ChilRev: Lady Willoughby

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<1>Lady Margaret Willoughby, Keeper of the Lost Secret

<n>On a wicked night in Scotland, five self-styled witches had gathered in a guestroom in the eastern wing of Balmoral Castle. Their coven had convened to ensorcel their hostess, the Queen Victoria, who had become morose after the death of her husband the Prince Consort Albert. Led by the traitor Lady Lise Paulmann, the witches convened in the library, drawing forbidden sigils on the floor and lighting candles so that they might call forth the ghost of Albert and compel him to beg her to join him, driving the queen to despair. Even if the queen didn’t try to cross the Veil into the ghostly prince’s arms, the moment she spoke in public about a visitation form her lover’s ghost, she’d no longer be suitable to lead the empire in the eyes of her subjects, despite the Romantic mysticism of the time.

For her part, Lady Paulmann sought to place the queen in thrall so that the newly unified Germany, growing in power, might keep its European neighbor in check. For the rest of the witches, such treachery was unimaginable, and they were seduced by the idea of having the queen in their debt of silence. Paulmann herself lived in Victoria’s United Kingdom and had no desire to invite the bellicose Germans to sack her adopted home, as she too greatly enjoyed the affluence and comfort to which she had grown accustomed. Without a doubt, she was a spy for her homeland… but she had no desire to aid the fatherland too much.

In truth, Lady Paulmann was a ghoul working at the behest of a coterie of German Ventrue, waging their secret Jyhad against London’s Prince Mithras. Acting directly against Queen Victoria was a bold and desperate move on their part, and the ruse unraveled only because of the timely arrival of the agents of Scotland’s Tremere Lord.

Scotland had long been a territory of primarily Toreador fiefdom domains, owing to a connection between the Caledonian Degenerates and the House of Valois, which had attached the Scottish domains during the rule of Mary Stuart and her marriage to Francis II of France. Dispossessed French Toreador traveled to Scotland, claiming domains there from independent lesser Ventrue, Brujah, and Gangrel Princes, backing their praxis seizures with the power of the French throne before the ascension of Elizabeth in England and the complicity of many English Ventrue along the way.

Amid this centuries-old political and Kindred quagmire, Lady Paulmann’s plot against Victoria formed. And the night her seance began, it was interrupted by the arrival of Baladin, who then held the Lordship of the assembled domains. Baladin’s arrival was purest coincidence, but the guilty looks of the Queen’s other guests when he made his introductions queered the entire ritual and roused his suspicions. Under his withering presence, one of the assembled “witches,” Lady Margaret Willoughby, admitted the entire plot, and with a hasty session of Dominated probing, Baladin confirmed the conspiracy and its betrayers.

In most cases, this would have spelled the end for both the holdout traitors and the one who gave them away, for Tremere justice is an unyielding thing. A greater tumult in the House of Tremere changed the outcome this night, however, and the plot against Queen Victoria became the catalyst for a greater scheme that would span continents. The crisis had yielded an opportunity.

The opportunity wasn’t a pleasant one, however, as might be expected of the treacheries of the Damned. Of the five witches, Baladin killed three, to protect the secret of the conspiracy — and to slake his thirst on their blood. Thereafter, the Tremere Lord sequestered himself at an ancillary Tremere chantry in Glasgow with Ladies Paulmann and Willoughby as his “guests,” where they were attended by obsequious ghouls and bizarre Thaumaturgical constructs that placated their needs. The ladies responded differently to their host’s hospitality, and Baladin made plain that he had plans for them that involved a greater degree of the sorcerous arts than their limited attempts at Balmoral had provided.

For a month, Baladin courted the two ersatz witches with temptations to power, exacting from them tithes of blood that he used to initiate them into the mysteries of Clan Tremere. On the most auspicious night, when a cloudless sky yielded a long, raw solstice, the Tremere Lord brought his apprentice into the chantry vault to Embrace Lady Paulmann. Incensed, Lady Paulmann protested, for if the secret of true witchcraft traveled in the blood, why should she have to settle for the Embrace of a low and common apprentice? Baladin slapped her, stunning her into silence, warning her that the structure of the pyramid must needs have its foundation, and that there were… ways to rise the potency of the Blood. Lady Paulmann then churlishly submitted to the apprentice’s Embrace, while Lady Willoughby looked on in horror and watched her die.

When the undead creature that Lise Paulmann had become rose from the death-chrysalis, the Tremere Lord ordered her to feed on the blood of a ghoul. And as if to demonstrate the sanguine hierarchy of the clan, he compelled Lady Paulmann to perform the same act upon Lady Willoughby, to pluck the thread of her life and replace it with the midnight blood of Damnation. The look in Lady Paulmann’s eyes as she approached Lady Willoughby paralyzed the still-mortal woman with despair. She had always been docile, and had joined the witches’ coven largely out of obligation to the others, and to see the monstrosity that awaited her under the curse that this Baladin fiend had explained — but the time for such terrors vanished as her life poured from her body in a thrilling rush that bloomed within her voracious accomplice.

Baladin then gave a practical lesson in those “ways to rise the potency of the Blood.” He explained to the fledglings that by drinking another Kindred’s blood and beyond, by consuming her very soul, one could focus the power in vitae, distilling it, alchemically reducing it to a more potent humour and gleaning from its puissance a more acute power over the Kindred condition. And then, as the viselike grip of a Thaumaturgical servitor rendered Lady Paulmann immobile, he instructed Margaret Willoughby to perform that very act.

The Amaranth scarred Lady Willoughby with its violence, with its carnal pleasure, and with the unwholesome blasphemy of its function. As her sire of a few moments’ blood streaked from Lady Willoughby’s mouth and nose, Lise Paulmann’s body crumbled to ash.

“This is for your protection and mine,” Baladin spoke cryptically, and only later did Lady Willoughby come to understand the value of the remove from her grandsire’s lineage. At the cost of her own humanity, she gained the power of her grandsire’s Embrace, but also a distance between them — a progenitive gap that suggested an autonomy from Baladin’s will accomplished only by the illusory pretense of ancestry. “Besides,” the Tremere Lord disclosed, “a sense of entitlement like your departed sire’s makes for a dubious foundation in the pyramid.”

Alas, the newly Embraced aristo showed little skill with Thaumaturgy, finding its practice repulsive and medieval. At Baladin’s urging, she gravitated toward the political theater of the clan, but here she similarly had little success. The political weight of a Tremere who was a minor lord’s wife in Toreador-dominated Scotland was negligible, and she proved as much a liability to the Warlocks as she did an asset. About this time, Baladin’s own career with the Tremere was in decline, and the two parted ways.

In an effort to leave the United Kingdom behind, Lady Willoughby took her own monies, left to her after the unfortunate consumptive death of her husband, and invested in the Transandine Railway. Shipping off the entirety of her estate to Argentina, Lady Willoughby looked very much the part of the expatriate investor, and despite the difficulties the Ferrocarril Trasandino Clark company had in breaking ground, the endeavor eventually not only launched but prospered. With a modest investment quietly accumulating resources for her, Lady Willoughby’s interests turned inward. With a humble haven in Mendoza, she learned the language and enough of the Argentine culture to play up her role as an urbane emigre.

Such quiet resolutions rarely occupy the Kindred for long, though, and such proved to be the case for Lady Willoughby. One evening, when she had held a dinner party for several of the city’s elite at her californiano home, she received a visitor: her grandsire, Baladin. His star hadn’t faded by chance, he had simply constructed a quiet exit from the Lordship of Scotland with the aid of a silent patron placed elsewhere in the Pyramid. This had all been part of his long-term plan, he confessed, because he and his patron had discovered a secret that might have sparked a war in Europe, and with tensions rising in Austria-Hungary at the time, the last thing the Kindred needed was high conflict on top of the worsening mortal political climate.

Baladin disclosed his situation, that he had found an unlikely ally in a thread of Thaumaturgical research during time spent in the late 1700s in Vienna. In various studies of Kindred blood, the composition of the Gargoyle bloodline, and the curse-haunted soil of Eastern European domains, Baladin and a small cabal of fellow Tremere of House Goratrix had discovered a curiosity that seemed to have flourished, if such could be said, in the vitae of Clan Tzimisce. And, if the experiments conducted by the chantry proved true, Baladin and his cabal would have the ability to render the “anomaly” inert. Lady Willoughby didn’t understand, so Baladin explained — if the blood magic could be developed, the Tremere would have the ability to terminate the Curse of Caine in the Tzimisce, sending the ritual traveling up the mystic lineage of the Fiends like a virus, reducing them to ash where they stood.

The broad and fine details still eluded Margaret Willoughby, but that was why Baladin had chosen her. She lacked the ability to effect the ritual herself, so he had no worries that she’d abuse it without his knowledge, and her lack of effectiveness in larger Kindred politics had meant that no one had taken undue notice of her. She was an excellent candidate to protect the secret that he was now poised on the verge of discovering.

The problem, of course, was that House Goratrix had chosen to league with the Sabbat, which had been formed after the Anarch Revolt as a union of Lasombra and… Tzimisce. With the power of the Sabbat on the rise in the New World, Goratrix saw an opportunity to place his rogue chantry of Tremere antitribu in a position of advantage among them. This didn’t quench any of House Goratrix’s enthusiasm for finding the ritual. Rather, Baladin confided, his old coven seemed highly motivated to do so — it simply made their motives somewhat different from those of the Tremere still faithful to Vienna and the Council of Seven. The Spellbinder’s priorities belonged first to himself and then his House, with loyalty to the Sword of Caine falling to a distant third on the Usurper’s agenda. To Goratrix, the Sabbat represented a useful tool and a powerful patron sect rather than an ideology to venerate in and of itself.

Since Baladin’s arrival in South America, the Sabbat had its eyes on him, and despite his expert use of Thaumaturgy to hide his trail, the rebels of House Goratrix had greater sorceries at their command. His movements known to those Sabbat agents that Goratrix’s faction had deemed appropriate to tell, Baladin knew that his time was running out, but that someone outside the rogue faction must possess the secret. He stayed at Lady Willoughby’s haven for several months, though he vanished for weeks at a time, intentionally keeping her ignorant of his movements so that anyone who questioned her wouldn’t be able to pry his whereabouts from her, regardless of what anyone who sought him might inflict on her.

During these months, Margaret Willoughy considered her fate. Her sire had abused her since her first night among the Damned, treating her as a pawn and a patsy, pushing first his condition and then his agenda upon her. By the coming of autumn in 1912, Lady Willoughby decided she’d had enough of Baladin’s ill treatment. When the Víboras de Dios pack came calling, with murder on their minds and fire at hand, she offered them a deal. She’d present them with a staked Baladin and they’d leave her alone while she fled their domain. Disappointed at the lack of need to force her to yield her guest, the Víboras de Dios left Lady Willoughby with a grim warning. If she planned to renege on the agreement, they’d hunt her too the ends of the earth and splay her innards in a blood eagle for the sun to devour. Margaret had no intention of backing out of the deal, but she had played the shrinking violet long enough. Having steeled herself to her course of action, she planned a betrayal that to her bore the gravity of justice.

The next night, Lady Willoughby rummaged through Baladin’s rooms, looking for through his meager belongings for anything that might have looked like it might bear Thaumaturgical value. Baladin was no fool, however, and had both hidden his journals that contained the ritual and warded his makeshift haven from tampering. When he returned to Margaret’s haven, filthy with the grime of obviously desperate travel he demanded that she show him her hands. There, beneath the lace of her evening gloves, glistened his weeping sigil, opened raw upon the flesh of her hand.

Lady Willoughby confessed to the arrival and fierce threats of the Sabbat pack that had come to demand that she deliver him to them, but that she had no idea where he was. From there, however, she concocted a lie that suited her meek demeanor, that they demanded some personal trinket of his and that she relented, rifling his belonging in a desperate attempt to give them something of value.

Baladin bought the ruse, prideful of his own anticipation that someone might have been tailing him and the wisdom in hiding his ritual journal. He forgave Lady Willoughby the transgression and questioned her as to the identities of the interlopers. She described the Víboras de Dios, whom he recognized as Sabbat, but without any known connection to the Tremere antitribu.

The Argentine domains had no formal sect allegiance, being a confederation of territories in which Princes and Bishops of both the Camarilla and Sabbat held sway. Between the most populous areas stretched vast, unknown domains, where Autarkis might be the only power, or where packs of Sabbat or Anarchs might claim praxis of their own. As such, Baladin explained, the only authorities to be found were of the very local variety, and should the Prince of Mendoza not have any personal grievance against the Sabbat, she might not have any issue with turning a troublemaker over to an eager pack if it meant the Sword of Caine would move on from her domain back to its own. That meant that their safety was in their own hands, and that flight was their best recourse.

Weeping tears of blood that Baladin assumed to be borne of fear, Lady Willoughby agreed. They would abandon the californiano the next night, and she would go where he instructed her, waiting until he contacted her again to make her next move. She even suggested that he not tell her his destination, again that his secrecy might be protected. Baladin smiled. His grand-childe knew her role. He had chosen well. He next night, when they once again left each other’s company, he would travel to the macondo where the local Chulupi fearfully revered him as Desmodus. There, he could practice his rites, “Embracing” the victims the Chulupi provided with his sorcerous approximation of the Tzimisce condition and the tie it developed between the fledgling and the land. He collected his things, including the oilskin satchel that contained his encoded diaries, which contained the location of his secret Thaumaturgical cache near the Chulupi village.

It was never to come to pass as such.

While Baladin retired into a smug day-sleep, Lady Willoughby roused herself from slumber and crept to his room in an agonizing lethargy. In her mind, she fought the actualizing urge to rouse her grandsire in the moment before she condemned him, letting him know that his hapless subordinate had finally suffered enough, but too much was at stake. Without the satisfaction of his understanding, Margaret plunged a carob stake into Baladin’s heart and hammered it home with a silver mallet purloined from among the ex-Lord’s meager travel belongings. Sodden with his spurting blood, hoping that he recognized her in the moment when his eyes bulged at the attack, Lady Willoughby crawled back to the comfort of her own chambers and slept a fitful sleep for the remainder of the day.

When next she woke, Margaret contacted the Víboras de Dios and let their pack leader know that she was ready to fulfill her half of their agreement. When the pack arrived, she allowed them to plunder his sleeping quarters. It was in a ruin, she explained, because she and Baladin had planned to flee that very night, but she misled him to allay his suspicions, and they had struggled briefly when she had staked him in his surprise. She had no use for his half-packed things, she said, and the pack could take what they wanted. The pack sought information about the Tremere’s Thaumaturgical breakthrough for its patron Dominion, but they had no reason to think that Lady Willoughby would know what they desired. And she continued to play her part as the timid victim, convincing the Víboras as wholly as she had Baladin.

In truth, Lady Willoughby had taken Baladin’s satchel before she arranged for the pack to collect its gory prize. She knew the satchel didn’t contain the precious secret, but she knew that it contained clues to where it had been hidden. She then asked for the protection of the Víboras de Dios, begging asylum within the Sabbat for, when word of her betrayal reached Vienna, she would be a marked Kindred.

Lady Willoughby’s request was beyond the authority the Víboras de Dios had, especially in the contested domains of Argentina and in a domain claimed at least nominally by a Camarilla Prince. They were savvy enough to realize that they weren’t dealing with a sniveling neophyte who would end up impaled on a spit during the Sword of Caine’s next Fire Dance, however — they knew Baladin’s background and the fact that a powerful rival faction in the Sabbat afforded him some degree of protection. Rather than take a chance at offending that unknown entity, they referred her to Néstor Lavagna, then a Bishop of Clan Lasombra, who maintained a civil discourse with the Prince of Mendoza.

The audience with the Bishop went as well as it could have. For her part, Lady Willoughby was mostly forthright. Bishop Lavagna plucked several illuminating thoughts from Margaret’s mind, as well, smoothing over the ripples in her memory afterward so that she wouldn’t recall the inquiry — and he was intrigued by what Lady Willoughby’s confessions suggested. The question was, how could he turn this best to his advantage? If the mystical knowledge she possessed was true, the Tzimisce rivals of Clan Lasombra in the Sabbat would cease to be a political threat to the Keepers’ rightful dominance. But the weapon was a dangerous one, for without the Tzimisce, the Sabbat stood little chance of holding its already tenuous domains against the Camarilla, and without adequate soldiery, the Sword of Caine certainly could pose no threat to the hated Antediluvians. And Bishop Lavagna had to acknowledge the truth, that he was a remote Bishop in a contested territory who had little grasp of the global status of the Camarilla-Sabbat conflict. So he did what the Kindred do best. He traded his information for favor.

The Lasombra curry favor with one another like no other clan can, and Lady Willoughby soon found herself invited to the domain of São Paulo by none other than the Archbishop. The last anyone saw of her was under the protection of a cadre of Caine’s Chosen in the spring of 1917, and there her trail vanishes from the consciousness of the Damned.

It would seem that Lady Willoughby’s tale ends thus, with her becoming a captive of the Sword of Caine, likely in some wretched hell beneath the streets of Sampa, where she either lies staked or shackled to a scrivener’s desk, scratching out possible permutations of the ritual Baladin thieved from under the collective noses of House Goratrix. That is not the case, however. Or, rather, it was, but it no longer is. The Tremere of the Sabbat did indeed have Lady Willoughby indentured and ensorcelled, bound to the subterranean library of the apostate Pontifex of Brazil. There she remained a prisoner, poring over not the ritual itself, but Baladin’s journals, which held the secret of the ritual that could cripple the Tzimisce.

One night, the ritual binding Margaret into the biblioteca simply… lapsed. She felt the ward cease suddenly, like manacles falling from the wrists of a slave. That was over a decade ago. She still hasn’t left the library — how can she? She’s in an unknown city where she doesn’t speak the language, in a domain claimed by an Archbishop she may or may not know anymore, who may or may not be among the Damned, and the arguable chattel of a clan that has vanished, which is a fact she doesn’t possess. For all of her efforts to free herself from the yoke of Baladin, she’s ended up in an even worse situation, and lacks the temerity to make her own go of it again. Instead, she confines herself to the vast underground library of the absent Pontifex, feeding from a dwindling retinue of still-living servitors (shouldn’t they all be dead by now?), wearing the immaculately kept remainder of a century ago’s wardrobe and guarding a secret she doesn’t actually possess.

Little by little, though, Lady Willoughby has been mustering the boldness to test the confines of her prison. On the night of the new moon, he says, a Spanish-speaking Malkavian envoy of the Black Hand visits her to check on her ongoing progress with Baladin’s journal. She doesn’t trust him, and he knows she lies to him when she tells him that she’s been diligent with the effort but that it hasn’t yielded anything, and so the two play their own private Jyhad. This Black Hand contact does permit her contact with the outside world, though, and faithfully brings her handwritten letters to be posted, collecting what few responses she may receive. It’s a strange code of honor this Freak of Caine’s Chosen possesses, for he doesn’t read her mail, believing that some night he’ll find out whatever it is that keeps him coming back to Margaret’s side.

So who exactly corresponds with Lady Margaret Willoughby? Valkar de la Rosa, a Spanish Tremere Embraced perhaps a decade before the Pontifex’s ritual wavered. When Margaret’s Black Hand attendant first visited her, she had sent a letter to Valkar’s sire, but it ended up in the hands of the childe. From there, de la Rosa continued the communication out of a sense of duty, and has since learned what Lady Willoughby thinks she hides, as well as collecting an incomplete copy of the journals of Baladin, which Margaret encodes with her own cipher, trickling it to him one page at a time. Why did Lady Willoughby choose Valkar’s sire with whom to initiate correspondence? And why does she continue it despite knowing that it’s not her first choice of Kindred who returns her letters? Only she knows, but she plans to soon try again, hoping to reach a different Kindred whose last known whereabouts she hopes to discern from the arcane library beneath São Paulo. With little attention to how much time has passed, she’ll probably reach another descendent of any named Kindred, or even a childe of a childe, assuming the receiving address still exists at all.

The disintegration of what remains of Maragaret Willoughby’s unlife isn’t the worst of the situation, however. Baladin, in the hands of the Víboras de Dios, never made it to the Chulupi macondo. Whether his ritual would or wouldn’t have succeeded never became known, but whatever he buried there in the heights of the Andes did something to the village near where it lay buried. Tonight, none of the Chulupi survive as the mortals they once were. They have long since become the desmodus, the nag loper, and what remains of the village itself is little more than a desiccated necropolis… and its dwellers are hungry.

Sire: Lady Lise Paulmann (deceased)

Clan: Tremere (possibly antitribu)

Nature: Loner

Demeanor: Caregiver

Generation: 9th

Embrace: 1864 AD

Apparent Age: Late 30s

Physical: Strength 2, Dexterity 2, Stamina 2

Social: Charisma 3, Manipulation 3, Appearance 2

Mental: Perception 5, Intelligence 2, Wits 2

Talents: Alertness 4, Awareness 1, Empathy 2, Subterfuge 3

Skills: Etiquette 3, Performance 1, Stealth 3

Knowledges: Academics 2, Investigation (research) 2, Medicine 1, Occult 1, Science (outdated eugenics theory) 2

Disciplines: Auspex 2, Dominate 2, Thaumaturgy (Path of Blood) 1

Thaumaturgical Rituals: Communicate with Kindred Sire, Deflection of Wooden Doom, Engaging the Vessel of Transference, Wake with Evening’s Freshness

Backgrounds: Contacts 1, Herd 2, Retainers 2

Virtues: Conscience 1, Self-Control 2, Courage 2

Morality: Humanity 4

Willpower: 2

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 14/2

Image: Lady Willoughby has been denied the opportunity to assimilate into modern society. She exhibits the stasis of the undead in her clothing in particular, wearing full Victorian dress when she expects to feed or when she expects to entertain her Black Hand Malkavian rival and confidant. In fact, she has little choice, as the only clothes she has are those with which she was entombed in the biblioteca of the Sabbat Pontifex. Her Embrace came in the cold of December, and she has a winter countenance that stands out significantly among the tropical complexions of the residents — and Kindred — of Brazil. Her hands are small and dainty, almost always sheathed in damask gloves, and she wears her long hair in a proper Marcel wave.

Roleplaying Hints: You are a tempest at sea, slow to rouse, but when the full weight of your wrath has arrived, is is terrible to behold, so long have you been shuttered away from any but simpering thralls and the fractured agent of some killer’s cult. Woe to the Kindred, especially the rapacious Sabbat, who consider your reserve to be timidity or complacency. Confined to this dank and horrid den, you have become its lioness. Were you ever to escape, you would likely be overwhelmed by the immense changes wrought upon the world since your removal from it. Everything would seem familiar enough to unsettle your long-atrophied mind, but sinister enough in its difference to plunge you into fear-frenzy or worse.

Haven: The library of the lost apostate of São Paulo is a wonder, but an incomplete one, and Margaret’s lack of practical skill with Thaumaturgy makes it a gilded prison. Or it would, if Lady Willoughby had any ambition for blood magic. Instead, she haunts its vast shelves like a revenant, bound to it now by the twisted sense of safety she finds in its contemptible familiarity. She has a perfect memory of what books and scrolls reside where, but not their contents. Since the mortal servants who attend the library have slowly begun to die off, she maintains a shrine to their memory in a previously unused alcove of the vault, where she displays their severed heads and occasionally conducts one-sided conversations with them, remembered verbatim from the last time they spoke.

Derangement: With her contact limited and few substantial outlets for conversation, Lady Margaret Willoughby finds herself prone to vicious bouts of hysteria, and it is in these states that she removes the heads from her beloved? — no, that’s not the word — mortal minions when they finally succumb to age and she grieves. In reality, Lady Willoughby obviously suffers some horrific aggravation of something akin to Stockholm syndrome. Under the combination of this, her hysterics, and the unending sameness of dwelling in a candlelit tomb of the written word, she is dangerous and unwholesome company.

The Devil’s Darling

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Per request, a Lasombra privateer. The tone’s a bit different with this one, allowing for a bit more action-and-adventure-style Vampire chronicles.

Esperanza Lucifer, the Devil’s Darling

I trust that we all know what's going on here.

Few Kindred are so renowned as to be known beyond the limits of the city in which they have made their haven. The interests of the Damned are almost universally personal and rarely furthered by activity that exceeds the geographic boundary of their own domains. In fact, despite a salacious social construct that elevates its saints and bogeymen to artificial heights, most Kindred spend the bulk of their existence in local pursuits. Pursuing a secret, acquiring information, creating a work of art, mastering a Discipline, enjoying a literary or cinematic work, and simply overseeing one’s nightly affairs takes time. Even setting aside the never-ending hunt for blood, most Kindred simply have no interest in involving themselves in the affairs of other Kindred who don’t threaten their domains. Even the vaunted Primogen and Princes much prefer to remain big fish in their respective small ponds than small fish in a much larger ocean. Recognition and fame only invite a host of political and supernatural entanglements that offer far more trouble than benefit. Worse, celebrity among the undead is the surest way to draw the attention of hunters, Kindred or otherwise, who seek the famous vampire’s demise.

Some few among the Damned have risen to notoriety, however. Besides the semi-mythical Antediluvians and a host of legendary Methuselahs, for the most part these Kindred are elders whose achievements were instrumental in shaping the modern society of vampires. Hardestadt, for example, whether admired or reviled, is known across the globe by many Kindred for his role in the founding of the Camarilla. On the other hand, Francisco Domingo de Polonia, the one-time Sabbat Archbishop of New York City, achieved fame primarily due to the global importance of his domain. In addition, certain Justicars and a few of those they hunt have also become known throughout the world’s Elysiums. Still, besides their names, little else of these figures is known, even by Kindred of a scholarly nature.

Ultimately, only a handful of Kindred have achieved anything akin to true fame, Kindred who have by virtue of their deeds and misdeeds become legend. One of these, a rogue whose exploits have been recounted by the Damned from Los Angeles to St. Petersburg is Esperanza Lucifer, the Devil of the Deep.

According to some accounts, Esperanza was the daughter of a Spanish naval commander who fought the mostly French and English buccaneers who patrolled the waters off the coast of Haiti, then Hispaniola. Others claim that she was actually a prostitute, brought to the island of Tortuga by the French to sate the rampant lusts of the local pirates. A few voices say she was both, a lord’s daughter captured and forced into prostitution by her captors. Whatever the truth, all tales agree that she was quite young and quite beautiful, with long, fair tresses and eyes of the deepest blue, like the sea.

Aristocrat or harlot, Esperanza fell in love with a veteran captain employed by the Dutch West India Company, one Hendrick Jacobszoon, a rather rough-around-the-edges fellow who adopted the surname Lucifer to enhance his image among friend and foe alike. How the affair began is the subject of a plethora of very different stories, but in 1627 the two were together when Hendrick’s ship had a fateful encounter with a pair of Spanish ships sailing from Honduras.

The Dutch West India Company ships, for there were three in all, dared not let the opportunity pass and so set upon the Spanish ships, succeeding in capturing one, while the other escaped their barbarous clutches. The fighting was fierce and Hendrick was injured by a bullet in the action. Ignoring pain, he fought as if possessed of some preternatural potency and so won the day, as well as an untold fortune in guilders. He was unable to enjoy the spoils, however. Later that day in his own cabin, Esperanza at his side, he breathed his last.

Terrified at being left alone with Hendrick’s bloodthirsty crew now that her protector was gone, Esperanza racked her brain for a way of avoiding what seemed an obvious and unwholesome fate. She hatched a scheme that called upon all the imagination, courage, self-control, and willpower she could muster, along with a hearty helping of rum. Emboldened by drink and what she saw as her only possible recourse, clad in some of the accoutrements of her now-deceased lover, armed with his pistol and rapier, the young girl vanished in the blood-stained cabin and the new captain of the ship stepped onto the deck.

The crew was flabbergasted at Esperanza’s daring and thought it a joke, laughing at the woman’s audacity. The humor died when one of the pirates dared to grab her and found six inches of steel in his stomach, courtesy of the self-anointed Captain Esperanza Lucifer. The action gave her enough room to quickly tell the crew of how, unless they accepted her command, they would suffer at the hands of the Spanish. She surprised even herself with her rhetorical gifts at that moment and feared it might not prove enough for the hungry, drunken crew, but many were exhausted, wounded, and in no more mood for violence. They had their gold and they wanted little more than to return to port to enjoy their share of the plunder. Until they made port, most reasoned, the sailors might as well give her the service she wanted.

Esperanza’s initial plan to flee upon making land did not come to pass. Perhaps she had nowhere to go, or she was more worried about her fate away from the crew than with them. Or, she simply realized the potential offered by being a pirate captain. Again, it matters little to most Kindred what her thinking was. What is of importance is what happened a few years later when, for a second time on the high seas, she faced a truly life-altering decision.

Word of Captain Lucifer’s “mutiny” were widespread, especially in Tortuga and among those seafarers who frequented the infamous port city. She became one of the most wanted pirates when the Spanish recaptured the town in 1654, yet she proved exceptionally capable of evading capture… for a time. But all man’s works must come to an end and her own ship, which she had rechristened the Devil’s Darling, finally met a force that it could not outgun or outrun.

Esperanza’s foe was not another ship, but rather a mysterious visitor who appeared on deck one particularly stormy night, master of the briny waves who proved unbeatable. A Lasombra of great age — some claim a Methuselah, even — rose from the depths of the churning sea, a creature of the abyss who was inexorably drawn to the charismatic pirate captain. Under cover of unnatural darkness and torrential rains, the shadowy vampire entered Esperanza’s cabin and introduced itself. Those who tell the tale hotly debate its name and even gender, but it was undeniably potent. One version of the story even claims that the Lasombra was the Antediluvian’s spawn and that it had lain in torpor beneath the sea floor since the Great Deluge, rising only when it was tasted a tide-borne drop of the fiery Captain Lucifer’s blood.

The Ancient had fed on nearly half the crew before entering the private bedchamber in order to quench its ungodly hunger, so that when it did enter and present itself to the half-asleep woman, it was able to do so with a demeanor of civility. The incalculable power of its presence and the unbelievable words it spoke left Esperanza incapable of responding. When she finally did, the legend says she agreed to become like her visitor only so long as she was permitted to keep her ship and crew, which had apparently become her life’s purpose. The Lasombra gave its word that she would be able to do as she pleased, then it unleashed the forces of the ocean’s blackest depths and she drowned in the darkness of its Embrace.

Of course, a few stories relate Esperanza’s activities or whereabouts for the next decade. Some among the Night Clan assumed that she accompanied her sire for at least some of this time, learning the ways of the Damned and doing his bidding, whatever that may have been. Suffice to say that in 1666 the Devil’s Darling was again in action and once more making quite the name for itself and its Damned captain. By this time, however, though the ship was involved in a number of well-known acts of traditional piracy, its real target is of far more interest to the Kindred. Esperanza’s primary concern had become the destruction of those Lasombra who did not cleave to the Sabbat, the antitribu traitors who had joined Montano’s cause and threw their support behind the Camarilla and its staid ways.

Throughout the Caribbean and the Atlantic the Devil’s Darling hunted these wayward Lasombra, many of whom had themselves taken to piracy. Perhaps it goes without saying that many of her most recounted battles took place under the light of the moon, though her crew, rumored to be ghouls or revenants possessed of some small measure of supernatural ability, certainly took advantage of daylight to capture enemy vessels and more easily dispatch their captain’s enemies. As the stories of Esperanza’s adventures grew even in her own time, the Camarilla made some effort to put an end to her business, more to protect their financial interests than the Lasombra fugitives she hounded.

It is said that, like her sire, Esperanza came to possess an unusually formidable mastery of Obtenebration, one that seemed fittingly adapted to her environs. In particular, one rather popular tale tells of how she found herself along with another ship cut off from an escape route near Cuba by a half-dozen warships backed by Camarilla interests. As her second ship listed under cannon-fire and her own seemed poised for a similar fate, Captain Lucifer called upon the very void of the ocean depths and from it summoned the mythical Kraken, a nightmarish monstrosity whose umbrageous tentacles rose up from the swelling waves and pulled each of the enemy ships to their watery doom. The crews on board were drained of their vitae, exsanguinated by the hellish thing before being sent to Davy Jones’ Locker.

Some suggest that Esperanza consumed the souls of her foes when she could, sometimes engaging in diablerie and sometimes indulging something even worse, if such a practice exists. This tall tale, and many others, ensured that the Devil’s Darling, as both Esperanza’s ship and later the captain herself were named, would not be easily forgotten and would go down in the history of the Kindred as entertainment at the least, if not actual fact. Even some of her pack, who served as officers both on her flagship and other vessels that comprised the fleet she commanded throughout her career as a buccaneer, gained some acclaim of their own. A particularly repulsive Tzimisce known as Abbatoir, who led the ritae for the Devil’s Darlings and is said to have committed diablerie no less than four times, was put down in 1708 near the Florida Keys by a Gangrel of some esteem. Another member of the pack, a Toreador antitribu named Mogrovejo destroyed a trio of Ventrue, including a childe of London’s Prince, who were traveling to England from the Americas in 1811.

While the great age of piracy finally ended in the mid-1700s, the name of Esperanza Lucifer proved far more durable. Rather than fade away into the shadows along with tales of swashbuckling avarice and dramatic sea battles, the Devil’s Darling continued to make her presence felt in ways that her fellow Kindred could not ignore.

In 1812 Esperanza threw her support behind the just-announced war on Britain by the United States. Quiet for a time, she recruited a crew for her fleet in Baltimore and terrorized ships of the Royal Navy, technically as a privateer under the flag of the U.S. Naturally, the targets chosen were often those ships believed to be transporting Camarilla Kindred, for the Devil’s Darling had by now largely turned her aggressions toward that sect as a whole rather than merely her clan’s antitribu, who were likely too few in number to reasonably pursue. With Lucifer’s ships in play, the Sabbat had a very real impact, with no less than two dozen Kindred meeting their Final Death in the cold waters of the Atlantic.

What is not known to many Kindred storytellers is that by the late 1700s, Esperanza was becoming quite tired of plying the sea lanes for victims. She doubted she would find many more traitorous Lasombra and she felt the heavy bonds of the ennui that plagues so many of the Cainite race, which had progressively extinguished all but a few embers of her previous passions. Whether the heaviness of her sire’s Ancient blood in her dead heart, her own detachment from Humanity that was part and parcel of her Sabbat identity, or something else from deep below the waves, she grew weary of her existence. She so rarely participated in the Vaulderie that even her Vinculi to her packmates had become little more than faint tethers, and were unable to stand the growing might of the dark current that called to her and made her days sleepless.

In 1802, she surrendered to the call of the deep. While her pack performed the Blood Feast on the deck of her flagship, courtesy of a helpless merchant ship that had appeared on the horizon, she summoned from the abyss the same unholy monster that her sire had learned to command, an entity of shadow and evil from elsewhere. She called it to her and then, making her own escape in a rowboat, she released the abyss-thing upon her pack. None survived the calamity besides Esperanza. Relying upon her own wits and now quite impressive gifts, she made her way to Baltimore and hid among the noisy throngs of the city’s busy harbor.

For a time, Esperanza stayed clear of the affairs of the Damned. She made use of her kine contacts in order to access part of her fortune, which she had spread among various institutions and locales throughout the coastal domains of the Atlantic, but otherwise kept to herself and ceased using her infamous name. Part of her regretted what she had done to her fellow Sabbat, but not enough to make any atonement. She was no longer Captain Esperanza Lucifer, but simply a vampire who sought some semblance of solace, and solitude that could not be found while bound to others. In her loneliness, she would return to the ocean, or wherever she must go, to find her sire. She labored without a knowledge why her Ancient sire Embraced her and she desired to be by its side among the darkest shadows of the world.

Vanity intervened. A small part of the Devil’s Darling still did not want to see her legend die, and she came to the decision that before embarking on her journey she would Embrace a childe and bestow upon her progeny the identity and legacy she had spent centuries building. Just as the War of 1812 ignited, Esperanza found her replacement. Like herself, Mary was barely more than a girl when she received a visitor in the black of night. The Devil’s Darling extended an offer to enter the shadows for eternity. A laborer’s girl with no obvious merit, Mary nonetheless had a certain confidence about her that Esperanza was drawn to, as well as an unusual lack of fear. She learned quickly under her mentor’s tutelage, and when the Devil’s Darling appeared off the coast and word spread that she was seeking a crew, the Damned perked up as readily as the kine. Naturally, the living assumed that the ship and its eponymous captain were not the originals — how could they be, over a century after their first tales of infamy? However, the Cainites were not so sure and when the captain introduced herself to a group of Sabbat by the light of a bonfire on a Maryland beach, they were convinced that this was indeed the legendary Captain Lucifer.

To ensure her childe survived her first years, the real Esperanza remained at her side, claiming to be her fledgling’s childe and taking her name, Mary, as her own. In this way the elder Lasombra was able to teach the “new” Esperanza all she needed to know to both command a fleet of ships and a pack of wild-eyed Sabbat Cainites. A few years later, while in the Caribbean at a place where “Mary” felt strongest the call of her own sire’s Blood, she bid her childe farewell and vanished into the ocean, sinking beneath the waves and leaving only one Esperanza to the Sabbat.

Esperanza (the younger) proved nearly as capable as her predecessor, though her interest in the seafaring unlife waned and by the mid-1800s she had abandoned her legacy and made her way on land. Some members of her pack remained with her when she turned her back on the ocean, but the Devil’s Darlings never truly disbanded. Instead, the pack served its sect by supporting a series of actions against the Camarilla in the Americas. From Florida to Boston, Esperanza’s reputation grew as her pack ran the length of the East Coast striking at its enemies and plundering their precious vitae. The pack ranged in size from as many as a dozen vampires to as few as four, but bound by their Vinculi, they were always a force to be reckoned with.

For the next two centuries, Esperanza Lucifer led her band of marauding Sabbat in an inchoate, yet effective crusade on many Camarilla domains. In truth, there was nothing random or unplanned in what they did. While most packmates were unaware of it, Esperanza and those closest to her had actually been very precise in deciding what the pack would and would not do. The destruction of the arrogant Camarilla Kindred was surely a worthwhile goal, but this inner circle had another, more overriding aim: a transition from nomadic unlife to that of a founded pack. Even as they harangued the Camarilla and its close ties to the kine and their money, the Devil’s Darling’s adopted the same practices as their nemeses in order to grow the great wealth Esperanza already possessed on account of her sire. She hadn’t wasted the intervening centuries. Rather Esperanza had studied economics and understood their importance, even to the unliving, and she felt that without real financial assets the Sabbat would eventually find itself outmaneuvered. With money she could purchase loyal agents among the kine, and she could protect herself from her growing list of enemies’ moves against her.

Even as her pack massacred the kine and stormed the havens of their elders in the name of the Sabbat, she took advantage of the mayhem to seize whatever assets she could: cash, unsecured stocks,  and bearer bond certificates, property deeds, and whatever else she could get her hands on. To make use of these employed a small network of accountants, lawyers, businessmen, and bureaucrats, all isolated from one another, but nonetheless pawns ready to cross ethical boundaries in return for a small cut of the illicit gains. Indeed, the Devil’s Daughter emulated her Camarilla foes in whatever way best served her purposes.

As the 20th century became the 21st, Esperanza, like her sire before her, became aware of a bizarre homeward urge, a calling from her blood to that of her predecessor and her grandsire. In an increasingly complex world that whispered of the Final Nights on the winds, she decided that she too would step out of the limelight and seek the patron of her bloodline. For the past few years, she has actively sought her own replacement, the next Captain Esperanza Lucifer, to pass on the legacy she feels she has no right to let wither. Once she finds the next Devil’s Darling, she will instruct her as she had been, albeit at the head of a Sabbat pack and not aboard a ship, and she will then release the childe as her incarnation. She knows that this means that she will also have to dispose of her pack so that none know the truth, and to this end she has also been working hard, seeking to weaken her Vinculi in order to do the Devil’s work, though it has come at great cost to her morality.

Soon, a new Esperanza Lucifer shall step onto the stage and, without missing a beat, take over the role made so fearsome by those Lasombra who came before her.

Sire: “Mary”

Clan: Lasombra

Nature: Capitalist

Demeanor: Bon Vivant

Generation: 5th

Embrace: 1812

Apparent Age: Late teens

Physical: Strength 3, Dexterity 5, Stamina 4

Social: Charisma 5, Manipulation 3, Appearance 4

Mental: Perception 2, Intelligence 3, Wits 4

Talents: Awareness 2, Brawl 4, Intimidation 2, Leadership 4, Subterfuge 2

Skills: Firearms 3, Melee 4, Stealth 2

Knowledges: Finance 3, Politics 2, Technology 2

Disciplines: Chimerstry 1, Dominate 5, Fortitude 2, Obtenebration 5, Potence 2

Backgrounds: Contacts 3, Fame 1, Resources 6, Retainers 2, Rituals 3

Virtues: Conviction 2, Instinct 3, Courage 4

Morality: Path of Night 3

Willpower: 5

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 40/8

Image: Esperanza appears as a very attractive club girl, with long brown hair and deep blue-green eyes. She has a thing for leather pants and corsets, as well as motorcycle jackets, and she always wears a ribbon around her neck. She carries herself with a cavalier air and is always ready for the next challenge, whatever it may be. She protects the secret of her identity jealously and usually keeps at least one pistol on her person, if not a more formidable personal arsenal.

Roleplaying Hints: You are a legend in every sense of the word. Act like it. You love to regale others with tales of your exploits, or at least those attributed to you, all the while sizing up your listeners and considering how you can use them to your advantage. Beneath your hellion’s facade, you are tired and hope to soon let another assume the role given you by your sire. Ride the wave until then, but when the time comes, yield to it, for you will finally be able to rest among the darkness that, in a voice suppressed by the sea, calls to you in your sleep.

Haven: Because she is always moving around, Esperanza uses a number of different havens along both sides of the Atlantic’s coasts, most of which her own packmates do not know about. Most of these are as opulent as one might expect of immensely wealthy Magister’s lineage, but many are also unassuming and pragmatic. When with her pack she usually repurposes an existing structure, like an automotive garage or neglected office building. She uses only enough of her fortune to ensure her safety, keeping the rest hidden from even her closest fellow Sabbat.

Influence: Esperanza has a surprising volume of financial assets spread out smartly among a variety of industries and interests. She usually uses proxies to manage this empire, but will involve herself directly when she feels it imperative. Were she to consolidate all her resources and influence in a single city, she would likely rival a Camarilla Prince, but that would put a big red target on her back. By doing as she does she avoids becoming too real for her enemies, something that would destroy the legend that has taken so long to build.

ChilRev: Clans Introduction

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Personal Horror.

The Introductory chapter for Children of the Revolution is up for review over at Google Docs or Google Drive or Google Donks or whatever it is right now. I’ve turned commenting on so you can leave a remark in-line as opposed to appended to the bottom of the text like you’d have to do here. Hop on over and take a peek, and see if it passes muster.

I’m working on some Hunters Hunted 2 drafts tonight before returning to the final two characters for Children of the Revolution. I’m also drafting a blog entry as a follow-up to Colm Olliver’s, explaining a little bit about how we developed him. Rich should have some art commentary, as well, so you get a sense of the book shaping up in graphic design as well as the content development portions.

Finally, we’re in the final three days of backing the deluxe print run of the Children of the Revolution book. If you’ve been holding out, now are your final few hours to pledge your copy. If you miss the window, we won’t have any left over (check out the round table for a discussion of how we use Kickstarter to fund precise print runs), so be sure you’re not left out in the cold! And by cold I mean, without a prestige print book.

Roderigo al-Dakhil, Lich of the Dead City

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Roderigo al-Dakhil, Lich of the Dead City

For all the time he has existed, Roderigo al-Dakhil best remembers his few bright shining years as one of the architects of fate.

His first touch of magic almost broke him. A Castilian soldier in the army fighting to reclaim Cadiz, he’d drilled for the day when he encountered the Moors, like many young men he knew. But the reality was very different from the stories, from the scenarios a fervent young Spanish man had woven in his imagination.

Gone were the monsters he was sure the Moor would be, flaunting God’s grace and the sovereignty of his beloved Spain. When he drove his sword through the first of his enemies, it stuck, trapped between two ribs. He pulled and grunted, trying to work it free, while the dying man screamed his life away and soiled himself.

The reality wasn’t noble or brave — it was horrifying. This was a man, a man with a mother and two younger brothers, Roderigo saw somehow, a man with a lover who at that moment was praying for him to return to her safely. He glimpsed all those who were important to the dying man: a loving son, a devoted brother, a passionate and tender lover.

And when the man died, Roderigo’s soul shattered.

He woke to find a strange monk bending over him on the nighttime remnants of the battlefield. The man shushed him and told him to rest. The monk gave the man he’d killed a blessing and took Roderigo away to explain what had happened. He was now one of the secret angels of the world, blessed by God with a great destiny. On his head and soul was placed the mark of Uriel, the angel of death.

For a year, Roderigo learned from his new mentor Brother Figueroa, and once Cadiz had fallen and Roderigo released to go home, the two undertook a long journey along the Silk Road. Eventually, they found themselves in Turkey, where Brother Figueroa introduced him to other magi like himself, in a citadel carved by magic within the volcano called Nemrut Dagi. They were not only Muslims and Christians, nor even all People of the Book. They belonged to every faith Roderigo had ever heard of, and several more besides. And all claimed the same destiny: to bring an ending to the world when the thread of Fate was overlong.

There he studied the arts of destiny, death and the afterlife. He learned the great Mysteries of this order of death-sages. Roderigo met ghosts from ancient civilizations, and mystics from all corners of the world. He met stranger figures, as well, including the one who would have the most lasting impact on his existence, the scholar and necromancer called Mokhadaji Ranpur, a vampire of great age.

Ranpur and Roderigo spent many nights together, discussing the nature of the dead and death itself. From Ranpur, Roderigo first learned of the soul of a whole city, an ancient city lost in the howling ghost-winds of the Underworld. In time, however, the order to which Roderigo belonged came under attack by their enemies. Ranpur disappeared one night, returning whence he’d originally come, with only a written promise to Roderigo that they would meet again.

Roderigo found his soldierly talents in demand once more as their enemies sent great and shining angelic spirits to bring an end to the “spiritual corruption” taken root in the volcano. He and all his order fought hard, but they were outmatched in sorcerous resources. At the suggestion of Brother Figueroa, the magicians of the order performed a great ritual to move their citadel to the mountains of northern Spain.

Over the next several years, Roderigo and the vampire Ranpur carried on an extended correspondence, carried through the winds of the Underworld by the voices of ghosts bound to their service. By the time Roderigo had seen his fifteenth year as a sorcerer, his power had grown, and for the first time he ventured into the Underworld.

Into the Dead Lands

His journey was fraught with dangers to body and soul for a lone magus, and he braved their terrors with an iron will. Following one of the ghosts bound to his and Ranpur’s correspondence, he managed to find his way to the strange black city in the heart of the afterlife.

Sadly, these walls did not offer him sanctuary, but dangers greater than any he’d faced. A small moment, a lapse in judgment and the black horrors that lurked within those ancient walls snuffed Roderigo al-Dakhil’s life. Before his soul fled him entirely, however, Mokhadaji Ranpur found and Embraced him.

Thus, he woke a second time as a changed creature. For a time, the loss of his connections to the realms of spirit and magic broke him, and he howled in a prison labyrinth beneath the ancient city.

For years, Ranpur would venture down into the cells where the mad neonate dwelt, and simply sit and talk. He spoke on many topics — Hindu theology, philosophies of the ancients, funereal customs, the role of fate in mankind’s destiny. Ranpur read to Roderigo from the Guarded Rubrics, the sacred texts of the Tal’Mahe’Ra, the sect that Ranpur served as a rawi. In time, through sheer pedagoguery and tenacity, Ranpur restored some sanity back into his suffering childe.

For almost a century, Roderigo remained in the Dead City, learning at the feet of his master. He read the crumbling libraries of the Tal’Mahe’Ra and spoke with its most learned sages. He listened to the philosophies of the enigmatic Del’Roh and made himself available to the sect’s Liches for any tasks that might need the attentions of a young and eager Kindred.

Finally, at the dawn of the 14th Century, he petitioned the Basalt Throne for permission to return to the mortal world. The Del’Roh considered the request for one week before granting permission. Roderigo would go and serve as an agent of the Dead City in the world of mortals, however, acting as the voice of the Del’Roh to those Cainites of the sect who worked to inflame the Inquisition against the rebellious childer of the Antediluvians.

Seeker of Heresy

For years Roderigo worked tirelessly in Spain, applying a gentle pressure to the agents of the Church. Many vampires claimed to have controlled the Inquisition through the years, but if any came close to it, it was Roderigo. Even his influence was subtle, consisting of whispers in the right ears, relaying information on the whereabouts of vampires to them occasionally and — most important of all — preventing any other Kindred from gaining unreasonable sway over the Inquisition.

While acting in this capacity, he found evidence of strange heresies among the Bogomils. While the Tal’mahe’Ra specialized in seeding their own strange rituals and beliefs into the heretical notions of mortals, this was different. According to one informant, these Bogomils used full stanzas from the Guarded Rubrics as liturgy of some kind in their debased chthonic rites. Moreover, they quoted the Rubrics with scriptures that had never been heard of, suggesting that they might possess a fuller copy of the Rubrics than had been seen to date.

Delivering responsibility for continuing his work to another agent of his sect, Roderigo departed immediately for Kievan Rus. Upon his arrival, he found the truth of the matter soon enough. These Bogomils did indeed worship the wicked demiurge of their Gnostic faith using a tattered, but almost-complete copy of the Guarded Rubrics.

The gap-toothed, cloudy-eyed priest merely smiled and pointed to the ground. Clearly, some Kindred who masqueraded before these degenerates as a demon or devil of some kind had left it with them. But for what purpose? Intrigued, Roderigo remained, copying the Guarded Rubrics and continuing the investigate the origins of the manuscript.

Weeks later, however, he discovered the truth of its origins when an ancient Gangrel rose from the ground at the center of the village. The priest’s gesture was not an indication of infernal origins; it referred to an earth-melded vampire. Roderigo introduced himself, explaining why he was present in this elder’s domain.

The Gangrel’s name was Mitru, who claimed to have once been a Prince, but who sickened of the ways of the Damned and retired to the crags and forests away from the cities of the Eastern Lord Ventrue and their wretched minions. This ragged-bound, scrawled manuscript had belonged to one of them before he’d removed her worthless head from her neck. The manuscript had been among the things he’d claimed as his trophy. Since it did him no good, he’d given it to these degenerate Gnostics, who believed him some kind of apostle of their demiurge.

Unfortunately, far from solving the riddle, it merely deepened it. True Hand holy writ stolen from the hands of a secular Ventrue at the bloody whim of a Prince who abandoned his domain and gone to haven in a den of heretics? Madness.

Finally, though, Roderigo’s probing and questions raised Mitru’s suspicions, and then his ire. When his herd of Bogomils came to to regard Roderigo as a figure of importance for his knowledge of the Guarded Rubrics, that was the last straw. Mitru attacked the interloper late at night, and Roderigo escaped only by befuddling the Outlander with hostile ghosts. He fled west, stealing the tattered copy of the Guarded Rubrics as Mitru screamed his rage into the night.

Among the Rroma

Although Mitru pursued him, Roderigo found aid and succor with strange nomads whose people had just found Europe and had been entering it in small numbers for the past few decades. They called themselves the Rroma, and those who aided Roderigo claimed they did so at the behest of their ancient patron, the spirit called Mokhadaji Ranpur.

He learned that the elder vampire had been watching his endeavors, and reporting his successes to the Del’Roh. His sire lent his aid where he could, mainly through the network of temporal connections he’d somehow managed to keep intact through the years. These connections slowly became Roderigo’s as he employed them.

Roderigo and his caravan of gypsies arrived in Western Europe just in time to encounter the Black Death, and the devastation was terrible. Worse, they were often hounded by minions or childer of the Princes of the western domains, who considered Roderigo’s intrusion a violation of the Traditions.

One by one they came, and Roderigo defeated or confounded them. One such agent of a Bohemian Prince realized that he could not slay the necromancer alone, and so Embraced one of the young women of Roderigo’s Rroma family, a young woman named Reveka. This Nosferatu agent hoped to use her to strike at the necromancer unaware, he underestimated the ties of the Rroma with one another — even one who’d become accursed shilmulo. His plots undone, the Prince’s childe fled with specters on his trail.

Ashamed that the aid his hosts gave him selflessly was repaid by the death and cursing of one of their daughters, Roderigo swore to avenge her. Departing to find the fleeing Nosferatu, Roderigo found Reveka following him, insisting that she be allowed to take her revenge. Although hesitant at first, Roderigo agreed, and set about teaching her the intricacies of her undead state.

In a short time, they found the Prince’s pawn and the confrontation was short and brutal. In the grip of frenzy, Reveka consumed her sire’s blood and plucked the amaranth of his soul, consuming him wholly.

Returning to the encampment, Roderigo and Reveka found the small tribe fled, broken off in a dozen directions, each going their own way, in hopes of evading the shilmulo. Roderigo offered what comfort he could to the mourning Reveka, promising her that she’ll never be alone. From that night forward, Roderigo acted as a sort of surrogate sire to Reveka.

The two traveled Europe for a time, though the Black Death scourged all of Christendom. In the midst of the devastation, however, the two became lovers. In time, however, Roderigo’s duties called him back to Spain. The two parted ways then, for Reveka felt that she could call no domain her true home. Privately, Roderigo suspected that she sought her family. He only hoped it wasn’t to kill them.

The Anarch Revolt

In the late 1300s, a fury gripped the Blood of Caine, like a frenzy that overtook them as a race. The Anarch Revolt sundered all of Kindred society, and stories of atrocities trickled in to Roderigo’s havens in Spain. As the Revolt ran its course, strict lines of allegiance emerged, and the war of factions made no place for those who wished to avoid the strife. Unfortunately, it was not Roderigo’s intellect that chose his place, but his affections.

Reveka returned in the early 1400s, a harried creature full of fear. “Hide me,” she begged him, and her kisses tasted of old blood and wormwood soul. Her nightmares were terrible, and for a time she was deeply afraid of the dark. Eventually, Roderigo prised the full story from her, a story of the ultimate rebellion. She’d joined the coterie of a Cainite named Gratiano, and together they’d done the impossible. They had consumed the heartsblood of an Antediluvian.

The horror of her act was almost too much to bear for Roderigo. What would his masters say, his masters who revered the Ancients in some capacity? Knowing that this act would not go unremarked upon in the Black City, Roderigo found safe haven for Reveka and entered the Underworld.

Arriving at the foot of the Basalt Throne, he found the Tal’Mahe’Ra just as he suspected he might, in a state of wrath over his protege’s betrayal. Seeking justice for the destruction of one of the Holiest, its elders demanded swift and terrible punishment for those responsible. Knowing the ways of heretics and blasphemers as few other did, Roderigo spoke up against that plan.

Wouldn’t it be better, he argued, to shape this nascent tool to their ends, rather than shatter it? Why make martyrs of those involved, when they might make amends for their evils, willing or not? Roderigo won many enemies in the Black City that night, but the Del’Roh merely narrowed its ancient eyes, and gestured for him to continue.

If this force were guided away from the actual resting places of the Antediluvians, and instead directed against the many elders who’d built empires in the mortal world, it might succeed where the Inquisition had been intended to work, but failed. The Church would not bring its might to bear against the elders who accrued the kind of power that might allow them to battle the Antediluvians at the End of Days. But a ravenous pack of hounds, clamoring for their heart’s blood?

“We must command them, and shape them,” he said in his quiet, refined tones. “With ourselves among them in ways we never could be among the Inquisition, let us chain this rabid dog rather than put it down, and unleash it upon our foes.”

The Del’Roh considered, and the rawis spoke in favor of the suggestion. The voice of Roderigo’s sire was loudest among them, and finally the Del’Roh assented. “Let us forge of them a sword, with its hilt firmly in our grasp,” was the command from the Basalt Throne, and Roderigo empowered to make that happen.

Returning to the world of flesh, Roderigo engaged Reveka in his plan. She had already proven herself to the rising Sabbat, and she quickly found her way into its growing throng again. From the shadows, Roderigo aided her, slaying her rivals and seeing that her own goals were realized.

Even as Reveka helped to shape the movement, however, Roderigo became aware of other forces operating within it. With time, research and the interrogation of at least one vampire, he found a name: the Lost Tribe. His masters in the Black City identified this as a sect of vampires from the cradle of civilization founded by ancient rebels against the authority of Alamut. By this time, it consisted of more than merely outcasts and rebels of Haqim’s get, however. The Lost Tribe had become practically a cult, dedicated to the destruction of the Ancients in revenge for Zillah, whom they revered.

Forced to conceal himself more carefully, Roderigo’s efforts became a game of cat and mouse, requiring him to avoiding discovery while uncovering those who also hid in the shadows of this Anarch’s Movement.

Forging the Sword of Caine

While Roderigo was not himself present at this momentous occasion, Reveka was nearby, ready to lend aid to her compatriots should it be required. The wildest of the Anarchs christened themselves the Sabbat, and Reveka was one of its first adherents. She seemed the perfect fit for the new movement, exulting in the rituals introduced by the old orthopraxic Lasombra who still longed for some measure of religious symbolism, and the hoary kolduns among the Tzimisce.

In short order, Reveka became a respected member of the burgeoning Sabbat, well-regarded for her dauntless pride and tenacity. In many ways, the Nosferatu antitribu counted her as one of the first among them, and she was among the first in the Sabbat to use the term “pack” to describe the cohort she gathered for herself.

Returning from a year-long visit to the Black City to report his actions and continue his education in the theology of the Tal’Mahe’Ra, Roderigo discovered a change in Reveka, not the least of which was a strange black crescent tattooed to her palm. She’d joined the faction of assassins and warriors made up of the remnants of the Lost Tribe, he discovered.

More terrifying still, she’d suggested calling the group the Black Hand, a name that seemed to stick. Not once had Roderigo ever mentioned the vulgar name of the Tal’Mahe’Ra to his adopted childe. How did she know of it? Had someone suggested it to her? She was evasive on the matter, dismissing it as unimportant, something she’d thought of in the passion of the moment when she’d seen some of the others sporting the black crescents.

In the Dead City, Roderigo claimed to have fostered the name himself through his adoptive childe, and quickly called for more Tal’Mahe’Ra initiates to infiltrate the Sabbat and its Black Hand. Over the next decade or so, younger members of the cult and the childer Embraced for the specific purpose of seeding it with agents were all inducted into the Sword of Caine, while Roderigo continued to see the disciples of the Lost Tribe.

The necromancer quickly found his power base threatened with the death of Reveka. Intoxicated with her own growing power, the ancilla Nosferatu antitribu decided that she was owed a position of more authority within the Black Hand, and foolishly challenged one of its leaders. Roderigo’s agents said that not only did the Assamite antitribu extinguish her life mercilessly, but also did so with such ease that he could only have been far older than he claimed.

Enraged, Roderigo stepped from the Underworld into the haven of his childe’s murderer and slew him as he slumbered during the day, scattering his ashes in the howling tempests of the dead lands. In the last moments of the Assamite’s existence, he threatened the retaliation of the Lost Tribe, and Roderigo understood then. The elder leaders of the Zillah-worshipping cult were not hiding behind the Black Hand. They were in it, posing as younger vampires. He then returned to the Dead City, grief-stricken and disillusioned.

There was no way he could exert the kinds of influence on the Sabbat that they could, Roderigo realized, even manipulating multiple agents from afar. No control is quite so firm as direct control, and his own lineage and occult talents were strange enough to invite unwelcome scrutiny.

Returning to the Basalt Throne, he begged that this burden be lifted from him, and the Del’Roh agreed. His sire Ranpur lauded his achievements before the Basalt Throne and other rawis, however, urging the Del’Roh to consider a position worthy of his devotion and successes. To Roderigo’s shock, she agreed, naming him one of the Liches of the Ancient City.

The Third Lich

For several hundred years, though, Roderigo found his new position demanding of him, and almost fatally so. The Liches of the Ancient City are rivals beneath their skull-masked veneers of politeness and noblesse oblige. His sire aided him where he could, but his greatest aid was demanding that Roderigo seek out and master blood magics with the fervor with which he had once learned magic as a mortal.

As part of his researches, Roderigo often undertook journeys into the world of flesh. This made him unique among the Liches. Indeed, among many elders of the True Hand. He always made it a point to learn the nuances of the world, and how it had changed since he last was there. Even when in Enoch, the Sabbat agents of the Tal’Mahe’Ra often learned that they might foster a patronage with one of the venerable Liches if they but maintained correspondence with one who wished to know as much about the world as possible.

For decades, he studied the venerable necromancies chiseled into the walls of Enoch, and whispered into the crypts of the Aralu, hoping for a reply. Roderigo journeyed into the world of mortals frequently, investigating various forms of blood sorcery. The Tremere fascinated him, as did the blood sorceries of the Tzimisce and Assamites, but the paranoia and xenophobia of those clans prevented his acquisition of any but the most elementary of their mysteries.

The Giovanni, on the other hand, were a whole other business. Roderigo learned long ago that patronage was a quick route to obedience among the childer of Caine, and the easiest way was to aid an ambitious Kindred in secret, without even that vampire knowing it. Roderigo put these methods to tremendous benefit, recruiting agents both on behalf of the True Hand and for himself.

In his investigations of the Giovanni, Roderigo discovered the ancient vampire named Apacia, an outcast Cappadocian who was neither cast into their founders’ prison nor consumed by the childer of Augustus (though not for lack of trying). Her presence in the Sabbat drew his attention, and he approached her directly.

Suspecting that his normal subtleties would do nothing more than antagonize her, Roderigo instead chose to approach her with an open proposal of alliance. Fascinated with another Cainite necromancer not of the blood of Augustus, she returned his overtures. The two spent almost thirty years together in the 1600s, she teaching him the deathspeaker-lore of the Scythian peoples and the Cappadocian clan, and he subtly aiding the Sabbat in whatever of its goals interested Apacia.

In many ways, she reminded him of Reveka, though with the feral sort of barbarian wisdom Reveka might have developed if she’d existed long enough to cultivate it. By the early 1700s, their goals and obligations took them in separate directions, but the two remain bonded by oaths and Vinculi, as fast as elders of the blood of Caine might ever be said to be.

Upon his return to Enoch, Roderigo found himself in a position of active knowledge of the Sabbat’s workings that outstripped even the Del’Roh’s preferred agent for such things, a Ventrue by the name of Karnof. It made him a new enemy in the Black City, but Roderigo publicly humiliated the Ventrue before the Del’Roh, demonstrating his own knowledge of the workings of the Sword of Caine.

In response, the Del’Roh ordered the hierarchy shifted, and Karnof now answered to Roderigo. The Sabbat’s status within the True Hand ceased to be one of political identity. By the command of the Del’Roh, the doings of the Sword of Caine were now an occult matter, within the purview of the Liches.

Although he remained in the Ancient City almost exclusively, Roderigo has never allowed his understanding of the Sabbat to fade to the risible levels that Karnof did. Once a decade or so, he journeys into the world of flesh to speak with his agents and see the workings of the Sabbat himself.

Padre Cráneo

In the early 1900s, a hallucinogen-maddened pack priest in Guadalajara, Mexico spotted a skull-masked man among the nacreous caverns beneath the city where the young Tzimisce’s pack held their Ritae. Over time, various Sabbat have seen him lurking here and there, and the tales about him have grown over time.

The name for the skull-faced figure has stuck: Padre Cráneo. Some packs have taken him as something of a totemic figure, incorporating the mortal rites for La Santisima Muerte into their Ritae, calling on Padre Cráneo to help them in an upcoming crusade. Others believe he was the herald of the Harbingers of Skulls, and yet others believe he is an identity that Sabbat elders in the Black Hand assume among themselves like a costume. Others wonder if he isn’t perhaps a member of the Inconnu, seeking to eradicate the most monstrous of the Sabbat as an affront to the ideals the Inconnu hold precious.

For Roderigo’s part, he is happy to be all of these things and more, so long as these urban legends serve him well. He takes a fledgling’s delight in lending small aid to those packs that revere him, or in haunting those that fear him.

When the Black City was destroyed, Roderigo was one of the few among the upper echelons who managed to escape. Some among the Tal’Mahe’Ra whisper that he knew of the terrible storm, thanks to his alliance with Apacia, who somehow foresaw the maelstrom’s devastation. However it happened, Roderigo was quick to gather those elements of the Tal’Mahe’Ra and establish a new sanctuary for them in the world of flesh. The tale had come full circle, and he offered the broken sect his cabal’s sanctum in the mountains of northern Spain, which had been abandoned for many centuries.

Although he has gathered many of their agents together, it cannot be properly said that Roderigo al-Dakhil continues the traditions of the Tal’Mahe’Ra. The Aralu are gone, he assumes, and the Basalt Throne no more. Rather, he maintains the resources and tactics of the True Hand, drawing on its agents for their own ends. He is something of a lost creature, an elder in his own right with no other power governing or commanding him. Some of the former True Hand agents have claimed that he is merely consolidating the Hand’s power to use for himself… and they may be right.

Sire: Mokhadaji Ranpur

Clan: Nagaraja

Nature: Judge

Demeanor: Eye of the Storm

Generation: 6th

Embrace: 1354 AD

Apparent Age: Late 30s

Physical: Strength 2, Dexterity 3, Stamina 4

Social: Charisma 4, Manipulation 5, Appearance 2

Mental: Perception 5, Intelligence 4, Wits 6

Talents: Alertness (Running) 4, Athletics 2, Awareness 4, Brawl 3, Empathy 5, Intimidation 3, Leadership 5, Subterfuge 4

Skills: Etiquette 4, Melee 4, Performance 2, Stealth (Urban) 5

Knowledges: Academics 4, Finance 2, Investigation 5, Law 3, Medicine 4, Occult 6, Politics (Sabbat) 4

Disciplines: Auspex 5, Dominate 4, Fortitude 3, Necromancy 6 (Sepulchre Path 5, Ash Path 5, Bone Path 3, Cenotaph Path 5, Corpse in the Monster 5, Grave’s Decay 5, Vitreous Path 5), Obfuscate 3, Thaumaturgy 3 (Path of Blood 2, Elemental Mastery 2, Hands of Destruction 3, Movement of the Mind 2, Path of Corruption 1)

Necromantic Rituals: All Necromantic Rituals of up to ••••• •.

Thaumaturgical Rituals: Defense of the Sacred Haven, Devil’s Touch, Domino of Life, Wake with Evening’s Freshness; Blood Walk, Recure of the Homeland; Clinging of the Insect, Incorporeal Passage

Backgrounds: Resources 3, Rituals 5, Status (True Hand) 4

Virtues: Conviction 4, Self-Control 5, Courage 4

Morality: Path of Bones 8

Willpower: 6

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 30/6

Image: Roderigo dresses in simple, dark clothing that fits his small frame well. He is generally quite innocuous, with slicked-back black hair and dark eyelashes. He is given to donning a stark bone skull mask, however, when he intends to be seen, to fearsome effect.

Roleplaying Hints: Roderigo is calm, the very image of the perfectly composed elder Kindred. He has an undeniable haunted, melancholy air to him, and seems to bear some measure of affection for the Sabbat, particularly its younger members. The wilder, the better.

Haven: His primary haven is in an old mage sanctum, concealed through cunning sorcery and now blood magic, in the mountains of northern Spain. Roderigo maintains multiple havens in areas that attract and hold his interest for any length of time. Currently, those areas include Mexico City, Cadiz, London and New York.

Influence: Although he has no influence to speak of in the mortal world, Roderigo was one of the Liches of the Tal’Mahe’Ra and even now still wields tremendous respect among the remaining True Hand agents. He is also one of the only members of the True Hand’s leadership to survive the destruction of the Ancient City, as far as anyone knows.

Colm Olliver: Anarch or Autarkis?

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Are you ready for some Brujah? Here’s Colm Olliver, a nasty dude who would probably be Clan Honeybadger if such a thing existed. I like that Colm’s history is intertwined with an interesting location in the existing Vampire setting (Carfax Abbey, the gothic Anarch nightclub in London) and that some cornerstone musical elements of the Gothic-Punk world are part of his backstory.  Here’s a guy who knows it’s better to burn out than fade away.

Four days left and counting in the Children of the Revolution Kickstarter, by the way. We’re almost to our funding milestone!

<1>Colm Olliver

<n>Wrong place, wrong time, wrong decision. A combination of events led to Colm Olliver’s ouster from the domain of Birmingham, not the least of which was his own refusal to heed both the Traditions and the mortal laws of the domain.

He has a Specialty in Kicking Your Head Apart.

The Embrace that brought Colm Olliver into the world of the Damned was a fluke. A pack of Sabbat made it all the way to Birmingham from Bristol, where its members decided to bolster their ranks and throw a few shovelheads at the Sheriff of Bristol’s Hounds. One of the pack’s Cainites grabbed Colm, put the bite on him, pointed him southward, and told him to kill any other vampires he saw. In the throes of frenzy, Colm did all of this and more, taking down two of the unsuspecting Hounds as well as four police and almost a score of innocent bystanders.

Unfortunately for Colm, this all happened on the night of the Birmingham pub bombings. The police, already facing the chaos of the domestic terrorist attack, reacted to the news of their fallen comrades and civilians as a related terrorist event. Riot police finally managed to subdue the enraged Kindred, who had exhausted himself at the end of his frenzy and sank into torpor as he was being hauled to Winson Green Prison. The violence of being dragged out of the police van and into the prison roused him from his shallow torpor and he frenzied again, killing two more police and slaking his thirst on their blood. While the attentions of the police at the prison were otherwise occupied by the so-called “Birmingham Six,” Colm Olliver escaped into the night with police blood on his hands.

Shortly thereafter, England passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Under the law, Colm’s actions were classified as terrorist activity, even though he’d had nothing to do with the actions of the Birmingham Six — who were themselves later exonerated — in support of the pub bombings. On the lam from mortal authorities, Colm chose to leave his Birmingham stalking grounds, where the local Kindred were becoming aware of him none too fondly. After all, he’d had no introduction to what he’d become or the society of the night. He was simply a rogue Kindred, presumably Caitiff or some debased elder’s by-blow, in a very traditional domain. Colm knew that something else was out there, hunting him, and before the Sheriff had a chance to bring him before the Prince, he again vanished into the darkness.

Colm came to understand his situation quickly. He quickly concluded the vagaries of the Kindred condition and, piecing together the fragments of his frenzied memory, he realized that his options were limited. There was no way he could get out of the country. The Prevention of Terrorism Act having been swiftly enacted, Scotland and Ireland’s borders would be heavily guarded, and the English Channel was too great a risk under cover of darkness and who knows what else was out there. London seemed to have the numbers and the urban chaos required to hide an accidental dissident, at least to a Kindred who couldn’t stay in his home domain.

So London it was, and Colm’s understanding of the Kindred state increased exponentially during the journey. He traveled by stolen car, by stowing away aboard passenger trains, and by traveling on foot when no faster method presented itself, all the while leaving a trail of ravaged vessels and traumatized onlookers. Along this trail of horror, Colm learned the vagaries of placating the Beast, avoiding the Red Fear, the impotence of God’s dominion, and the falsity of so many of the popular culture banes of vampirism. Being undead came with more than enough drawbacks, but the benefits it offered… we was like unto a fucking god himself! The midnight king of Hibernia, Albion, and even that shit-swamp Caledonia, if he wanted it!

Reality intruded as Colm approached the London domain. The mortal agents of Lady Anne Bowesely had followed the news of Colm’s trajectory and had braced themselves for the inevitable arrival of the rampaging hell-monger that the police reports and tabloids had indicated was heading their way. A network of ghouls, vigilantes, and “private security freelancers,” each unknowing that others had been summoned to aid the effort, converged upon the early morning London-bound farm truck as it rolled into the dispatch center where it was scheduled to offload its cargo. Colm had no idea he had been anticipated, but when a dozen interlopers who seemed to know fact from fiction when it came to the Kindred’s banes, he woke from the daysleep that had so recently overtaken him to find the peasants hammering a stake into his heart.

<3>Das Ungeheuer Darin

<n>When he came to, it was no longer 1976. Three years had passed before someone… his captor…? had seen fit to remove the stake that held him in deathless stasis.

Indeed, his captor. Or captors, as it turned out. The Prince of London, not wanting to connect herself to Colm’s lurid person, had tasked one of her Primogen with the extirpation of the rising Caitiff menace, which happened to include (and indicate) Colm Olliver in particular. Shit rolls downhill, and this particular odious task tumbled down the Kindred pecking order until it foolishly ended up in the hands of a coterie of young Gangrel who had no especial enthusiasm for Anne Bowesely’s reign. The Gangrel unstaked Colm rather than risk their own Humanity in an act of murder-for-favor and promptly fled the domain for Manchester.

Political fallout was characteristically severe. How could this simple task, Lady Anne vituperated, result in such a ? Neonates shrugged their shoulders. Ancillae shrugged their shoulders and kicked the concern back up to the elder level. Elders blamed each other, their barbs dripping with venom over past personal transgressions and long-dormant vendettas, and ultimately hid behind an impenetrable snarl of prestation that left it unclear exactly who was supposed to carry out the death sentence. The result was a blemish for not only the Camarilla as an organization, but for the system of obligation that let such a high-profile obligation fall through the cracks. Two Harpies found themselves relegated to the Whitechapel hunting grounds, a Primogen saw his clan banned from Elysium for a month, and the Tremere lost the patronage of the Prince and had their claim to domain revoked — in a territory that held a crucial chantry. Amid the whole mess, Colm was pardoned in absentia, with the vain elders hoping that the sooner the whole affair was swept under the rug, the better. Death sentence? What death sentence?

The trouble he had caused the elders brought Colm to the eventual attention of London’s Anarchs, who gathered at Carfax Abbey, a deconsecrated church converted into a nightclub. A Brujah attached to the scene, Ian Corso, recognized Colm from the tabloid stories and identified in him the characteristics of the Kindred and that was all it took for Colm to become royalty at the Abbey. To his surprise, these vampires weren’t fucking asshole ponces who prided themselves on what gigantic cocks they could be to one another. Instead, Carfax Abbey was home to a movement that actually hated the gigantic fucking asshole ponce-cock part of vampire society. The whole lace-and-makeup thing was a little rich, but Colm soon found a home in the company of the scene’s rougher element, which had a bit of a connection to other countercultures, all of which were at least initially receptive to a new Kindred who had given such an audacious finger to Queen Anne herself. Even if he hadn’t directly known he’d done it….

The relationship that developed between Colm Olliver and the Anarchs proved to be a tumultuous one. While both certainly resented the rigid structures of the Camarilla and, when they encountered them, the equally relentless dogmas of the Sabbat, the Anarchs of Carfax Abbey aimed to rebuild London’s political into landscape into one that offered more opportunity for younger Kindred, in line with much of Anarch philosophy. More than anything else, Colm Olliver thrilled to the vast quantities of vitae that Carfax Abbey’s Blood Dolls readily yielded to him, oftentimes without his even having to ask them.

Colm had no such lofty ambitions. Indeed, his outlook ran more toward that of a particularly selfish Autarkis. He fell in love with the outlook espoused in one of the quotations bandied about he Anarch rallies:

“No one holds command over me. No man. No god. No Prince. What is a claim of age for ones who are immortal? What is a claim of power for ones who defy death? Call your damnable hunt. We shall see who I drag screaming to hell with me.”

The Anarchs just wanted to replace Princes with other Princes more sympathetic in outlook to their own. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Anarch politics even used the same kinds of outdated history-fetish terms to honor their heroes. Baron instead of Prince? What does the word matter if you’re still kissing his ass? Colm reasoned.

<3>Tearing Down the Tower

<n>Over the course of the next decade-plus, the Anarchs rebelled openly against Prince Anne Bowesley’s praxis in particular and Camarilla dominance more generally. As punk, goth, krautrock, new wave, Oi!, protest reggae, and other musical genres colored the political and cultural scene of Carfax Abbey and London’s Anarch Movement, The Camarilla tightened its grip over the Traditions, cracking down on the Anarch Movement under the guise of protectionism against Sabbat encroachment. The Kindred had their own Iron Lady in the form of Queen Anne and her parliament of Primogen. The Camarilla pronounced death sentences on those self-identified Anarchs who chose to Embrace and their childer, but stopped short of declaring a unilateral Blood Hunt against the Anarch Movement. In response, the Anarchs redoubled their rhetoric against the Queen, winning little sympathy among the largely conservative Kindred power structure in London. With little option left to them, the Anarchs waged open Jyhad against the Camarilla, their ostensible parent sect, and struck down a series of “pretender Primogen” among the Ventrue, Toreador, Tremere, and Malkavian clans. Colm participated in several of these conflicts, not out of sympathy with Anarch philosophy, but out of hatred for Queen Anne herself.

By the summer of 1982, the Anarchs had disavowed themselves of Colm Olliver and the sympathy was mutual but not directly as hostile as the attitudes both of them harbored against the Camarilla and Sabbat. In this case, it simply worked out that the enemy of both of their enemies didn’t happen to be an ally. Carfax Abbey ceased to be a haven for him, though he was free to attend as he chose. It simply represented a time, a mindset, and a philosophical standpoint that he felt he had left behind. When the Tremere Justicar Gabrielle di Righetti showed up at the door of Carfax Abbey to formally censure club impresario Hortense Holden and her confidant Ian, Olliver and the Movement had already formally parted ways, despite Colm owing Ian a life boon for a perilous moment that had come during the early-1980s Anarch revolts known as “the Ghostdancing.”

After the split, Colm entered what has undeniably become the darkest phase of his unlife. Having been fighting incessantly since his Embrace, without any guidance into Kindred society by a sire-mentor, and having been considered a menace by the masters of the domains into which he found himself thrust, Colm succumbed to a fugue that must have been nurtured by the roaring of his Beast. He simply does not recall the years from 1984-1997. When he returned to his senses, he felt that nothing had changed. The “no-future” mantra of the postpunk 1980s had morphed into the millennialism of the 1990s and would — if the world continued to survive — adopt a new slogan for the same anxiety and nihilism. Even Queen Anne still held the Princedom in London, while Carfax Abbey continued to harbor the same bitter Anarchs and their screed, stinking of the same stale, spilled lager and smoke-machine chemical runoff. The only thing that’s changed is that Ian Corso looks as ravaged as punk icons Penny Rimbaud or Vini Reilly these nights.

After Colm regained his sense of self, he decided that he simply had to leave London, as it had nothing to offer him. With a suicide’s sense of finality, he planned a gesture that would graphically underscore his disgust with the Ivory Tower and its despotism over London. At the time, London had suffered a spate of terrorist bombing attempts, and Colm intended to strike a similar message against the Camarilla’s blood-cult of demagoguery while the Kindred of the city were similarly smitten with the climate of fear that gripped the mortals. Over the span of a week, in early November of 2009, Colm placed over a score of nail bombs throughout London, including targets such as Underground stations, shopping centers, banks, and nightclubs — including Carfax Abbey. Each of the targets had some connection to a Kindred who exerted influence over the locale, from the Nosferatu warrens beneath the Underground to the Ventrue-favored skyscrapers of the Bishopsgate financial interests.

Some of Colm’s bombs exploded, causing the desired effect of terror. Various mortal agencies and Kindred found others. In the cases of those that discharged their improvised payloads, the Camarilla of London conspired to cover up the acts of domestic terror or to tie them to radical organizations among the kine. Among the Kindred community, response ranged from the incredulous to the wrathful. Hortense Holden from Carfax Abbey lamented the act as “depravity brought on by an obviously eroding humanitas” while even the insider Malkavians of the Camarilla courts howled for retribution. The result was inevitable, of course. Colm Olliver had finally earned a Blood Hunt.

Olliver considers himself a freedom fighter, primarily for his own freedom rather than any greater political sentiment, which is why he splintered from the Anarchs. Under Queen Anne’s decree, Colm is a terrorist. Similarly, Colm remains wanted by British Special Branch and the Metropolitan Police Service for his mortal law violations that have no statutes of limitations. In response to his Kindred infamy, he’s under Lextalionis in both London and Birmingham, and has pledged never to return to either unless it’s to stake and devour their Princes. (Obviously, he has no direct knowledge of the events surrounding the disappearance of Prince Mithras or the fate of the diablerist Monty Coven, who is believed by some to have committed Amaranth on the Prince.) The Camarilla has considered adding him to the Red List, but prevailing sentiment is that sooner or later, he’ll manage to destroy himself, and no specific clan has stepped forward to pursue any possible trophy placed on him.

Tonight, Colm flirts with the idea of joining the Anarch domains (but not the movement) in northern Italy or California. Whatever his decision, he must hide the route he takes out of England from both mortal authorities and Kindred toadies, and will likely end up passing through several interim domains before arriving at his final destination. And if he has to pledge more boons along the way to take his fight to a different front, what of it? That is, if he manages to make it out of Queen Anne’s London with his head still attached to his shoulders.

Sire: Fat Ciaran

Clan: Brujah

Nature: Child

Demeanor: Deviant

Generation: 11th

Embrace: 1974

Apparent Age: early 40s

Physical: Strength 4, Dexterity 2, Stamina 5

Social: Charisma 3, Manipulation 3, Appearance 2

Mental: Perception 3, Intelligence 2, Wits 2

Talents: Alertness 2, Athletics 1, Brawl 2, Intimidation 3, Streetwise 2, Subterfuge 1

Skills: Crafts (butcher) 3, Drive 1, Firearms 2, Larceny 2, Stealth 1, Survival 2

Knowledges: Academics 1, Politics 1, Science 2, Technology 2

Disciplines: Celerity 2, Potence 4, Thaumaturgy 2 (Path of Corruption 2)

Thaumaturgical Rituals: Bind the Accusing Tongue

Backgrounds: Allies 1, Alternate Identity 1, Contacts 1

Virtues: Conscience 1, Self-Control 3, Courage 3

Morality: Humanity 4

Willpower: 5

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 12/1

Image: A rough-and-tumble butcher from an industrial northern suburb, Colm has been scarred by an impoverished youth and outlaw unlife, and he looks it. He’s not big, but he’s a hellfighter, a knuckle-cracking Mick with black hair and a scarred-over eye. Having always been on the lam since his Embrace, Colm’s a bit ragged around the edges, having no time to settle into a domain and get comfortable. He has a hostile, vicious look about him, which he relies upon to scare others away from contact.

Roleplaying Hints: You’re angry with everything because nothing ever works out for anyone except the people who already have everything they need. You give people a chance in the infinitesimal hope that they might see things as they truly are: that mortals want to be taken advantage of and that Kindred should be able to do what they want without having to answer to someone pretending to be superior to the other monsters. Eventually, though, everyone fails that test. You just want to find that one Lick who knows the truth.

Haven: Colm makes his haven wherever he finds it, bullying “crash space” where he can or breaking and entering if nothing else presents itself. He’s not above evicting a rightful tenant, especially in locations where that’s known to happen, and home invasion is one of the many mortal-law crimes on his lengthy rap sheet.

Influence: Practically nil. Colm’s Allies and Contacts are those last few lingering connections to his time among the Carfax Abbey Anarchs who feel a sense of duty even after the bombing. Even these will probably atrophy to nothing once he manages to escape England, and whether he’s able to cultivate new relationships with other connections along the way… well, it’s unlikely. The future probably holds a great deal of loneliness and bitter regret for Colm.

Bizarre Blood Triangle: Dastur Anosh

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Not sure where the art came from, but it was included in Adam's linked Google Doc, so I reposted it here.

Commenter Adam suggested that we include the character Dastur Anosh, Black Hand Seraph (referenced in Caine’s Chosen), Assamite antitribu, and Kindred assumed to be extremely dead. Well, that sounds like a fine revolutionary character to me. Joe Carriker worked on him, and Dastur Anosh ends up being, through some clever crafting by Joe, part of a very compelling trio of Kindred whose stories interweave through their entries in the book.

Naturally, Dastur Anosh is exceptionally old, dating back to the original schism with Alamut before such things as a Camarilla or Sabbat stirred Kindred passions. Normally, that puts me off a bit. Vampire has a lot of extremely old and powerful characters running around, acting like selfish assholes and generally fucking things up for all of the Kindred who didn’t have the serendipity to have been Embraced when Caine was still rounding out the contacts in his iPhone. The cool part here, though, is that Dastur Anosh isn’t present to kick ass and take numbers. He’s present to throw a monkeywrench into modern Sabbat politics and to give the Black Hand (Sabbat subsect) an active point of contentious overlap with the Black Hand (secret sect of mankind’s shepherds concentrated in the Underworld). Dastur Anosh sets to boiling a conflict that to date has been merely simmering. With the other two characters that make up the triptych (you’ll see them soon), Sabbat politics ratchet up a notch for those players who have a stake in them, and when the Sabbat suffers internally, the other sects can practically feel the Sword of Caine’s hackles rise.

So here he is, fucking things up in the good, stories-will-come-out-of-this sort of way. Remember when the clever among you put together the pieces of the Karsh and Jalan-Aajav situation? I think you’ll find something similar here, if you put on your thinking cap.

(Also, the Children of the Revolution Kickstarter for the prestige edition is heading into its final week. Be sure to pledge if you want a copy but haven’t backed the project yet!)

<1>Dastur Anosh, The Seraph Dying and Reborn

<n>The origin of the martyred Dastur Anosh is a thing of interest to the fanatics of the Sabbat’s Black Hand. His contribution was archetypal within the Hand, the Cainite whose role was so important to the assassin cult that when he suffered the Final Death the order felt it necessary to encode his duties into the identity of the Hand: the title of the Seraph. Sabbat historians solemnly note that the Black Hand appoints four Cainites to the Seraph’s title, a recognition not of those Seraphs’ inadequacy, but of Anosh’s importance.

<3>Life and Embrace

The Black Hand’s apocrypha claims Dastur Anosh was born in ancient Persia, his familial origins humble. He only ever spoke to his followers of his time in the company of the Golden, the wise man clad in white that history would later know as Zarathustra. Some modern Sabbat historians cast aspersions on this tale, but most of the Black Hand accept it as practically an article of faith in their cultic history.

While there, Dastur Anosh was one among many of the magi who gathered around the Golden One. Although he was not so learned as some of the astrologers and magicians there, he was born with visions. The noble and learned magi paid little heed to his strange dreams, but a scribe and scholar who frequented their gatherings showed interest, asking the young man about his visions and what he thought they meant.

The two struck up an abiding friendship. Every dream the young man had, the older scribe recorded, and they often passed the hours of the night discussing their meanings. When Anosh spoke of seeing a strange stone that wept blood, and the sounds of a woman sobbing on the desert winds of the night, the scribe grew very interested. He diligently recorded all of the young seer’s recollections of the stone. Again and again the young man dreamt of the weeping stone, each time with greater and greater clarity and recollection.

Eventually, the two departed the company of Zarathustra’s faithful, at the scholar’s urging. At first, Anosh assumed they were simply wandering, but an off-hand remark of the scholar’s brought understanding: They sought the stone. Afraid but excited, he searched with the scribe for more than a year. The closer they came to finding it, the more intense his dreams became. They traveled during the night, sleeping during the day according to the needs of the scholar, which Anosh did not understand, though he did not comment on them in any way.

Finally, the pilgrims found the stone, in a strange, desolate valley with iron-reddened sands that looked like a field of blood under the wan desert moon. The stone itself was tall, lushly curved, and planted deep in the earth. The coppery smell of blood wafted from it on the wind and the scholar trembled as they neared it. A thin trickle of liquid coursed slowly down the stone’s surface, its path over the centuries wearing a rivulet in the basalt.

The scholar licked the stone, tasting of the blood before Anosh knew what he was doing. When the scholar turned to regard him once more, his face was bestial, all fangs and rage and grief. The Cainite scholar fell on him in frenzy, and killed the young seer. As dawn neared, however, he raised the young man in the Embrace and brought him across the threshold into damnation.

<3>Flight from Alamut

They fled, then, bound for the secret citadel of Alamut, his sire’s home. In that journey, Anosh found that his dreams had left him. Instead, the scholar woke from his daily slumber shrieking of his terrifying dreams. The two agreed that somehow he’d drunk the boy’s visions along with his blood; his sire insisted that the “blood of Zillah” had something to do with it. He would answer no further questions, however, until they arrived.

At the citadel of the Eagle’s Nest, Anosh found a cold welcome. Sequestered in a black cell deep within the fortress, Anosh lost all track of time. Those who brought him his draughts of blood intimated that is master sinned in Embracing him, and that he must answer for those sins.

Finally, they called for Dastur Anosh, and he came to them. He answered their questions truthfully, fearful for his existence. In the end, they granted him their leave to exist, but made it very clear that it was by his sire’s virtue, not his own. He and his master left as quickly as they might.

As they traveled, Anosh’s sire wept his own tears of blood, and often woke from his daily slumber with screams. Eventually, Anosh discovered that his master was dreaming, experiencing visions of the destruction of Enoch, Irad, and Zillah. As they traveled at night, his master spoke with hatred of the Third Generation and their terrible sins.

When Dastur asked why they did not travel directly to the Stone, his master smiled and replied that it was because they were being followed. Alamut desired the knowledge of where this Stone might lie, and he refused to tell them. In the hours before they returned to slumber, and in the hours after they woke at night, Anosh’s sire trained him in the arts of battle, the use of his Blood and the legacy not only of the progeny of Haqim, but of Khayyin and the Second Generation.

They traveled away from the lands controlled by Alamut, until the night when the three dark-skinned Kindred appeared at the edge of their encampment as the sun set in the west. These three emissaries of Alamut ordered them to return to the Eagle’s Nest, but Anosh’s master refused. The only reply the emissaries gave were drawn blades, and Anosh hid. The battle was hideous, the kind of carnage that only Kindred of many years can unleash, but in the end only Anosh’s master stood.

Anosh and his sire traveled into Africa where they met many strange Kindred. There Anosh’s master was called the Weeping Master for his oft-bloodied eyes and his terrible power. The African Kindred soon learned to leave the ebon-skinned scholar and his apprentice in peace as they traveled.

As time passed, however, Anosh couldn’t help but notice his master’s degeneration. He often spent entire evenings in thrall to his visions, weeping uncontrollably. The Weeping Master forgot his name entirely, and nearly slew his childe when Anosh called him by it. He was falling into his visions and finding it harder and harder to find a way back out. More than once, he emerged from his trances in a frenzy, and Embraced no few of his victims afterward, forcing Anosh to take his new siblings under his wing.

<3>The Lost Tribe

Although he considered it, Anosh knew better than to risk a trip to Alamut again to introduce them to the rest of the clan. In one of his rare moments of lucidity, the Weeping Master sorrowfully referred to himself and his childer as the “Lost Tribe of Alamut,” never daring to risk returning to that vaunted citadel.

In time, the small company returned to the site of the Weeping Stone. Anosh was the last of the Master’s childer to taste the blood of the Stone. The others tasted the strangeness in the bloody trickle and experienced odd dreams, but Anosh fell into his own blood-dream trance, wracked by visions for the first time since being mortal, dreaming the horror and bitterness and grief of Zillah’s psychodrama.

He emerged from these visions a changed man. Where his Master’s gibbering and glossolalia once only terrified him, he understood more of what he said. He saw his Master’s burden not as madness, but a gift from the First. He took to recording the ravings of the Weeping Master and organizing them into something of a cogent whole.

Over the next few centuries, the Lost Tribe grew and attracted a small handful of others. As time passed, the Tribe assumed a cultic reverence, with the Weeping Master as their prophet and Anosh as his high priest and interpreter. They built a haven near the Weeping Stone, and members of the Lost Tribe guarded the site from others.

The years turned him introspective, and Anosh found himself sympathetic to a body of principles similar to the Path of Blood that his master tried unsuccessfully to teach him. Taking the canon of that Path and combining it with the tenets of the beliefs they were developing, Anosh developed one of the first portions of what would later come to be known in the Sabbat as the Path of Caine. Even tonight, Noddists the world over hold Dastur Anosh to be one of the founders of that Path.

All such things come to an end, however, and in time the Lost Tribe discovered that the agents of Alamut sought them once more. They fled the site of the Weeping Stone, hoping to protect its location through obscurity and diversion.

The Lost Tribe established a hold in the bustling young metropolis of Alexandria. The resources of the city proved useful in the development of the Tribe’s strange philosophy. They sought evidence of the Third Generation, first as proof of their existence, and then with a fanatic’s zeal and desire to destroy them. Anosh counseled slow progress in such things — the sheer power of the Antediluvians was inspiration toward diligent planning and study.

It was here that the Lost Tribe found fragments of the Book of Nod. Its words further galvanized their philosophy and spurred their research. But even before they were able to formulate any plans for discovering and destroying any of the Antediluvians, the hawks of Alamut found them and attacked their hold. Vicious fighting brought about the Final Death of many of the Lost Tribe. Anosh managed to smuggle a number of his brethren to safety, but Alamut’s agents captured the Weeping Master, spiriting him back to Alamut.

Dastur Anosh believed that the Followers of Set in Alexandria sold them out, and maintained a foul regard of Setites from that night on, so much so that his dislike became partially encoded in the Black Hand’s operations, making it very difficult for Serpents of the Light — “still too close to the dead god’s breast” — to become members.

In his grief, Anosh scattered his followers to the winds, sending them far away for their own safety. He would call upon them in the future, he assured them. In the meantime, they should keep secret their goals and spend their efforts to gather more information on their great enemies, the Third Generation.

Then, in the year 139 BCE, Dastur Anosh returned to the site of the Weeping Stone, fortifying himself on a taste of its bloody rivulets, and returned to the bosom of the earth, surrendering to his grief and to torpor.

<3>The Return of Anosh

Several centuries passed before Dastur Anosh made his presence known again, in a spectacular fashion. Footnotes in the annals of Alamut’s history record the troubled times when the clan ground out the assimilation of Islam into its tenets. They note that the renegade Dastur Anosh, childe of the Weeping Heretic, was caught in the citadel’s archives.

Disguised as a recently-embraced neonate, he claimed to be seeking his sire, managing to escape before his captors took him before the masters of Alamut. His powers of deceit and command were impressive; it was later discovered that he’d been in their midst for almost a full year before anyone discovered him, disguised as a new Embrace.

Shortly thereafter, he appeared to all of his old followers, scattered across Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa, placing in their minds the desire to journey to undertake a pilgrimage. Following inexpressible subconscious directions, these Cainites made their way slowly to the site of the Weeping Stone.

There, they found a much-changed Dastur Anosh.

Where once he was a quiet, scholarly man, driven by his devotion to his master and teacher, they found a firebrand apocryphist. It was clear had emerged from torpor for many years at that time, and he’d spent his time searching for the Weeping Master and seeking fragments of Cainite history. He roused his followers to a religious frenzy, drinking from the Weeping Stone to Dionysian excess, falling into states of spiritual rapture and drunken trance, relating their visions to one another.

Then, at the end of ten nights of this, when the moon was but a sliver in the sky, he slaughtered a third of them as they lay in near torpid blood-glut. When the others regained their senses sufficiently, he called on them as the faithful, calling them his Lost Tribe.

Those who met the Final Death were traitors, he said, who did not keep his commandments to be silent. They failed to seek the knowledge of the Third Generation in his absence, or had doused their hatred of Zillah’s killers in their blackened hearts. They had given up their knowledge of Dastur Anosh to petty Princes and to the agents of Alamut in exchange for wealth or favor.

To acknowledge themselves as the worthy survivors of Anosh’s killing floor, the survivors took the blood of the Weeping Stone and mixed it with clays, tattooing themselves with the blackened crescent moon of that night sky, the sign that eventually came to denote membership in the Black Hand of the Sword of Caine.

His apostles were no more than a dozen or so Cainites, and they went their separate ways once more, after copying down one another’s gathered lore. For hundreds of years, they met on the anniversary of the Cleansing of the Tribe, as it came to be known. Some years, one of the apostles did not return. In other years, one or two brought childer or acolytes who were true believers, to be inducted into the Tribe.

The Lost Tribe continued in this way for generations, until the assault upon the Lasombra Antediluvian. Word quickly reached the Lost Tribe from its agents in Malta. Some of them counseled caution, suggesting watching these angry childer from the shadows, aiding them where they might. Others suggested that they subvert this movement and use it as their own weapon.

But Dastur Anosh chose the middle path: The Lost Tribe retained its secrecy, but joined with this vestigial Sabbat movement. The vampires of the Blackened Crescent infiltrated these movements, feigning ignorance of one another. Members of the Lost Tribe participated in the attack on Lasombra, and again later aided the Amaranth of the Tzimisce Antediluvian.

<3>The Black Hand

As the Sabbat established its identity through sheerest chaos, overthrow of the vampiric social order and consuming the heart’s blood of members of the Thirteen, the Lost Tribe likewise set its own plans into motion. They christened this shadow faction the Black Hand, claiming to have found kinship with one another in the Sabbat’s holy crusade, and dedicated to acting as the foremost weapon of the Sabbat. Their insular activity and crescent marks gained them quick notoriety within the young sect, and soon brought recruits to their doors.

Although Dastur Anosh maintained a position of leadership in the Black Hand, it soon became clear he was not the only force within its membership. Powerful Sabbat Cainites — many well known for their martial prowess and thirst for violence — were inducted into its membership, and their charisma soon usurped some of the influence and control of the assassins’ cult away from Anosh.

By the time the colonization of the New World had begun, Dastur Anosh realized that the Lost Tribe was no more. What had been conceived as a disguise for the Tribe had supplanted it. No more were Cainites swearing to uphold the rigors of the Lost Tribe. In fact, those who had even known of its existence made up a smaller and smaller portion of the Black Hand’s population.

With this in mind, Dastur Anosh did what was unthinkable to his brethren of the Lost Tribe. He revealed their existence. In a gathering of the leadership of the Black Hand — including those who would one night be called its Seraphs — Dastur Anosh revealed the origins of the black crescent, his contributions to the Path of Caine, his personal history and even the location of the Weeping Stone, all in his notable passionate style of address.

Once again his fiery rhetoric served him and his brood well, and the Black Hand rejoiced at its ancient lineage, older even than the Sabbat. Its gathered elders begged to be taken to the Weeping Stone, to taste the coppery tears of nighted Zillah and to be given the chance to know she whom they would avenge in the coming nights. A pilgrimage to the Weeping Stone became part of the Black Hand’s rites, and the history of the Lost Tribe became a part of the Black Hand’s identity.

The elders of the Sabbat, however, discovered these pieces of information for themselves as it slowly trickled out of the Black Hand’s membership and came to the awareness of the sect as a whole. Appalled to learn of such a full infiltration, they resented being made fools of, though Dastur Anosh made earnest attempts to soothe pride frayed at the discovery.

Nonetheless, he found his loyalty questioned ever more frequently, with Priest after Bishop after Priscus citing his great betrayal when his actions crossed their ambitions. A creature of patience and aplomb, even Dastur Anosh’s tolerance for these importunities had its limits. One particularly onerous Bishop, the Tzimisce called Altzay, cast aspersions on Anosh’s motives and zeal before the leadership of the sect as a whole, and he answered the accusations calmly, the whole night through.

Then, at the end of the night, he challenged Altzay to the Rite of Monomacy and ripped the much-larger Cainite apart in a torrid moment.

Dastur Anosh’s demeanor had always been one of such unwavering composure that it was easy to forget what a devastating purveyor of violence he could be. In fact, few among the Sabbat had ever seen him truly fight. To their horror, as it turned out, few of the assembled Brothers and Sisters were aware of just how old he was.

Anosh, of course, was aware of all of these factors, and chose to use the sudden eruption of ultra-violence to make his point, calmly announcing that anyone else who challenged his loyalty would be met reasonably, and he would submit himself to questioning. But anyone who proved to be incapable of proving his perfidy would find themselves met with a similar challenge. Then he left the gathering, and never returned to another.

<3>Other Hands at Work

From that time forward, Anosh was no less resented. Other Sabbat simply became much more circumspect with their accusations. For their part, individual members of the Black Hand were often fiercely loyal to their high priest, particularly among the younger members who admired to his devotion, iconoclasm, and fiery words, so full of passionate hope and hatred for the Antediluvians.

For many years, he retreated to the site of the Weeping Stone, entering a period of seclusion, seen only by those Black Hand elders with the authority to visit the site. The once-a-year initiation of new Black Hand members continued, in which they received their taste of Zillah’s vitae and their black crescent tattoos.

From his perspective, however, Anosh watched strange traditions take root in the Black Hand. An old hand at infiltration, he was canny enough to recognize the signs, though he’d been far too close to see it. Young members showed up at the Weeping Stone, bragging of the ritae they’d mastered and the patrons they’d won, and Dastur Anosh saw other influences where his own had once held sway.

He turned the pastoral duties of care for the Weeping Stone to one of his childer and disappeared. In time, word trickled back through the Black Hand that Dastur Anosh had revealed himself among the Sabbat who’d traveled to the New World. It was clear that he was not eager to lay claim to the new lands on behalf of the Sword of Caine, as so many of them were, however. He simply showed up in newly claimed Sabbat diocese occasionally, frequently in need of safe harbor from Lupines he’d run afoul of in his wanderings.

No one really is sure what it is he sought during those times, or why his obsession with finding his old master would bring him to the New World. An old journal written by a Lasombra neonate — noteworthy for being one of the first mestizos to be given the blood of the Clan of Shadows — notes a long conversation its author had with the wandering Anosh in which he claimed that he had again experienced visions.

After a decade away, Dastur returned and spoke with admiration of some of the warrior cultures of the native peoples of the Americas, introducing some of their ways into the Black Hand’s ever-evolving culture. While the Hand was distracted with the new customs he’d introduced, he swore in three kamuts led by those who’d once been members of the Lost Tribe themselves, and took them to a new sanctuary in the upper reaches of Mt. Washington, in New England.

From here, he watched carefully. He took command of the Black Hand in the New World himself, carefully watching its members, drawing from those Cainites newly Embraced from among the natives and settlers of the young domain over those with ties to Europe. Years passed in this way, and the Black Hand came to speak of his increasing eccentricity, wondering if madness was far behind for the high priest of the Black Hand.

After making his presence so visible in the New World, Dastur Anosh returned to his old habits. He claimed to be entering torpor in a hidden location in the countryside around Mt. Washington and promptly disappeared. He reappeared in Mexico City, disguised as a neonate among a recent mass Embrace. There, he attracted the attention of the Black Hand, and was inducted into their ranks, which granted him a fascinating perspective.

The rites that he’d established for his followers were being subverted, subtly altered at the lowest level of interaction: pack priests and individual agents. He slowly traced these lines of influence, following them back to a source. Then, one evening while this mid-level agent and instructor within the Hand trained him, Anosh sprung his trap. Despite the power of the Nosferatu antitribu, Dastur Anosh overwhelmed her easily.

For the next week, he kept the staked vampire available to answer questions, compelled by both commands and the occult thought-reading Anosh had mastered centuries before his prisoner had been Embraced. The answers he found in the vampire’s mind and records were unsettling. A death cult of some kind, tied to ancient stories of the city of Enoch, pulled his strings.

Finally, he gained a name: the Tal’Mahe’Ra. The very next night, an unholy host of ghosts and shrouded Cainites attacked the Nosferatu’s haven, destroying her and attempting to lay waste to Dastur Anosh at the same time. They had underestimated his power, however, and he nearly destroyed them.

Anosh disappeared once more, fleeing into the isolation of the deserts of Mexico, a territory now familiar to him. There he wandered and thought. After a many months of this, he reappeared in the Black Hand citadel in the mountains of New Hampshire. Already, the rumblings of conflict between branches of the Sabbat had begun.

In 1766, Dastur Anosh died. His death came as a shock to the sect and his followers in the Black Hand. His rivals in the Sabbat were quick to accuse one another, or to lay the blame at theoretical enemies of the Lost Tribe. Shortly thereafter, the first Sabbat Civil War broke out, pitting the Sword of Caine against itself.

<3>The Seraph Dying and Reborn

Dastur Anosh, of course, did not die. The attack on him was real enough, however, arranged by agents of the so-called “True” Black Hand seeking to terminate his influence. He destroyed their agents and rid the area of all evidence of such, save for one set of ashes, into which he dropped some of his own regalia, first scourging the remains of their true identity so that the able death-sorcerers of the Tal’Mahe’Ra might have no incontrovertible proof one way or the other.

Anosh gave up his original identity and the leadership of the Black Hand — two things that weighed him down with responsibility and limited his ability to search effectively for the answers he demanded from the world. He grew concerned that the would-be leaders of the Black Hand would break out into open warfare with one another, so soon after the end of the Sabbat Civil War. Fortunately, they settled on the idea of four Seraphs, leaders in his image.

In the time since, he has taken on the mantle of multiple Sabbat neonates, often showing up as recent Embraces from various crusades, or claiming a recently destroyed Sabbat vampire as a sire. About half the time, he arranges to find a place in the Black Hand, going through the induction rites thereof and drinking once more from the Weeping Stone. He even occasionally implants in younger Sabbat a memory of having recently Embraced him, giving him an easy introduction into the sect when he wishes it. He does what he is there to do, and then stages his own death once more.

The time in solitude has not been without its effects on him. Sometimes, he forgets what he’s looking for. The Antediluvians. His sire. The Tal’Mahe’Ra. Sometimes, he conflates them, sure that the False Hand is in service to the Antediluvians, or that his sire was consumed by an Antediluvian he seeks vengeance against that progenitor. Perhaps the Weeping Master was taken by the Tal’Mahe’Ra?

Over the years, the Seraphs have collated information about the appearance of strange Cainites in the midst of the Black Hand. Jalan-Aajav acquired sufficient information to deduce that the ancient Anosh — the original Seraph of the Black Hand, the high priest of the Lost Tribe — exists yet.

He and the others have heard of what amounts to a shadow war between this figure and seemingly disparate factions and individuals within the Black Hand, which flares up occasionally, as swift as a sudden desert sand storm, and is gone as quickly.

Sire: The Weeping Master

Clan: Assamite antitribu

Caste: Vizier

Nature: Visionary

Demeanor: Enigma

Generation: 5th

Embrace: Unknown; sect apocrypha claims he was Embraced around the time of Zoroaster

Apparent Age: early 30s

Physical: Strength 4, Dexterity 6, Stamina 5

Social: Charisma 6, Manipulation 5, Appearance 3

Mental: Perception 5, Intelligence 3, Wits 4

Talents: Alertness 6, Athletics 4, Awareness 5, Brawl 3, Empathy 3, Expression 7, Intimidation 3, Leadership 5, Streetwise 2, Subterfuge 5

Skills: Etiquette 3, Larceny 2, Melee 6, Stealth 6, Survival 2

Knowledges: Academics 4, Investigation 5, Law 2, Medicine 2, Occult 6, Politics 3

Disciplines: Auspex 7, Celerity 5, Dominate 6, Fortitude 4, Obfuscate 7, Potence 3, Presence 5, Protean 3, Quietus 6

Backgrounds: Alternate Identity 3, Black Hand Membership 2 (5*), Contacts 8, Resources 4, Rituals 5, Status (Sabbat) 4* (Dastur Anosh has access to the Backgrounds marked with an asterisk if he reveals his true identity.)

Virtues: Conviction 5, Instinct 3, Courage 3

Morality: Path of Caine 9

Willpower: 8

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 40/8

Image: Dastur Anosh is a small man, standing just over five and one-half feet. He dresses in clothing appropriate to his current façade, or goes unseen most of the time. His eyes are deep-set, and his flesh has become the deep, almost-reflective obsidian of truly ancient Assamites. He usually hides his identity through a combination of cosmetics and potent Obfuscate, avoiding the presence of elder Cainites of the sect unless holding them accountable for some transgression.

Roleplaying Hints: Anosh is quietly intense, with a veneer of unsettling calm. He chooses his words carefully for maximum effect, except when he’s speaking on some subject he is passionate about. Then his words are a torrent of pathos, sweeping up those around him in their spell even without the use of Disciplines. Most troubling of all, and truly part of the horror and danger he represents, is his dwindling ability to recall certain specifics of his solitary crusade. Even when he becomes confused as to the end he desires, his passion for it never ceases. In his most lucid moments, he suspects that he is becoming something other than the consciousness he once held in iron thrall to his cause. Despite the bulwark of the Path of Caine, Dastur Anosh is terrified that the Beast owns him more than the Man, and his long unlife has a fearsome number of lacunae in its history.

Contacts: Dastur Anosh has carefully cultivated a variety of contacts worldwide who aid him in his various searches and travels. Each knows him as someone different.

ChilRev: Meixiu

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I saw some good response to Lizette, a comparatively young Kindred whose modern revolutionary Embrace grounded the idea of “Children of the Revolution” in a context of what players and Storytellers might be able to do with the idea of domain and the limited understanding of stagnant Elders. By contrast, here we have Meixiu, a similarly young vampire (fewer than 40 years as a Kindred), who would fit into a political chronicle, but would also have a lot to offer a more mystical or occult-focused chronicle. Here are some cool highlights for her:

    • She’s a good bridge to the Kindred of the East without being kuei-jin herself, reinforcing that it’s a World of Darkness and not just a western Europe and North America of Darkness.
    • Her haven is at a consistent location, but she’s always on the move and lookout for a particular set of artifacts. That means she might come to the troupe’s domain, or a coterie that specializes in occult interests might have a reason to go to her. She has a few elements of her agenda that are left deliberately open-ended (the plutocrat and the museum) that could easily be a part of any chronicle’s home domain and thus provide a point of introduction.
    • The occult aspect of her background isn’t tied to the obvious Tremere approach, so she provides an example for how characters who aren’t inherently tied to the supernatural can still find themselves pulled into its horrific orbit.
    • Similarly, her Malkavian derangement takes a form that’s tied into the overarching structure of the World of Darkness. She’s no fishmalk, but neither is she a Hannibal Lecter. Instead, her madness is tied to something that might well end up being true, even if her perspective on it isn’t. That, to me, is a wonderful literary use of madness, along the lines of the old chestnut, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not actually out to get you.”
    • Enjoy!

<1>Meixiu, the Black Dragon Princess

<n>The Kindred have long sought to better understand their “cousins” in the Far East, the so-called Cathayans. These inscrutable vampires pose both a threat and an obstacle to the Kindred, some of whom seek to gain a foothold in Asia while others aim to forestall any similar gains by the Cathayans in their Western domains. To this end, the Camarilla in particular has sought to create diplomatic ties to its kuei-jin kin, most often by cautiously welcoming certain of the Eastern Kindred to their domains as emissaries of sorts, from whom they can glean information and possibly even cultivate influence in a meaningful way.

Much less frequently, a western Kindred will actually travel to China, Japan, or another Cathayan domain to directly engage the local undead, either in some diplomatic capacity or for more personal reasons. Rare is the Kindred who remains in the East for any length of time, however. As vigilant as the Kindred are about outsiders, they are nothing as compared to the watchful Cathayans who are xenophobically protective of their own territories. Even Kindred who are welcomed as guests usually have a deadline by which time they must leave, so as not to “distract” the Eastern vampires. During their stay they often endure the close scrutiny of their hosts and they are strictly forbidden to engage in any behavior that might upset the intricate customs that govern kuei-jin society. This is especially the case with regards to creating ghouls among Asian mortals. However, nothing is so proscribed as the practice of Embracing one of the native kine. The stories that recount the punishments for such a crime are as gruesome as they are instructive. Consequently, few recognized Western Kindred have been sired in the domains of the Cathayans.

One of these rarities makes her haven in Washington, DC. What is most remarkable is that she is entirely unaware of the uniqueness of her Embrace. Since the night she was stolen from the ranks of the living, she has been wholly convinced that she is unlike the other creatures of the night who prowl the nation’s capital in search of blood. For more than two decades, she has believed that she is one of the Cathayans, one of the Ten Thousand Immortals, and that it is her duty or karma to overthrow those Cathayans who have become possessed by the demons of Diyu, the Chinese Hell. She strives to become powerful enough both personally and through those she can command to topple the Communist Party of China (CPC), which she believes is a tool of these possessed immortals, and thereby unlock the gate of Heaven that will otherwise remain forever closed to her.

Not a pleasant homecoming for Meixiu.

Meixiu was in her last year of study at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing in 1989. Her father was a mid-level salary man with an automotive manufacturer, a figure she admired even though he was rarely present, preferring to spend much of his time with a mistress and a bottle rather than at home with his sickly wife and bright child. Meixiu had an unremarkable childhood, though her academic achievements marked her as a girl who would likely have successful future. As she blossomed into womanhood, though, her parents felt that her newfound beauty was a gift that should not be wasted, and they sought to marry her to the nephew of her father’s boss. She refused the arrangement, furious that even her mother would allow her to be used in this way, and looked for a way to avoid this fate.

Chen Zhaoxing was a professor of Law at CUPL whom Meixiu had known from attending a few university seminars open to the public. She admired his charm even if she did not agree with his political views. Zhaoxing was a strong supporter of Hu Yaobang, the retired former Communist Party General Secretary famous for a lifetime of pro-reform policies that ultimately led to his removal and ill treatment by the regime. Ironically, it was her beauty that won her his attention, which soon become full patronage. Zhaoxing, smitten by the girl, used his influence to have her admitted to the university. Given the poor economic climate and the lack of prospects for student graduates, her father allowed her the opportunity, sure that when she had finished her studies she would make an even more valuable bride.

She proved an adequate student, but her studies took a backseat to other, far more pressing matters. Meixiu became embroiled in the increasingly strident student movement that demanded an end to government cronyism and corruption and a solution to the stagnant economy, spurred on by her mentor and lover, Zhaoxing. She joined various student organizations, signed petitions, and carried a demonstration sign at a number of gatherings, caught up in the emotion of the times.

When Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack on April 15, 1989 Meixui camped on the campus lawn with many thousands of other students eulogizing Hu and demanding that the CPC officially renounce its criticism of his political legacy. She marched with the crowd to Tiananmen Square along with similar throngs from Peking University and Tsinghua University and helped lay the impromptu wreath two days later to commemorate Hu’s contributions to reform and liberalization. After being pushed out of the plaza by police, Meixiu and thousands others marched back later that night and drafted a series of demands that required the government to publicly acknowledge the need for reform.

What began as a simple protest against the dishonoring of a much-loved liberal politician grew over the next seven weeks to become an international tragedy that forever changed a nation, with the tides of the revolutionary movement changing many times before it was finally snuffed out. The student gatherings announced boycotts and strikes and, enflamed by passion and a feeling that they might be ignored, erupted in open looting and mayhem. The government sought to open dialogue with the students, even if they had no intent to given in to the demands of the youth.

A notorious editorial in the April 26th edition of the Communist-controlled People’s Daily newspaper that painted the students as traitors plotting the overthrow of the government pushed the chaos even further. More than 100,000 student protestors responded, joined by factory workers and others who saw them as true patriots, marching through Beijing. Even when the government sought to appease at least some of the protestors’ demands, the situation grew worse. Hunger strikes were staged in Tiananmen Square with the aim of embarrassing the Communist Party leadership on the eve of an historic visit by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

On May 20th, the Chinese government declared martial law and in the first days of June, the military finally moved in with tanks and soldiers to forcibly clear Tiananmen Square of the tens of thousands of encamped protesters who had made it their home for more than a month. Even once cleared, terrible violence emerged in the surrounding neighborhoods and thousands were killed or injured on both sides of the battle. When it was over, the world was aghast at the atrocities and responded with heavy condemnation and sanctions. The Communist leadership sought to downplay the events and to distance itself from the worst violence, but mostly they sought to silence or arrest anyone who might dare revive such protests.

For Meixiu, the seven weeks were personally even more transformative.

Some months prior to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, a Malkavian named Colin McAllister had arrived in Beijing from Hong Kong, where he had cultivated a network of influence for over a year as a representative of his sire’s financial interests. In February, he had felt an overpowering urge to visit the Forbidden City in Beijing, convinced that there was something or someone there that he needed to find, though he was unsure of the purpose. Upon arriving, he was brought before a representative of the Imperial City’s Cathayans and was formally welcomed, though he was assigned a chaperone for the duration of his stay. When the protests first broke out in April, Colin’s escort restricted his movements such that Tiananmen Square and the universities were off-limits, so that the Malkavian could not bear personal witness to what had the potential to become a cultural embarrassment.

But Colin’s curiosity and assurance that he was supposed to be in the Forbidden City persuaded him to ignore the warnings and elude his chaperone’s accompaniment. With violent protests a fortuitous distraction, he was able to slip into the imperial palace and find the thing he was meant to find, a relic of ancient bone bearing carved inscriptions that had an almost hypnotic power over the delighted Kindred. He absconded with the artifact and fled with the other looters into the night, avoiding capture from his desperate escort by hiding among the students. When he was struck by machine gun fire, the Beast erupted and he lapses into a frenzy of bloodlust and rage that didn’t end until just before sunrise, when he found the crimson rage finally subsiding.

In his arms was the beautiful young Meixiu, injured by gunfire herself and easy prey for the rampaging Malkavian amid the nightmarish chaos along the blood-soaked Chang’an Avenue. As some semblance of control returned to him, Colin felt himself overcome by emotions of horror for what he had done, as well as fear of what would happen to him if the Cathayans found him. Without thinking further, he Embraced the girl in the ever-doomed hope of saving her, then he dragged her to safety inside the ruin of a destroyed shop while he found more secure refuge further from the scene of the crime.

Meixiu awakened to her new existence completely unaware of how it had happened. The only evidence she possessed that linked her to her sire was the artifact he had stolen from the Forbidden City, for he left it to her out of a sense of guilt that possessed him at the last moment before he left her. For more than a month she acclimated to — what was she? A predator? A parasite? — though it took every ounce of cunning, willpower, and spiritual effort to adapt as she did. When finally captured by the Cathayans and dragged before the eldest, Cha’ang-Li, Meixiu was first thoroughly questioned about her origins, and then subjected to a series of gruesome interrogations both physical and supernatural. As she was unable to reveal anything, she was proclaimed a by-blow of some laowai interloper and sentenced to destruction.

More for political reasons than out of any concern for the terrified Malkavian, that sentence was “mitigated by purchase” and she was delivered instead into the hands of Martino della Passaglia of Clan Giovanni. He was aware that she knew the location of an Oracle Bone, the artifact her sire left with her, and it was of great importance to the necromancer. Once under his protection, he had her retrieve it from its hiding place. No longer interested in her and unwilling to be held responsible for her, especially given the severe mood swings that plagued her and posed a regular threat to the stability of his domain, he sent her to America in 1993 to pay off a debt to Chas Voyager, a powerful Toreador in Washington, DC, with whom he maintained substantial financial dealings.

Chas was a member of the Primogen and one of the most influential Harpies in the domain of Washington, DC. He was ecstatic when he received his “gift” from della Passaglia, especially because he could not determine Meixiu’s true nature. Importantly, the little the young creature knew of her own kind only made it harder to discern any truth, for she had filled many of the tremendous gaps in her Kindred origin with her own fanciful and rather egocentric explanation for her condition, something her Giovanni ward had not discouraged. Her answers to the many questions posed by the Kindred of the domain made her a favorite among the well-heeled Damned, even if she was viewed far more as a divertissement than a peer.

As with all such things, Elysium’s fascination with Meixiu waned, and just as quickly, so did the Toreador primogen’s. She was formally released and Prince Marcus Vitel even recognized her small domain near the George Washington University campus in the hope that one night he might find some use for her, and given the demographics of the city, perhaps even lead to some arrangement with an influential Cathayan diplomat.

Once released, Meixiu constructed a personal cosmology that explained her condition to her, based on the legendry she had already patched together in her deranged mind. First and foremost, she was sure that she was not one of the western Kindred, especially one of the ruinous Malkavians. No, she was a Cathayan, at least as she imagined them to be, and she was not just any Cathayan, either. She began to identify herself as Hēi Lóng Gōngzhǔ or the Black Dragon Princess, a title to which she aspired based on her fractured memories of Chinese legend. She believed it was her destiny to one day defeat the “Demon Princes,” those Cathayans who currently ruled her homeland and were possessed by demons from the most foul realm of Diyu.

She understood her vampiric state, and that of all other Cathayans, to be a just suffering for failings of morality while alive. Only by repaying karma could she return to her original form, and to do this should would have to become a paragon of ascetic morality. However, her own salvation would have to wait until she first destroyed the Demon Princes, for only as one of the Ten Thousand Immortals would she have a chance at defeating such mighty enemies. And to do this she would first need to greatly increase her own power.

Meixiu’s misdirected research had led her to conclude that the way she was going to do this was by obtaining the Bái Zé Tu, a legendary grimoire authored by none other than the god-like Yellow Emperor that contained the secrets of all 11,520 types of supernatural creatures. With this tome in her hands she would know her foes’ every strength and weakness with that wisdom would be unstoppable. Of course, she would first have to find this sacred scroll, but again she was sure that she had discovered the means to accomplish this task, too.

The Oracle Bone that her sire had left her and that had been confiscated by the Giovanni was not the only one of its kind, she learned. While very rare, a number of similar artifacts had been discovered by archaeologists over the years. Experts claim that the script on these desiccated bones and tortoise shells is the oldest record of the language spoken during the Shang Dynasty. Her studies had led her to the conviction that the location of the Bái Zé Tu was recorded on one or more of the Oracle Bones. Therefore, she turned her attentions to obtaining and deciphering as many of them as she could until she unlocked the hidden resting place of the eldritch Bái Zé Tu.

In a relatively short time the Black Dragon Princess has gained a notable degree of influence in her adopted city, most of which she uses to directly aid her in acquiring more Oracle Bones and deciphering them. As might be expected, she first sought the support of the local Chinese community, primarily cajoling the aid of students and others who would believe her to be a peer. A number of the Tiananmen Square protesters managed to escape China in the aftermath of the uprising, and more than a handful found their way to the Washington, DC area, and to its universities. The GW campus boasted some of these and Meixiu queried them first to aid her quest. She also extending her influence beyond the student population and into the larger Chinese community, even into the diplomatic corps, using her attractive physicality as well as her supernatural gifts to convert Communists to her way of thinking.

Her greatest asset came from her involvement in the growing Falun Gong movement that had been founded by Li Hongzhi in Changchun in 1992. The practitioners of this physical, moral, and spiritual teaching that has its roots in qigong and became popular in the mid-1990s was increasingly viewed by the Chinese Communist Party as a threat to society and government. A harsh campaign to paint the Falun Gong as a heresy aimed at taking down the government paved the way for massive protests in 1999 that were nearly as impressive as those a decade before that ended with the Tiananmen Square massacre. With Li Hongzhi in New York, the protests crushed, and many of those involved jailed or worse, the activist wing of the movement relocated outside China.

Meixiu helps the Falun Gong in Washington, DC by funneling resources to the movement’s local organization, the Falun Dafa Association. A select group of members belong to the Tears of the Black Dragon, a secret society and ghoul cult created by Meixiu whose fundamental purpose is to serve as her herd. Its members believe that she is indeed the Black Dragon Princess and, while not granted complete understanding of her nature or purposes, they have been conditioned with enough of her delusion to both motivate them and make them useful tools. Every day this group and the larger organization have their agents on the National Mall and in front of the White House handing out pamphlets and staging small rallies in the hope of ultimately winning American support for their cause, even while some among them seek more vessels to sate the unending hunger of the Black Dragon Princess.

Cha’ang-Li and his Blood Court paid no heed to the rumors of one of their kind in the United States capital at first. However, in the past decade they have learned more that has convinced them that some vampire in Washington, DC actively supports the Falun Gong and tgus must be working against their broader interests. They have heard the name Hēi Lóng Gōngzhu and, while they can’t definitively determine whether this is someone they should fear or not, they are worried. Their greatest fear is the influence this Black Dragon Princess might have over their minions in Washington and elsewhere in the West. To uncover the truth, they have sent mortal agents to infiltrate Washington’s Chinese community in search of information about the mysterious vampire. Indeed, the Blood Court has made a special effort to seek the Falun Gong and its various associated organizations, including the DC office of the movement’s official western newspaper, the New York-based The Epoch Times. Very recently the Quincunx has sent its own kind to investigate, concerned that so far they have made no real progress, especially in an age when censorship has become more and more difficult.

Some of the Kindred of DC regard Meixiu with continued interest, though most, by and large, do not view her as a particular threat. While her status as a curiosity is long gone, she still commands a degree of admiration and respect on account of her mysterious identity, especially among the domain’s political outsiders. A few of the city’s Kindred have attempted to call her out regarding her origins, with one remarkable performance by a trio of Malkavians a few years back quite literally naming her sire and the circumstances of her Embrace, but the nature of the demonstration as well as the reputation of the participants achieved nothing more substantial than making the matter seem all the more incomprehensible.

Tonight, Meixiu appears in Elysium less frequently, in particular because she has become aware that there seem to be Cathayan forces moving against her and her interests. By taking her search for the Oracle Bones further and further beyond the traditional boundaries of the DC domain, she hopes that she can build real alliances with other domains’ Kindred and thus call upon more allies to protect her from such threats should they become serious. However, her bipolar condition makes these inter-domain forays difficult and more than once they have actually hampered her goals, worrying Princes and Bishops of her stability and further suggesting to some that whatever she’s actually up to might rouse the ire of some mysterious nemesis.

To her credit, Meixiu feels she is making real progress with the Oracle Bones. She keeps five of these artifacts in a special chamber in her DC haven and has another two within her sights. One currently occupies a public museum and another belongs to the private collection of a famed mortal plutocrat. Her attempts to translate the millennia-old engravings, however, have been less than triumphant. Three times she paid heavily for consultations with experts of dubious legal status that she believed would uncover her prize based on her translator’s best work, and four times she failed to locate the mythical Bái Zé Tu. These failures do not deter her, however. On the contrary, with each passing night Meixiu’s delusions grow stronger and she is further empowered to follow her destiny as the Black Dragon Princess, scion of the Yellow Emperor.

Sire: Colin McAllister

Clan: Malkavian

Nature: Fanatic

Demeanor: Enigma

Generation: 10th

Embrace: 1989

Apparent Age: Early 20s

Physical: Strength 2, Dexterity 3, Stamina 3

Social: Charisma 4, Manipulation 3, Appearance 5

Mental: Perception 4, Intelligence 3, Wits 2

Talents: Awareness 1, Intimidation 2, Subterfuge 3

Skills: Etiquette 1, Stealth 3

Knowledges: Academics 2, Computer 1, Law 1, Occult 2, Politics 2, Expert Knowledge (Chinese Mythology) 4

Disciplines: Auspex 3, Dementation 4, Obfuscate 3

Necromantic Rituals: Insight, Knowing Stone. Meixiu has no formal knowledge of the Discipline of Necromancy, having gleaned what little she knows from furtive observation of her della Passaglia “patron.” Her difficulties for these rituals is always 10 and requires the expenditure of a Willpower point to have any chance of working. Still, something occasionally gives her necromantic feedback, despite her not understanding the principles of the Black Art….

Backgrounds: Contacts 4, Domain 3, Fame 1, Herd 3, Resources 3, Retainers 1, Status 1

Derangements: Bipolar Disorder (Clan Weakness), Delusions

Virtues: Conscience 5, Self-Control 3, Courage 2

Morality: Humanity 6

Willpower: 5

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 13/1

Image: Meixiu appears as a pretty Chinese graduate student and typically dresses in a fashion that suits the assumption. She usually keeps her black hair in a long ponytail and wears glasses to give additional weight to her words. She is of medium height, but high heels increase that and with her bearing give the impression that she is taller than she is. When among the Kindred she often affects the distasteful stereotype of the “mysterious Asian vampire,” with long silk patterned garments and her hair done up in an elaborate style.

Roleplaying Hints: As the Black Dragon Princess you uphold a special code of honor that regards truth, justice, and strict morality above all else. At the same time, you will stop at almost nothing to obtain the things you need to fulfill your destiny. You play up your mysterious nature and undying youthful beauty to gain what influence you can, but you wield them as weapons whenever prudent. The Kindred are beneath you, but you will suffer them until the time is right for you to show your true nature to them and your true foes.

Haven: Meixiu’s haven is a four-story townhouse in the heart of Foggy Bottom and the campus of the George Washington University. The interior is decorated like a small, private museum, with vases, artifacts, artwork, and furnishings throughout, some of which are replicas and some are legitimate artifacts. The top floor is her private chamber and contains a walk-in closet that she has fortified so as to protect her most valuable possessesions, including her Oracle Bone scripts.

Influence: Meixiu has done quite well with her Falun Gong and student minions. She continues to make inroads with Chinese diplomats, too, usually via their offspring who are eager to believe the tales of the Black Dragon Princess. Meixiu knows that her time in DC is probably limited, however, and she seeks to “beat the Kindred at their own game,” building a balance of prestation favors and extending promises she hasn’t yet decide if she’ll honor.

ChilRev: Lizette

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Hello again, Kindred revolutionaries. Today we have a vampire much younger than many of the others we’ve seen here, in that she’s only a year old (if that!) but has made quite a place for herself. In particular, what I like about this character are:

  • The creative use of domain, in the form of a social movement rather than a geographical area.
  • The presence of gothic literary elements in her cultivation and ultimate Embrace and tailoring them to the Toreador archetype without being a stereotype.
  • The fact that a young Kindred can be important in her own way, and in ways that the elders might not have anticipated.

Tell me what you think!

In other news, the Children of the Revolution Kickstarter for the prestige print run of the title is already over 60 percent funded, and still has over two weeks to go as of this blog update. That’s great progress, and I just want to say thanks to everyone who’s pledged and backed already.

Lizette Cordoba

The Poet of the People’s Occupation

Everyone warned her, of course. “What are you going to do with a degree in poetry?” they’d always asked, as though they were the first to try and break the news to her that her dreams weren’t worth shit. Her answer had always been a smug “Teach, of course,” followed with a change of topic.

She did go into teaching. High school English Literature, while she worked on her Master’s Degree that would let her teach at the local university as she continued her own education. Poetry was her passion, and it showed in everything she did at that overpopulated inner-city New York school.

Not your average Embrace locale.

Her dreams of living out a real-life version of Dangerous Minds never quite manifested, of course. No one showed up to any of the Poetry Club events she sponsored, and the administration had to ask her several times to please stick to the lesson plans given by the school district.

It wasn’t the lack of interest that really did it in for her, though. It was the violence. Students from across the borough attended the school she taught. Students who were often part of rival gangs. The administration worked full-time to keep those enmities from exploding into open violence, but it still happened. It was inevitably in environments that couldn’t really be controlled: the front of the school after the last bell of the day, or in the middle of a busy hall between classes.

After a year, Lizette developed trouble sleeping, and used up her sick time and vacation days hiding in her bed, traumatized by the thought of walking those halls again. But she went back nonetheless. She took a year off from her night schooling, just to allow her to focus on rising to meet the challenge of teaching.

For all the good it did her. A half-year after she began to think of herself as capable of handling the rigors of teaching in the school long-term, her contract was terminated. Budget cuts, they said, the recession. They apologized because other, tenured teachers were going to be kept on, you see, whose class sizes had just increased by half again, but everyone had to make sacrifices, right?

For a week, Lizette raged, writing angry letters to the district, the teacher’s union, local newspapers, the mayor’s office, and the governor. Ultimately, none of it did any good. Her anger collapsed in on itself, became grief, and then numb depression. She collected unemployment meekly and had trouble getting out of bed on many days.

It was during this time that she turned to the one thing that had helped her through such episodes in the past: writing. She filled one black-and-white composition book after another with her couplets, stanzas, and whole poems. The first week was catharsis. The second week was expression. On the third, she had her muse available on command. The words flowed from her the way they never did when she was happy, and she lost whole days to the scratching of ballpoint on cheap lined paper.

In time, she transfered her writing – edited, polished, sharpened – to her laptop, and from there to a blog. She worked day and night on it, transferring her innermost feelings to something freely available on the web. It was a litany of her anger, her frustration, her helplessness, her grief. She railed against individuals, against the school district and useless unions, against the recession itself.

Two months later, she realized that she had come out the other side of all of that. She was still writing, but wasn’t doing so as a lifeline, desperate scribblings beneath a musty duvet that hid her from the world. Her blog had a small but loyal following, with a whole pantheon of commentors and friends who were nothing more than usernames and clever little icons. Eventually, Lizette realized wanted a bit more from the world. She took walks and visited friends she’d neglected.

On one of those walks, she saw them, a small body of protestors, gathered out in front of Wall Street’s tall churches to money. She stopped, listening to one of them who was standing and shouting something to them. Shouting something that sounded very familiar.

With a start, she realized that it was Burden of Scars. One of her poems.

She walked over to listen, and to speak with him after he was done. His name was Elliot Kemp and they spent the rest of the day together, talking. The next morning she showed up bright and early to join the Occupy movement.

Lizette’s life changed, dramatically and quickly. She found that her passion suddenly had an outlet. Not for apathetic adolescents or cynical administrators, but for people who shared what she had experienced. The stained gift-wrapping of the American Dream, as she said in one of her poems, and they roared their empathy.

The nature of her blog changed. There was still poetry, but it became fiery, inspiring poetry intended to goad her readers into action, and it worked in many cases. She volunteered for group-action committees and organized media responses, collected bail money for protestors thrown in jail and even got arrested a time or three herself. She self-published her poetry as an ebook that never made much money, but did earn the attention of both the publishing and academic world.

Lizette routinely performed spoken word renditions of her work at the Occupy gatherings, when she wasn’t working the food table, organizing the medical tent or writing furious e-mails to the alternative news sites. These events began to attract interested individuals, among them the handsome redhead she couldn’t help but notice. He showed up for a week to her performances before he introduced himself as Avery — just Avery — and told her how much he loved her work.

He was wealthy, it seemed, and he spoke not of her convictions and goals, but of the fire behind them. They discussed poetry seated on the Wall Street sidewalk at midnight, and he made substantial contributions to the movement’s food, clothing, shelter and legal needs. When she was arrested after one particularly ugly confrontation with the NYPD, he showed up first thing that evening, with a lawyer in tow who bore an order from the DA to not only release Lizette, but everyone else taken that evening.

She thought she was falling in love, and hoped that he was, too. He asked her one evening to come and perform a reading of her work to some of his friends. He was sure hearing her passion firsthand would convince them to support the work she was doing. Dressing in a new evening gown she bought for the occasion, she showed up to a salon that was all dark hardwoods, leather, and brass finishing. She shrank when she met them, though. They all seemed so cold and aloof, slightly amused at her expense. Even hostile. And one didn’t even feel like a person.

Lizette started by reading to them, and when the sable-headed beauty with the long neck that made her look like European nobility snickered at her, something snapped in her.

Fuck them. These were the people who were responsible for everything she’d been railing against for months. She stopped reading to them, and read at them. Something shifted in the room, a presence like incipient violence and sexual tension consuming one another.

As she stood there, on their rich carpet, she blamed them for the ills she’d faced, for what was wrong in the world. She called them villains to their faces, in perfect flowing meter and cadence. They sat awestruck, faces indignant and horrified — but wholly unmoving. When she finished, Avery was beaming, his hands clasped in front of his mouth as though he were trying to contain his joy. The black-haired, swan-necked woman dabbed a rich lace kerchief to her left eye, and then simply said: “Out.”

The others practically leapt to their feet, already snarling excitedly among themselves. She turned to Avery, who remained, and simply nodded. She stood then and crossed to Lizette, resting a single elegant finger on her chin and smiled. “Welcome,” she said, and left the room.

Avery and Lizette made love on the rich leather divan that night. After her orgasm, he chuckled and said “One for the road.” Then her world was sharp white fangs, sudden pain, dark blood and hunger.

Avery taught her about what it meant to be a vampire, what it meant to be a Toreador and what it meant to belong to the Camarilla. As she expected, his ardor for her cooled once she was his childe, but that didn’t really matter to her by then. She pursued her old goals with a new fervor, happy to use her newfound power to the benefit of the Occupy movement.

At least, until she ran afoul of the Ventrue. In short order, she found out who her enemies were, or at least who the hidden masters of the forces the movement railed against were. The short conflict nearly resulted in her Final Death. Worse, it nearly broke the ever-important Masquerade, which resulted in herself and the young Ventrue named Dayton being dragged in front of the Prince by the Sheriff. Both were warned against such stupidity in the future, and forced to drink of the Prince’s vitae.

Dayton was ordered to leave the Occupy movement alone entirely, no matter the trouble it caused him or his interests. In contrast, Lizette was given the Occupy movement as her domain in the city, with one condition: She must ensure that its efforts did not negatively impact the private domains of any of New York’s Kindred.

In the time since, Lizette has carried on her work. Sometimes, she fears that she’s stuck herself in a place of perpetual discontent, working openly to throw down the fat cats and make better lives for everyone, while working from behind the scenes to sabotage their efforts. The passion of the Occupiers is addictive, and continues to fuel her writing. To that end, the strength and significance of the Occupy movement as her domain has grown, giving her a degree of influence that the Prince likely hadn’t anticipated. Making things worse, her anger sometimes yields to the will of the horror inside her, the Beast, that occasionally results in depravities that make plundering the public treasure pale by comparison. Lizette has lied, stolen, taken blood by force, killed… and at the “coming out” party Avery threw for her, worse, at the behest of a truly awful Malkavian. Despite her passion, or perhaps because of it, she can feel her Humanity becoming brittle as she keeps the Beast on a taut leash.

Lizette continues to act as an unofficial leader for the Occupy movement, inspiring those around her to greater efforts and organizing its resources and recruitment. She frequently travels to other cities to help organize Occupy movements there, as well. During such travels, she is very careful to approach the Prince of that city and explain her purpose there. She does nothing involving the Kindred in such situations, if it can be helped, and she even tries to avoid the use of her vampiric powers while she is there. Her focus is the movement, and nothing else.

But somewhere inside, she knows that there is a clock ticking. Fiery rebellions do not enter stasis. They overflow and succeed in their efforts, or they eventually stagnate and boil away to nothingness in their failure. As well, she asks herself, given her vampiric condition, how much does she truly want to see a more equitable balance of power? When she, or any Kindred, needs to feed, isn’t it better to have a movement or an untouchable second class available, so that sustenance isn’t an ordeal? Does Kindred convenience trump the dignity of the human spirit? Or are the mortals, as some of the Damned contend, nothing more than kine for the consummate predators? Lizette plays a delicate game, keeping the movement boiling away steadily, neither succeeding nor failing, and asking herself questions that make her sleepless once again. But for how long?

Sire: Avery

Clan: Toreador

Nature: Dabbler

Demeanor: Architect

Generation: 10th

Embrace: 2011

Apparent Age: mid-30s

Physical: Strength 2, Dexterity 2, Stamina 2

Social: Charisma 3, Manipulation 3, Appearance 2

Mental: Perception 4, Intelligence 2, Wits 4

Talents: Alertness 2, Awareness 1, Empathy 2, Expression 3, Leadership 1, Streetwise 1

Skills: Drive 2, Etiquette 2, Performance 3, Survival 1

Knowledges: Academics 3, Computer 1, Investigation 1, Law 1, Politics 3

Disciplines: Auspex 2, Celerity 1, Fortitude 1, Presence 2

Backgrounds: Allies 3, Contacts 4, Fame 1, Herd 2, Influence 3, Resources 2, Retainers 2, Status 1

Virtues: Conscience 3, Self-Control 3, Courage 3

Morality: Humanity 5

Willpower: 6

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 13/1

Image: Lizette presents the camera-perfect image of the modern Occupier. She wears slogan-emblazoned t-shirts over jeans or track pants, sometimes with a hoodie over that. She wears her fair briwn hair choppy, and often in a ponytail as though she hadn’t had time to see to it properly or because she’s been out in the elements. She alternates between an over-stuffed messenger bag and a backpack, always with a laptop and an HD palm camera in them.

Roleplaying Hints: Lizette is somewhat awkward in social situations that don’t involve the topic she’s most passionate about. In these cases, her speech comes haltingly, giving the impression that she’s afraid to say something stupid, and perfectly content to remain beneath everyone else’s notice. If she can, she’ll turn conversations back to the things with which she’s most comfortable: socio-economic reform and early 20th century poetry.

Allies & Contacts: Lizette’s Allies are the people she’s met working the Occupy protests. These include a very influential local political blogger, a police precinct captain who was a bit of a protesting firebrand in his youth, and a mid-level functionary in the city government. Her Contacts are primarily among the Occupiers, academia, the publishing world, and the local police.

Herd: Lizette’s Herd consists of a small handful of people who tend to congregate around the Occupy protest sites. They’re mostly other protestors, but also a pot dealer or two and even a couple of street teens from the homeless population that flocks to these sites.

Influence: Although her kingdom is a tiny one, Lizette is definitely a queen of the Occupy movement in her city. Protesters look to her frequently for her input and approval, and though minute, she has access to the various resources the movement tends to gather for itself, such as donated food, clothing, and money, as well as volunteers from all walks of life, including lawyers and journalists.

Retainers: Lizette has a pair of ghouls, who serve her in different ways. Elliot Kemp is a fellow Occupier with solid people skills and a head for organization whom everyone recognizes as Lizette’s right hand. He frequently tends to the Occupy movement during the day while Lizette is in slumber. Her other ghoul is Amanda Cortez, a beat cop who specializes in “crowd control” tactics, and so is at the forefront of any police presence at the Occupy sites.

 

Nasch the Circassian

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Howdy, faithful Kindred scholars. Tonight I have for you Nasch the Circassian. He’s got a few years under his belt, and he often finds his way into some high-profile trouble, but he has some blemishes in his history that a clever coterie might be able to work around or even remedy. In particular, I like that his involvement in the Anarch Revolt leaves so many unanswered questions. What really happened in the tomb? Could that possibly have been Set? What did Giangaleazzo see that made him honor the agreement? And why haven’t the Tremere called for reparation? Los of room to explore here, whether you’re an Anarch, True Sabbat, or anyone in a domain where turbulence can be traced back to Nasch.

Oh! And in case you missed it, the Children of the Revolution prestige print run Kickstarter is now active.

<1>Nasch, The Circassian

<n>A snorting mare, dark against the silver mountains, its hide limned auburn by the setting sun. The laughter of a sister teasing him near a muddy stream. The rich smell of his mother’s cooking accompanied by the distant sound of his grandfather’s pain. The sudden scream of an eagle just before it drops from the brilliant heavens like a javelin and in one brutal moment seizes and rends the snake that had been hiding so completely in the tall grass, gorging on the kill that is its rightful reward. These are the only memories that remain of his childhood, of the time before Egypt, before manhood, before the deathly chill of the long shadows of the Endless Night that engulfed him. These last remaining fragments, these momentary flashes of imagery and sensation are the last anchors of a vestigial sense of humanity that remains above all else his most treasured possession.

Nasch was born among the Bzhedugh Adyghes, one of the peoples known more popularly as the Circassians, especially in the Mamluk culture that dominated the Near East at the time of his birth. Like many Circassian boys, he was proud when his father arranged for him to travel to Egypt to serve in the sultan’s army, viewing his sale to the visiting merchant as a ticket to freedom, not slavery. The sights and sounds that greeted him in Cairo were beyond anything he had imagined and he quickly heeded the clarion of Islam and the seductively mysterious culture of the ancient land of the pharaohs.

The boy became the property of Kulayb al-Naqid, a powerful bureaucrat who spent whatever it took to ensure that his young warrior received the best martial training available. His bow, lance, mace, and sword were as extensions of his body and his horsemanship improved so much that his patron regularly hosted competitions to further enhance his standing in the sultanate’s administration by showing off his remarkable young charge.

Complementing Nasch’s military education was a more cerebral one that was even more a source of pride for the learned al-Naqid. The lad was given regular access to the personal and religious libraries of his master and his master’s network of friends, which included Islamic scholars as well as Christian and Jewish authorities. Nasch was captivated by what he read and proved a quick learner, mastering Arabic and a handful of other important scripts and tongues before he had reached majority. He was most fascinated by those texts that revealed the older history of Egypt, its rulers, and its gods, and he made a special effort to teach himself hieroglyphics in order to pluck from the ancient inscriptions the lost secrets of the pharaohs.

Upon reaching the age for battle, Nasch was granted his freedom and provided arms and armor in addition to a mount. This did not remove his obligation to al-Naqid, however. As was the Mamluk custom, Nasch remained bound to his former master by an oath of blood loyalty. This was not an issue for the Circassian at first, but in time the elder al-Naqid grew demanding and continued to treat Nasch as a trophy to parade before his friends as the aging bureaucrat struggled to maintain his station in a shifting political landscape. As Nasch increasingly resisted this treatment, al-Naqid began to spread rumors of his “son” that resulted in doors being closed to him that previously had been open. He found himself cut off from the scholarly works that had become his great passion and his contacts refused to see him, all on account of al-Naqid’s poisoned words.

Only one door remained open to the abandoned Mamluk. A Copt named Abul-Darda Hashim al-Musayyab, a rival of al-Naqid’s who had been working hard to undermine him in order to assume his influential position as a tax administrator, openly welcomed Nasch and supplied him the intellectual companionship he desperately sought. Al-Musayyab also quickly changed Nasch’s views on his obligation to his former master, convincing the young man that a father who does not treat his son with due respect is himself worth none. When al-Naqid learned of Nasch’s association with his enemy, he formally denounced him as a conspirator and traitor. The crafty Copt seized the opportunity his manipulation had provided, fanning the flames in Nasch’s heart and urging him to take action before al-Naqid went any further. So effective was al-Musayyab’s argument that when Nasch found himself standing over al-Naqid’s bloody corpse he was convinced that the idea had been his own.

Nasch’s story might have ended there, but two things worked in his favor to save him from punishment. First, the Mamluks were swiftly rising in power on account of the recent ascension of Baibars to the sultanate, the first of the new dynasty’s rulers after centuries of Ayyubid rule. Second, al-Musayyab was only the servant of Nasch’s true patron, the Ventrue elder Palamon.

A devout Copt who dedicated himself to the goal of purging Egypt of Islam and restoring it to its ancient glory, Palamon had watched Nasch for some time and saw in him the perfect childe. He had actually masterminded al-Naqid’s downfall with the assistance of “sympathetic parties” among the Followers of Set, with whom he had allied himself against the Muslim undead. It did not take long for Nasch to become convinced to swear a new blood oath to the passionate Ventrue and in 1263 he took an oath of fealty in the form of the Embrace. With his nights now freed of mortal concerns and the Followers of Set willing to share occult secrets with him that no mortal possessed, Nasch saw his sire as both his savior and a true father that deserved his eternal loyalty.

As much as he threw himself into his occult pursuits, Nasch also put substantial energy into mastering contemporary politics. Aided by his nascent mastery of Presence, a gift that seemed to come more naturally to him than his clan’s parallel affinity for Dominate, he proved a skilled and valuable asset that his sire fully exploited. This partnership proved a successful one and by the time Nasch reached his fiftieth *birthday* and was rewarded by being formally released by his sire, the pair had become quite accomplished. However, this did not last, for even as Nasch and his sire cultivated influence among key officials throughout Egypt and the empire’s Syrian territory, they remained wholly oblivious to the way they were being manipulated.

The Followers of Set who had allied themselves with Palamon were a very secretive cabal even among their fellow Setites, a group possessed of a secret that they shared with no one and would do anything to protect. Dubbing themselves the Coil of the Lion, these Serpernts were dedicated to no less a duty than protecting one of the clan’s holy sites suspected of being the tomb of the Antediluvian Set. They not only knew its location, but had been guarding it from discovery and intrusion for millennia, keeping their progenitor safe until the time had come for his return. This responsibility meant that despite their dark stewardship, they occasionally had to relocate the torpid form believed to be the Antediluvian in order to protect him. The time had again come nigh for this task and they used their Ventrue pawns to ensure that this could be accomplished as smoothly as possible.

Key to The Coil of the Lion’s plan was to create enough distraction among the region’s Kindred to focus their attention elsewhere when the move took place. The cult decided that a political and cultural scandal would serve this purpose well and the best way to accomplish this was to turn Nasch against his sire. Just as he had been receptive to the deceptive entreaties of al-Naqid, the young Ventrue was equally susceptible to the persuasions of the agents of the fork-tongued Setites. He began to see his sire as no different from al-Naqid, an exploitive master who only pretended respect, which was not wholly untrue. He slowly came to believe that his release from his sire’s authority was actually a ploy to make him more loyal to Palamon even as the elder took greater advantage of him, a thralldom under the guise of freedom. Ultimately, The Coil of the Lion succeeded in convincing Nasch that as a Mamluk and Circassian he would never be able to achieve parity with his sire or other Ventrue, that he would instead always been viewed as little more than a fancy slave.

By this time, Palamon, in large part due to the help of his favored childe, had achieved near-total control over the immediate advisors to Sultan al-Ashraf Sha’ban. With the backing of the Setites, Nasch made his move and lent his support to an uprising among the Mamluks that began in Syria and quickly spread to Egypt. The turmoil took Palamon, along with other Kindred, by surprise and though their eventual downfall was not an overnight affair, they were unable to regain their upper hand. Nasch’s mortal ally Barquq, a cunning Circassian like himself, was instrumental in the rebellion and, after nearly five years of political and military chaos, finally succeeded in seizing the sultanate for himself, thereby founding the Burji Mamluk dyansty.

Naturally, Palamon and the other Ventrue did not look kindly on Nasch’s betrayal. They invoke the Lextalionis and did their best to make unlife difficult for the traitorous ancilla. Despite his best efforts, were it not for his Setite patrons, Nasch knew he was doomed. It was during this tumultuous time that the Coil of the Lion made its near-fatal mistake. Sure of their hold over the ruined Ventrue, they grew careless and boasted about their true purpose to enflame the imagination of the Ventrue they considered their debtor. They underestimated his understanding of the old ways and when they demanded his assistance in helping them ensure the protection of some pilgrims to the necropolis of Saqqara, he knew it was his only opportunity to seize an advantage that he so desperately needed.

In the winter of 1381, with the eyes of local Kindred misdirected elsewhere, the Coil of the Lion undertook the dangerous journey they had planned for so long. When Nasch’s Mamluks attacked the small caravan the morning after their arrival in Saqqara, the Setite ghouls and mercenaries were unprepared and unable to defend their cargo. The raiders seized the opulent sarcophogus and all but two of the Setite escorts met Final Death, the survivors fleeing in snake form into the night-chilled sands. Their minions were slaughtered and all traces of the caravan were burned or secreted away inside desert-scourged tombs. They dragged this choicest prize into one such funereal chamber and guarded it until the sun set.

When Nasch arose and stood before the ebony coffin he was not sure exactly how to go about the deed. He had read and heard many different things about the Amaranth, but such forbidden whispers bore no specifics. What he was sure of was that no matter how things happened, he was facing an creature whispered fearfully, reverently to be nothing less than a god in the eyes of the Setites, and to come unprepared would unquestionably mean his demise. For this reason he had worked every minion, contact, and pawn he could, and all but emptied his treasury in order to obtain something that might help him survive and accomplish this task.

Nasch’s efforts paid off when he was able, a mere few weeks before the desert raid, to acquire a small sliver of ancient bone from a merchant who desperately craved the reward of “eternal life” in exchange for the relic. The merchant claimed that the bone was nothing less than a fragment of the forearm of Osiris, Set’s nemesis. Nasch relished the opportunity, having read in a collection of Gnostic apocrypha that “one of the betrayer’s get” might deal a grievous wound to “his thrice-damned progeny.” Although Nasch asked a handful of trusted conspirators to verify the assertion that the bone fragment was the real thing, he remained skeptical, but without other options and time running out he had little choice but to put his faith in the artifact.

When his thralls pried open the last seal and removed the startlingly plain inner lid that had concealed the face of Antediluvian, Nasch felt the world shift. The a susurration quickly grew into a clamor, the sound of a thousand serpents rending the air with their unearthly hissing as the chamber around him vanished into blackness. He found himself standing upon a dais in a vast, open temple situated on an otherwise empty expanse of desert that stretched into infinity. Before him lay the body of a man with the head of an unspeakable beast, no sarcophogus in sight, naked but for a simple loincloth. For a few moments Nasch surrendered to a fear that made even the Red Fear seem insignificant. He could not move and was sure that he was to meet Final Death, sure that this was Set, and that the Antediluvian would slake its thirst thirst on his vitae.

It was at that moment that Nasch recalled the memory of the eagle and the snake. Without permitting himself another thought, he leapt forward and sank his fangs into the dark god.

What happened next he cannot or will not permit himself to guess. To this night, Nasch recalls a distant memory of power, unimaginable power, surging through him, and of a tremendous roar that drowned out all other sensation. He knows, too, there was pain, as if the sun itself had swallowed him. And his body unconsciously quakes with a terror so all-encompassing that to this night all his other fears have lost their hold on him.

When Nasch awakened next he discovered that more than a decade had passed. He found himself in a monastery in Sicily. His servitors had arranged for his transport out of Egypt, but only one remained with him, and the man could provide few additional details about the fateful night in Saqqara. Nasch became convinced that the shard of Osiris had been real, for he could find no other explanation for his survival. At first he believed he had succeeded in committing diablerie, but this conviction did not last long. Strange visions began to haunt his dreams, visions of serpents consuming the world, writhing from the trees and walls, and worse. An unrelenting hissing plagued him when awake, a hallucination he struggled hard to master.

The most telling sign that whatever had transpired had failed was his own form. Upon arising from torpor, Nasch had become gaunt and reeked of the grave. Initially, he assumed this was normal after torpor and that he would soon regain his former appearance, but no amount of blood would reverse this change. He soon came to believe that rather than taking the vitae an Antediluvian, whatever ancient Kindred this truly was had instead performed some lesser Amaranth upon him, leaving him permanently weakened. In the vain hope of reversing his condition he engaged in an orgy of blood-drinking that exceeded the capacities of his monastic environs. Sure enough, word reached the ears of a nearby Lasombra elder who had barely survived the Burning Times and had no wish to see them rekindled on her doorstep. With no minions or moneys at his disposal, and not wishing to draw too much attention to himself, Nasch chose to heed her warning and he left the domain for Milan.

For the next few years, Nasch kept a low profile and played the genteel and unassuming Ventrue ancilla. Although outwardly loyal to his clan, his closest ties were to the Tremere. Soon after joining the city’s Kindred, he sought their counsel as to the existence some art or artifact that might be able to mute his presence so as to hide him from Set and his agents. The Malkavian Oracle at Milan sensed an aura of doom around him and made an effort to avoid him, refusing to share her auguries with him. The Nosferatu similarly had no interest in teaching their Discipline to the blighted Ventrue, but the Tremere had no such compunctions. In fact, on the contrary, the magus Marco Pessina was intrigued by the paranoid Blue Blood and promised to help in exchange for Nasch’s knowledge of the Followers of Set and their cyclopean rituals.

In 1402, Pessina completed a ritual that he said would answer the Ventrue’s prayers. According to Pessina, the Ritual of Concealing would diminish Nasch’s presence so greatly that no Kindred of the foul blood of the Followers of Set, not even the founder of the clan himself, would be able to detect him. The rite came with two caveats. First, the ritual’s power was contingent upon Nasch’s own behavior. The more he advertised his presence, the weaker the protection would be. Second, given the incredible strength of the blood magic — it is no mean feat to obscure one of the Damned from from a god — its efficacy would fade over time. The only way to replenish the ritual’s potency was for Nasch to enter torpor, during which time it would regain its original might.

As final payment for the Tremere’s efforts, Nasch had Pessina destroyed. He provided enough information to a Toreador neonate inspired by the recent rumblings of the soon-to-be Anarch Revolt as was necessary and let Kindred nature take its course. Just to be safe, Nasch then tipped off the Tremere of Milan to the jealous Toreador in their midst, “to avenge the death of Marco Pessina, who aided me when I needed it.”

This became Nasch’s modus operandi. When, over the years, he sought an advantage among his kind, he identified a downtrodden neonate or ancilla and convince the patsy to stand against one or more established Kindred presented an obstacle, even while openly defending the Traditions and declaring allegiance to the establishment. Some, many even, fell for these lies, aided as they were by vampiric charms, but more often those in power saw through his sham and sought his head for stirring up the Anarchs. He survived as long as he did in Milan only because of his continued alliance with the Tremere, who found it more strategically beneficial to look beyond his likely involvement with the diablerie of one of their own in order to gain as much additional information about Setite and Egyptian rituals as possible. One night, they figured, his worth would expire, and then so would he.

The Tremere did not have that chance, however — at least not yet. Regardless of the danger he might invite, Nasch has historically been unable to avoid the limelight. His relaince on the Discipline of Presence stirred up feelings of rebellion and immediate action in any who fell under its sway, particularly those weak-willed neonates who had become dangerously numerous over the centuries. Even when he eschewed the use of his Disciplines, it was usually too late, and in more than one daomain, the Anarchs had already taking to the streets shouting his name. Almost overnight, Milan became a battleground for those defending the Traditions and those howling for a new order and the blood of the defenders. Even as he was hailed as a hero by the Milanese Anarchs and their “patron saint,” a Lasombra named Giangaleazzo, Nasch became terrified that the Tremere ritual would be powerless to protect him from Setite vengeance. Even if it did, the Tremere would still have his head when they finally reached their tolerance of him, as Nasch was sure they would. Ironically, a third contingency proved to be a far more immediate threat.

The Anarchs were not the only ones who had seized power in Milan. The nascent Sabbat had converted many of the impressionable Anarchs to their cause, heeding the exhortations of Giangaleazzo, or taking the faith of the Sword of Cain under pain of martyrdom. Nasch did not escape the turning tides of Milanese politics and was brought before Giangaleazzo. Desperate, he played the only card he had. In a closed-door parlay with the Lasombra, Nasch traded his knowledge of the purported Setite Antediluvian’s tomb to the astonished vampire in exchange for his protection from the Sword of Caine. The Lasombra “saint” agreed and declared his safety in Milan, so long as the Archbishop himself was satisfied with the contents of the desert tomb.

Having secured his safety for a time, Nasch voluntarily entered torpor in order to recharge the Tremere Ritual of Concealment.  He woke decades later, with the Tremere absent from the City of the Boar. Surprised that he had been spared by both angry Usurpers and tempestuous Sabbat — and now fully protected by the ritual once again — Nasch skulked away from Milan.

Since the fifteenth century, Nasch has spent significant time in at least a score of cities, usually doing his best at first to not draw attention, but always finding himself unable to resist the tendencies that advertise his presence and force him to flee and again seek torpor. His corruptive influence is almost like a virus, and in each place his legacy is one of destabilizing sedition and open violence against the powers that be that often lasts for some time after his terrified exit from the storm he incited.

Tonight, Nasch still clings to those few memories he has of life before the nightmare began. The horse, his sister, his mother’s cooking. But the last one, the memory of the eagle, is increasingly replaced not by another recollection, but by a vision of the future. Instead of the eagle falling upon the snake, it is the snake that finds the eagle asleep in his aerie and with cold-blooded intent sinks its fangs into the unsuspecting raptor and crushes it with the strength of a vengeful god.

Sire: Palamon the Copt

Clan: Ventrue

Nature: Conniver

Demeanor: Eye of the Storm

Generation: 7th

Embrace: 1263

Apparent Age: Withered by time

Physical: Strength 3, Dexterity 3, Stamina 5

Social: Charisma 6, Manipulation 5, Appearance 1

Mental: Perception 3, Intelligence 4, Wits 5

Talents: Expression 4, Leadership 4, Subterfuge 5

Skills: Etiquette 2, Melee 3, Stealth 3, Survival 4

Knowledges: Academics 4 (Pharaonic History), Occult 5 (Egyptian rituals), Politics 4

Disciplines: Auspex 1, Dominate 4, Fortitude 5, Potence 4, Presence 6, Serpentis 1

Backgrounds: Contacts 2, Influence 4, Resources 3, Status (Anarchs) 3

Merits/Flaws: Language (Adyghe, Arabic, Aramaic, Coptic, Hebrew), Smell of the Grave

Virtues: Conscience 2, Self-Control 1, Courage 4

Morality: Humanity 3

Willpower: 8

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 20/4

Image: Nasch appears taller than his entirely average frame on account of his unusually emaciated condition, a situation that also makes him seem greatly aged. His once-powerful muscles have winnowed to a wiry physique, contributing even more to his unsettling appearance. His dark hair is long and straggly, but otherwise he keeps himself clean-shaven, and the charnel accent that accompanies him completes the image of a monster. Only his deep brown eyes hint at his remaining humanity. Nasch typically dresses in clothing suitable for his environment, though perhaps a bit careworn. He is animated when speaking and unable to contain his passions, but he can swiftly transform into a creature of silent paranoia that is notably uncomfortable around others.

Roleplaying Hints: The Circassian is alternately terrified of the dreadful fate that he’s certain will soon be his — the one he knows he deserves — or manically focused on a scheme that will earn him just enough time to achieve his short-term goals before rebellion once again erupts around him. He is at constant war with himself, seeking to avoid attention for his own safety while at the same time craving the cruel pleasure that betrayal and unpheaval bring him. He is an awful creature, a liar for its own sake and satanically able with the habit.

Haven: Most of the time, Nasch’s haven is a private, secure home or small structure far from the path any Kindred would have reason to tread. He does not invite others into his domain, and is always prepared to relocate should it be discovered.

Influence: Among the Anarch Movement, Nasch is as much a figure of admiration as he reviled as a Jonah. While educated Anarchs respect him for his role in the Anarch Revolt, they also see him as the liar he is, knowing he has no loyalty to their sect above any other. Cagey Anarchs may try to exploit Nasch both as the inspiring figure his Presence projects, but also as a necessary sacrifice for the dominant sect if their revolution or subsequent barony fails. This ruse itself usually comes apart as those who would use Nasch fall under the sway of his Presence, as they almost always do. The Camarilla certainly have no love for the Ventrue traitor, but they have refrained from formally pursuing his destruction on account of… things certain Malkavians and Nosferatu whisper about the Circassian.

Mythic Tragedy: The Nabataean

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Here we see the Nabataean, one of the Children of the Revolution penned by Mummy developer C.A. Suleiman.

Thematically, I love this guy. He exudes a mythic feel that’s perfect for an elder vampire, and he does it without being an uber-character who can blow something into splinters by looking at it. He’s also tied very well to a modern world event that’s perfectly on target for Children of the Revolution. And he could easily show up in practically any chronicle, to be helped by characters or to be exploited by one of their nemeses. “Who’s this guy? Holy shit, he’s a two-thousand-year old victim of some kind of abusive clan bullshit. Hey, come over here and we’ll help you out. Now, can you do us a favor…?”

Mechanically, I think he’s almost there. I think one improvement would be to eliminate Amnesia in the form of a Flaw and replace it with a more exploratory treatment as a derangement. He’d still perform admirably in his role without that scurrilous Iron Will, too.

What do you think?

<1>The Nabataean

<n>One by one, we fall from Heaven into the depths of the past. This, our world, is ever upturned, so that yet some time we’ll last. Who are we?

— Riddle of the Sheik

All this grandeur, lost.

In the 363rd year of the Common Era, the hidden city of Petra (the biblical “Sela,” in what is now the nation of Jordan) was in the midst of its second bloom. The first came centuries before, when it blossomed into the premier stop along the trade routes between the East and Gaza, the most important port in the Levant, and the gateway to the markets of Greece, Egypt, Rome, and Syria. This important trade route was the family business and life’s blood of Petra’s inhabitants and civil overseers: the Nabataeans.

The intervening winter that allowed for this second spring came with the winds of change, blown from the west when Rome, which had been receiving tribute from Petra since the 1st century BC, invaded and claimed much of the  surrounding territory, including several precious trade routes. Petra’s decline was swift and sharp in the wake of Rome’s avarice, and yet drained of vitality though it was, the mountain city remained. When Emperor Trajan annexed and established it as the capitol of what he called the Arabia Petraea, Petra slowly began to see a new revival — one that would, in part, erase its cultural identity, but an architectural and economic revival all the same.

By the year 363, Petra was the center of a diocese under the auspices of Constantine’s dream, the Eastern Roman Empire. It had lost some of its luster from the glory days of the Nabataean kings, but the addition of Byzantine colonnades, finely carved chancels, and arrays of opus sectile mosaics certainly beautified the aging city….

…until the earthquake.

Records of the time indicate that the quake was felt as far away as Aqaba, and the devastation it leveled on Petra certainly reflected such magnitude. Like most earthquakes, it began at a tumultuous locus and concluded with an aftershock some hours later. It toppled temples, sent broken columns into the walls of the Royal Palace, and utterly demolished the city’s only theater. Over half the residents took the quake, which killed hundreds, as a sign from above and chose to abandon Petra, her short-lived Renaissance now at an end, forever.

<3>Shaking Heaven and Earth

The quake that rocked Palestine then remains an oft-discussed event. So great was its power that diviners and oracles, including some from as far back as the reign of Emperor Trajan, claimed to have foreseen the event. None of these prognosticators spoke in specifics, naturally, but the timing is certainly curious.

Just before the earthquake, in late 362, the Emperor Julian, “the Apostate,” had outlawed the teaching of Christianity, which had been the state religion for almost 30 years by then, throughout the breadth of the empire. Then, a month after the earthquake, Julian died at the Battle of Ctesiphon. Shortly after that, Julian’s successor Valentinian made his brother Valens the ruler in the east, and in so doing, created at last a permanent separation of the Roman and Byzantine Empires — an act that would ultimately precipitate the fall of both empires, according to some scholars.

Not every inhabitant of Petra felt so defeated. One man lived through the quake just the same as the others, but where they saw only ill-omen, he saw a need to pick up the pieces and soldier on. Like his father, and his father before him, the man worked the hydraulic engineering innovations that were the wonder of their place and time: conservation systems and dams to control the rush of winter waters that caused dangerous flash floods. He was a Nabataean, and his ties to the land and to Petra ran deeper than any Roman fear or Byzantine superstition. Knowing what a mass exodus would mean for Petra’s fortunes, he spoke out against her abandonment.

By that time, though, the word “Nabataean” had taken on pejorative connotations, such as “peasant,” “boor,” or even “bastard” in the very lands that had once comprised the Nabataean kingdom, a sad degradation of a people who had once been among the most tolerant and gifted of the ancient world. Although the man had done everything he could do to fit in and to be of use, including even converting to Christianity (as some Nabataeans had done, once Roman-occupied), to the ruling elite his word, was that of his people. And his people were “peasants.”

One powerful individual did take note of the man’s ardor and loyalty, however naïve or optimistic it was; he just didn’t do anything about it. This individual, one of the long-dead begotten of Cain, watched as the caravans filed along the city’s Colonnade Street, past her Nymphaeum and her fallen Temple of the Winged Lions, down her famous siq, and out her front gates. The city’s structure never lent itself to prolonged Kindred habitation, but it was as perfect a way station for them as it was for the kine, and it was in this capacity that the vampire was in Petra at the time.

This dead visitor, a scion of the King of Shadows, did not bring the Nabataean into the endless night. He merely took note of the mortal’s name, family line, and behavior before vanishing once more into darkness. In fact, one might say that his presence in Petra had been rooted in the same.

The Nabataean’s plea ignored, his city’s star would fade slowly over the next 300 years, as trade routes shifted away from Petra and support from the eastern empire waned. By the year 747, it was a backwater municipality in the growing Islamic Caliphate, its population dwindled from almost 40,000 during its heyday to fewer than 2,000 residents. But among those who yet remained was the last descendant of the Nabataean, who insured his line would keep faith with their land. This descendant, a humble laborer, eked out a living as best he could in Petra’s decline.

And then it happened again.

If the events of the year 363 were the beginning of the end for Petra, the earthquake of 747 was the final nail in her coffin. The city had been reusing materials for centuries by then, and what little foundation they provided was sorely outmatched by the power of the quake’s fury. It tore through not only what remained of Petra, but all the cities of the once-Nabataean Negev, leveling temples, collapsing homes, and swallowing tomb and soul alike.

And this time, the Nabataean was caught in the middle of it. When the quake started, he was working on the temple of Qasr el-Bint (“the daughter’s castle”), amending some of its masonry. Before he could even take a breath, the world was falling in all around him. In a last-ditch effort to find safety, he ran to the nearest aperture, and in a daze he thought brought on by the stress of the moment, he saw through the opening a beautiful white camel, smiling serenely beyond. Upon hearing a section of sandstone break loose overhead, he closed his eyes in preparation for death… but it took an unexpected aspect.

His eyes fluttered open and beheld a figure of nightmare, surely a djinn or one of the ghûl. Yet it stood with arms outstretched, an inscrutable look upon its weathered face, as if welcoming him back home. Looking up, the Nabataean saw the block of sandstone, suspended in mid-air… by shadows. At this, the mortal’s fragile consciousness gave out and he collapsed in a heap on the temple floor. When he awoke, he was no longer among the living, but the Damned.

Like his ancestors before him, the Nabataean had adopted the religion of his place and time; in this case, Islam. The Nabataean people, like other tribal Arabs, started out as fully polytheistic, offering their prayers to the likes of Al-Uzza and Al-Qaum, Dushares and Manawet. When the Israelites conquered them, Alexander of Judea forced mass conversions to Judaism, and so Nabataeans born in that place and time accepted that faith. Under the Romans, the Nabataeans converted first to the Hellenized incarnation of their former pantheon, with Venus and Mars in place of Al-Uzza and Al-Qaum, and later, under the Eastern Empire, to Christianity — until, of course, the coming of Islam. Indeed, adapting to survive in peace seemed to be the Nabataean way.

When the Nabataean discovered that his undying savior had not adapted as his ancestors did — had adopted neither the faith of his place and time, nor those faiths that had come before it — he was dumbfounded at his sire’s deed. He hadn’t been especially religious in life, but on finding out that beings such as this existed, his mind couldn’t help but frame the discussion in religious terms. After many nights, he mustered the courage to finally ask his sire why he had come to Petra in her decline, why he had saved a humble Muslim Nabataean only to damn him immediately thereafter.

“I have not slain you,” came the response. “I have preserved you.”

“But why? Why me?” said the Nabataean.

“Because one night, you might be the last of your kind.”

* * *

On his subsequent travels around the Levant, the Holy Land, and the Fertile Crescent, the Nabataean learned a great deal about not just one world, but two: the world of the living, and the secret world of the accursed dead who walked in its shadow. As sire and childe, the pair toured the courts of the Ashirra, the Islamic brotherhood of undead, and conversed with caliphs, supped with sultans, and interviewed with imams. The known world took them in, and they in turn took in the world. And through it all, the bond between the two Kindred grew.

As is often the case with the Damned, this very engagement was the very thing that spelled the end of their time together. In the early 11th Century, following the emergence of the so-called Taifa kingdoms in Al-Andalus, the pair ended up the honored guests of a fellow Lasombra named Bakr ibn Safwan al-Qushari, the self-proclaimed Sultan of Málaga. When the sultan asked them to pray with him, the Nabataean’s sire politely refused. The sultan, thinking him a fellow “person of the book” (i.e., a Christian or a Jew), offered him access to a local church or synagogue, instead. When he was again refused, the sultan realized that his guest was neither Muslim nor dhimmi (a non-Muslim freeman), but true infidel, and thus in need of some counsel.

So it was that the Cainite Sultan of Málaga challenged his clanmate and guest to a contest. Should the sultan lose, he would give up half his sultanate to form a new domain for his guest (who had, to that point, established no earthly domain of his own). If he won, his guest would agree to convert, if not to Islam than at least to another religion of the book. Thinking the contest a jest at worst and an evening’s entertainment at best, the sire agreed. The Nabataean no longer recalls the manner of the contest, only that his sire lost and that they both suspected deception. Both Kindred foolishly believed their aged host to be above cheating on such a trivial dalliance.

When called to make good on his loss, the Nabataean’s sire again politely declined, but made no mention of his host’s own bad faith in the process. When a Cainite guest breaks faith with a Cainite host, the results can be explosive, and this instance was no exception. Incensed, and feeling the honor of both clan and tradition slighted, the sultan brought the matter before the Amici Noctis, the quasi-secret internal tribunal of the Lasombra clan. Al-Qushari had been careful to cultivate alliances with both Muslim and Christian clanmates over the years, and his influence was heard and felt among those who sat in judgment of their nomadic clanmate. As such, their verdict was as clear as it was swiftly delivered. If the Nabataean’s sire would not make good and convert, then he would face the Final Death.

Knowing his sire would never convert to a faith he did not love, the Nabataean, who had stayed silent through the matter, made a bold and decisive move. He offered his own unlife in exchange. To his surprise, neither his sire nor the sultan objected, nor even reacted with especial dismay. The sultan accepted at once, and sent word to the tribunal that the sire’s verdict was to be voided, provided his Nabataean childe remained true to his word. After almost three centuries years together, sire and childe parted ways with nothing more than a lone knowing nod and a somber valediction.

Again the Nabataean prepared himself to meet death, as he had the night of his Embrace, and again was Death denied. The sultan, moved by the guileless integrity of his Muslim clanmate, though not moved enough to forgive the sire’s trespass entirely, opted to spare him the Final Death… in exchange for an eternity of nothingness. Al-Qushari drove a wooden stake through the Nabataean’s heart, boxed up his corpse, and kept it as the prize of his collection of treasures.

Before long, the sultan’s penchant for contest again had the better of him, and he was forced to forfeit the Nabataean as the culmination of a very heated exchange with a rival Christian Lasombra. Word of the “Nabataean trophy” spread like wildfire thereafter, and his body found itself passed from one undead curator to another, ever at the whim of vampires more seasoned and cruel than he. For a time, he was bound to the crypt of a qlipphothic sage, who unboxed him every few years to ask the same question: “What is your name?” When the Nabataean could no longer answer with certainty, his host sold him to yet another Kindred eager to possess the undying curio. The only constant in his indentured unlife was the ruling that bound him to coffin and clan, but it was that same ruling that prevented his soul from falling prey to the Amaranth or to the Final Death. After a few centuries, the Nabataean no longer knew whether he felt this to be a blessing or a curse.

When the Reconquista returned much of Al-Andalus to Christian (and more importantly, non-Lasombra) hands, the Nabataean returned once more to the Middle East, where he found himself the idle plaything of one Sheik al-Khali, called the Empty Prince. A man of infinite tales and riddles, the sheik’s favored form of interaction with his prize was to remove the stake and play tribal host, pretending that the Nabataean was an honored guest from afar. At the end of a long evening of heady drink and discussion, the Empty Prince set a riddle before his captive audience. Should the Nabataean guess correctly in time, he would win his freedom. If not, back to the box. Knowing his guest’s worldly experience had stopped abruptly at the turn of the millennium, the sheik’s riddles could be chosen accordingly, and thus, their outcome was never really in doubt.

By the end of World War II, the Nabataean had fallen into the possession of one Mirri al-Lam’a, childe of King Sharif and blood sister to the monarch of the Lasombra in North Africa. The Nabataean still doesn’t know how or why he ended up in her care, for she never unboxed and interacted with him the way the others had, she simply kept him stored in her cool cellar. But none of that mattered, anyway, since she was the last vampire to ever play host to his body.

Mirri al-Lam’a was the sole Lasombra resident (and de facto Prince) of the town of Sirte, Libya. Yet even as Sirte grew under the auspices of its prodigal son, Colonel Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi, the city’s Kindred activity remained constrained, as though its most tenured resident sought actively to avoid others of her kind. When the Arab Spring finally arrived at Qaddafi’s doorstep in October of 2011, the resulting hostilities made a wet, smoking ruin of Sirte, as well as Qaddafi.

What no one knows is that the Arab Spring accomplished an important Cainite event at the same time: the release of the Nabataean, after 1,000 long years of nightmares both real and imagined.

He awoke to find himself submerged. The siege of Sirte was accompanied by not only shelling and gun battles in the streets, but also flooding. And while the sub-basement that was his resting place had been secured against intrusion and sunlight, it hadn’t been entirely waterproof. With his stake dislodged and his host nowhere to be found, the Nabataean was on his own for the first time in a millennium. Were it not for the water everywhere and his ability to take his rest where he may, he almost certainly would have either met the sun or lost himself to frenzy.

Since his rude awakening, the Nabataean finds the world a stark and disorientating place. His unspeakably long torpor didn’t drive him mad, but it did strip him of many of his memories, much compassion, and even his identity, including his own mortal name. His first act of volition was to leave Sirte, which was still a ruin by the time he escaped the tomb that had been his most recent home. As if by instinct, he followed his memory of self east, heading back to the ruins of Petra.

Along the way, he stopped in Egypt and watched the fallout of the Arab Spring take hold there. He’d been to Egypt before, with his sire, but the place was of course unrecognizable to him now. After a run-in with a nomadic Sabbat pack (of whom he made dizzyingly short work), he followed the political ghibli once more, crossing the border first into Sinai and thence into Palestine, where he gazed in grim understanding at the familiar face of oppression and the loss of self-determination. When he arrived in Petra, his fear that it’d be nothing more than historical curio was confirmed.

As of tonight, only one purpose drives the Nabataean. He seeks to reconnect with his lost sire. Centuries of fitful sleep have robbed him of his certitude, but something tells him that his sire is yet undead, and if he can find him, maybe he can assemble the pieces of his past and move forward. With no contacts and nowhere concrete to start, he is reduced to wandering lands he once knew, now unfamiliar to him, alone and bereft of the guidance of even his own god. He wanders now, as in nights of old — wanders and wonders if he is indeed the last of his kind.

Sire: Antipater of the Hoof

Clan: Lasombra

Nature: Idealist

Demeanor: Martyr

Generation: 7th

Embrace: 747 CE

Apparent Age: late teens/early 20s

Physical: Strength 5, Dexterity 4, Stamina 5

Social: Charisma 2, Manipulation 3, Appearance 3

Mental: Perception 3, Intelligence 3, Wits 5

Talents: Alertness 4, Athletics 3, Awareness 3, Brawl 4, Subterfuge 2

Skills: Etiquette 4, Melee 3, Stealth 2, Survival 5

Knowledges: Academics 1, Craft 4, Investigation 3, Occult 3

Disciplines: Auspex 2, Fortitude 3, Obtenebration 4, Potence 4, Protean 3

Backgrounds: Mentor 4 (though the Nabataean cannot again call upon this mentorship, yet), Status 1 (Lasombra)

Merits/Flaws: Code of Honor, Iron Will, Language (Arabic, Aramaic) / Amnesia

Virtues: Conscience 1, Self-Control 5, Courage 5

Morality: Humanity 7 (treat as Humanity 5 until the Nabataean has an epiphany that returns his forgotten Humanity to him)

Willpower: 8

Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 20/4

Image: The Nabataean is handsome but unremarkable at first glance, an Arab of indeterminable extraction, standing just under 5’10” and possessed of a mason’s hands and upper body build. He does claim one physical curiosity among his kind, however. Like a mortal who went for decades without exposing his body to very much weather, pressure, or sun, the Nabataean’s skin is incredibly life-like for a vampire of his advanced age. This absence of the Cainite’s trademark pallid cast has already proven fatal to younger, cocksure vampires who thought him an easy mark. While he’s acquired enough contemporary clothing to get by without drawing undue attention, it’s clear to any discerning eye that the Nabataean is quite literally a man out of time.

Roleplaying Hints: The Nabataean can’t quite relate to the people around him, yet, and he’s still in the process of rediscovering humanity in toto, so that he can rediscover his own humanity. It’s all coming back — slowly — but until he gets his bearings, the Nabataean will have to walk a fine line between the poles of his own being, between way too little and way too much. And when one is an ancient nocturnal predator, those kinds of growing pains can be quite painful, indeed, especially to those who would think to prey upon him.

Haven: The Nabataean learned from his sire the Gangrel trick of taking one’s rest in the cold ground, and like a feral animal, he retreats into this mindset with the dawn of each new day. While he’s certainly capable of finding and establishing a true haven of his own, the concept simply isn’t on his mind for the time being. All he wants is to move, as he did in the old nights, and until he finds either his sire or a suitable source of answers, that’s unlikely to change.

Influence: If his sire is indeed still undead, he would be quite an influential figure in his own right come the modern nights, but the Nabataean can’t access any such influence, of course. Given his age and physical capabilities, he could easily become an influential member of either the Camarilla or the Sabbat, but thus far his understanding of both sects is greatly limited, and such aspirations aren’t even a concern to him for the time being. Once he acclimates, he’ll be a force to be reckoned with, but until that time his main concern is finding his sire — and his place.