a car determined to launch itself off the freeway and into the ocean.
June 10, 2020
Wraith vs. Mummy vs. Human hunters, what can be more exciting..........
Wraith is the ghost template for the White wolf Universe, a wraith is formed, when a person dies a horrible death and has unfulfilled tasks left to perform, not all deceased individuls can become a wraith, only those with tremendous will even after they passed away can become a wraith, as I was writing this review, I tried to google The Wraith game, and another factor in creating a wraith is their anchor to the past life, it can be an object that has tremendous sentimental value or someone that the deceased has an unfinished business with.......this is what is exciting and at the same time frustrating part of the White Wolf mythos, everthing had a story to tell, a part to play......
Mummies are the immortals that underwent ritual preservation in order to further serve their patron God or Goddess.........
Monster Hunters or Hunters in general are the.........well they hunt those that go bump in the night but these hunters have extra special abilities, I do not know if for this particular series they gave some advantages to the Hunters to take on their adversaries
As the story goes, we have a group of Hunters doing what they do best, hunting monsters, this particular group caught the eye of the the series' prime antagonist Maxwell Carpenter, a mafia cleaner who was betrayed by his girlfriend and killed in an agonizing way by his own Mafia Don(Boss???), the betrayal fueled the rage and thoughts of revenge and helped Carpenter to escape from the netherworld(where all would be wraiths come from), in trying to kill one of the Sforza's(the Mafia family he was working for and betrayed him), I think he helped the spirit of a mummy to come and inhabit the body of his botched kill........
Wraith is the ghost template for the White wolf Universe, a wraith is formed, when a person dies a horrible death and has unfulfilled tasks left to perform, not all deceased individuls can become a wraith, only those with tremendous will even after they passed away can become a wraith, as I was writing this review, I tried to google The Wraith game, and another factor in creating a wraith is their anchor to the past life, it can be an object that has tremendous sentimental value or someone that the deceased has an unfinished business with.......this is what is exciting and at the same time frustrating part of the White Wolf mythos, everthing had a story to tell, a part to play......
Mummies are the immortals that underwent ritual preservation in order to further serve their patron God or Goddess.........
Monster Hunters or Hunters in general are the.........well they hunt those that go bump in the night but these hunters have extra special abilities, I do not know if for this particular series they gave some advantages to the Hunters to take on their adversaries
As the story goes, we have a group of Hunters doing what they do best, hunting monsters, this particular group caught the eye of the the series' prime antagonist Maxwell Carpenter, a mafia cleaner who was betrayed by his girlfriend and killed in an agonizing way by his own Mafia Don(Boss???), the betrayal fueled the rage and thoughts of revenge and helped Carpenter to escape from the netherworld(where all would be wraiths come from), in trying to kill one of the Sforza's(the Mafia family he was working for and betrayed him), I think he helped the spirit of a mummy to come and inhabit the body of his botched kill........
June 9, 2025
I missed this
These Old World of Darkness stories are just gems from my youth. On to the next one. I can't wait!
These Old World of Darkness stories are just gems from my youth. On to the next one. I can't wait!
September 16, 2024
Full review here:
https://jamesgenrebooks.blogspot.com/...
t's readable, but it's also kind of silly and there were other fictions being released around this time that explored similar dynamics within the setting.
https://jamesgenrebooks.blogspot.com/...
t's readable, but it's also kind of silly and there were other fictions being released around this time that explored similar dynamics within the setting.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews