On June 6, 2006, the world as we knew it ended. The sun failed to rise, and out of that unnatural darkness issued thousands of undead, who commenced to slaughter and feed from millions of humans. Shapechangers stepped forward to what some still call the Last Battle , and died by the hundreds, overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
For seven days and seven nights, the war raged. On June 13, 2006, the vampires, victorious except for a few pockets of resistance, crowned Set the Prince of Darkness. He divided the world into lesser princedoms, which those princes then divided among their lesser supporters. Humans were herded like cattle, and the other supernaturals went to ground to lick their wounds and plan for a day when the Sun would rise again.

With the lens of history aiding our view, we can see that there were a number of factions who conspired to bring about the Long Night, and not all of them were vampires. However, the goal of Gehenna seems to have been the ultimate carrot that led many of the elder vampires -- hungering because human Vitae no longer sated them, and needing younger vampires as a thriving population to support them -- to follow and support Set's agenda.

What was Set's original agenda? No one knows for sure. Any records that might have been rifled were destroyed by the Sun's Return, and if there are records elsewhere, no one has unearthed them. There is evidence that he was strongly anachronistic, wanting to bring about the return of a "Golden Age" for the world -- which mainly meant a world where vampires lived like gods. He was powerfully technophobic, leading to the breakdowns of technological infrastructures and the Technoia Purge. Only efforts of some of the more modern-minded elders (Tremere being, apparently, a key figure) kept the world from being blasted back to the Bronze Age. From the fact that many of his supporters were Infernalists or otherwise related to Other Powers, one might infer that Set had some kind of deal with Another Power, and was, perhaps, an Infernalist himself.

Was the world en route to savagery, ruled by vampiric gods? Or was the world en route to summoning some Great Evil from beyond? No one knows.

What is sure is that there was a struggle between the Servitor factions (those who served a power Beyond: the Baali, Infernalist Sabbat, the Black Spiral Dancers, the corrupted tribe of Shadow Lords, Nephandi, and the Nephandic Technocracy) and the Power factions (those who followed Set out of sheer lust for power -- or their own agendas: the Tremere, the Blood Brothers, the Setites, the Lasombra, the Assamites, and some Order of Hermes mages). In this struggle, Set remained surprisingly silent, letting the sides beat on each other until they wore down to an uneasy truce.

Over the years, Resistance vampires had possibly the greatest attrition of all the Resistance fighters, and sadly received little sympathy from those they were helping. Many younger vampires, having had the fear of Gehenna instilled in them from "birth," were uneasy with the rule of the great Antediluvians, and sought to free themselves from the probability that they were going to be used in a fashion much like the humans. They developed a sympathy for their living compatriots, and a high level of Humanity grew from this sympathy. Some older vampires admitted to being stuck in their rut of existence, and were angry about the missing Sun, the change in lifestyle, the necessity of kissing up to their "superiors" just to get hunting privileges in their old haunts. It was the elder vampires whose arrogance and uncaring attitudes encouraged the jaundiced eye their living allies threw toward the undead Resistance.

At any rate, Brujahs, Gangrels, and Nosferatu fell in line almost universally with the Resistance. There were isolated members of other clans, mostly there for their own reasons rather than fundamental clan affiliation. However, the remaining Sabbat, under the leadership of the Tzimisce, frequently worked with the Resistance, coordinating their efforts through Silicon Blaze's information underground so that they never had to actually work *with* Resistance fighters.

One of the hundreds of rumors about what immediately preceded the Sun's Return says that one reason the Sabbat ceased to exist as such was because of their integral role in gaining access to Vienna and the underground caverns under Set's palace.

Vampires are few and far between in the Bright Future, although more plentiful in the Western Hemisphere than the Eastern, where the Sun destroyed all that were abroad at the time of his Return. There are still minions of Set in existence, partly consumed by the Corruptor and believing half-heartedly in Set's return. The former members of the Resistance have formed a group called The Network, which has close ties to Silicon Blaze and the Guild of Technology -- mostly young vampires who want to foster a symbiotic relationship with the "world community" someday. Mexico City and its environs plays host to a core of former Sabbat vampires who rule the city with the help of ghouls and other servitors. There is also a loosely-knit group of feral vampires (Gangrels and the rare Ahrimane) who work to keep their territories free of any infringement of civilization.