ChilRev: Lados

Okay, friends, let’s take a look at the first vampire to emerge from the fires of the revolution. In this case, we have a Greek general who made his fortune in the wars of the diadochi, after the fall of Alexander the Great, whose empire spanned “the known world” and whose death left a power vacuum so immense that the struggle to succeed him lasted almost 50 years.

What I think this character does well is show that you don’t have to have all your Traits pegged to be really, really old (in Kindred terms and historical terms). Here’s a Kindred who had accomplished much, mostly by dint of being clever as opposed to having giant dice pools. This is a good example of having a character who is as much defined by his shortcomings as his strengths. At the same time, though, he’s not a wretched or feeble figure. He knows he’s in Hell and he’s going to make what he can of it.

Without further ado, then, here’s Lados.

<1>Lados, the Lion of Bactria

<n>Lados surveyed the battlefield. Hundreds — thousands — of his brothers and countrymen lay broken and bloody, brought low by the ambitions of his fellow generals. After the death of Alexander, the outlying empire had plunged into kinslaying anarchy, with each of the diadochi trying to claim for himself a place where he might best reap the rewards of Alexander’s ambition. The roll of the vying competitors read like a veritable who’s who of the empire: Antipater, Perdiccas, Ptolemy, Leonnatus. Among them stood an ambitious but lowborn peltast who had a mind for fighting and a tongue for praise. And with both these charms, Lados climbed the ranks of the Greek military and seized a position among the other jackal-princes surrounding the carcass of Alexander.

Kindred society at this time was as factionalized as the world of mortal cultures. Greece belonged very much to the Brujah at their zenith, with the backing of a few enlightened Ventrue. Persia was the domain of the Toreador, interspersed with Ravnos ghûls both noble and common and the indigenous Tzimisce of the paynim domains. The shattered remains of Samiel’s brood held their territories against the barbarians even further east and the fierce Gangrel of the northeastern steppes. Amid these clashing bloodlines and warring cultures the Clan of the Moon, landless, unwelcome, had to make what it could of a world united under the banner of a fair-faced mortal son of a conquering Macedonian horse-king.

Thus, under a moonless sky, a philosopher crept into the fortress of Lamia and brought the soldier Lados into a world of eternal night. This philosopher, a Malkavian of unremembered name, sought to make the Regent of Athens his catspaw by Embracing his trusted advisors. Lados, he whispered into the fear-blanched face of his progeny, belonged to the night. It was then that Lados first knew fear. His was a fearful death away from the known violence of the battlefield, and a vile rebirth amid the blood and shit and ruin of his mortal corpse. The depth of his isolation gripped him in that long, terrible first night of being a vampire, and his sire probed this wound with malice and Dementation. Over a year passed, in which the mad prophet tormented his childe with extended bouts of abandonment that resulted in Lados being paralyzed by fear when left on his own.

So it was that Lados returned to Lamia by way of Athens, there finding the remains of his army out of shape and of dwindling ability and number. His lieutenants had all but exhausted the once-considerable war chest, preferring idle (if frugal) pleasures over the peril of the battlefield. What choice did Lados have? If he admonished his soldiers, they would leave. Reconnecting himself with Antipater’s court, the Malkavian set himself up as a dependable but uninspired shadow of himself, the better that the Regent might overlook him while still giving him access to the wealth and influence of the Empire.

Politics can be ugly, however, and the Hellenistic Brujah resented the intrusion of “outsiders” into their domains. A league of Brujah nobles and generals took notice of Lados and planned to make an example of him. And though Lados had been fractured by the Malkavian Embrace, he was certainly no fool. The new retinue with which he had surrounded himself included no few Brujah spies, but also included a number of loyal thralls and lovers. When word of the planned action against him reached his ears, Lados turned the intrigues of the Greek Kindred against their architects.

Pledging a boon to one of the Kali-venerating Tzimisce of Bactria, Lados had one of his slaves flesh- and bonecrafted into an icon of himself. Through an extended regimen of both Dominate personality subjugation and the sensory sensitivity of Auspex, Lados convinced his slave that he was the body and true Lados the mind, a dualistic creature destined for divinity. Where Lados the Kindred traveled in thought, Lados the thrall followed in body. Hiding himself beneath a cenotaph to Alexander, the Malkavian used his slave to expose his rival Kindred as demon-worshippers and Persian spies, orchestrators of a blood-cult bent on the subjugation of the empire and the regicide of Antipater. The Regent himself, no stranger to the subtle treacheries of the wars of the diadochi believed his “faithful general” — especially when the slumbering forms of the betrayers were dragged into the sunlight and burst into flame — making a place for Lados in the vacuum left by the sudden paucity of the Brujah and their agents at court.

The Kindred Lados far outlasted Antipater, and reinvented his ghoul in the image of a descendant of the great family of Lados every several decades, to keep the suspicions of the courts allayed. Under the Seleucids, Lados and his slave brought a number of satraps under their sway, both through pledges of military support and through the damning power of the Blood. Indeed, Bactria was almost more Greek than Persian under Seleucid rule, which suited Lados admirably. For over two centuries the family of Lados — just himself and his identical ghoul with the occasional mortal lover who served as wife and later matron to the family before the Malkavian began the cycle anew — enjoyed power and prestige in the presence of kings. Cainite Princes rose and fell, and other Kindred looked to Lados as a model of how to dwell in the shadows, taking what one wanted without risking one’s unlife.

With so much time and comfort, Lados lost interest in the arts of war, and his armies transitioned from elites of the philosopher-kings to mercenary phalangites who raised their pikes only for pay to foul-tempered Yavanas who lived only to bully their pay from petty lords and drink their wages in wine.

Every general eventually faces his downfall, and for Lados, this came in the form of invasion. The armies of Rajuvula marauded into what was by then the Punjab. Lados had grown lazy and complacent, embracing the decadence of the Indo-Greek Kingdom, unwilling to concern himself with the discipline of his soldiers or the tactics of the menacing Scythians. As the armies of Stratos took the field against those of Rajuvula, Lados found his forces in the unenviable tactical position of the fore. Scythian arrows perforated his lines and panic set in among his slovenly troops. The Malkavian bellowed a desperate and wrathful advance — but found himself spitted on a spear wielded by Jaxartes, a riverfolk hoplite from the times of Alexander and one of the scheming Brujah Lados thought he had ruined in his purge of Antipater’s courts. Indeed, Lados had ruined Jaxartes, who fled eastward and hid among the debased, evil Toreador of Persia. With Rose Clan patronage, Jaxartes was one of the instruments of vengeance of the Parthian Kindred, who resented the legacy of Alexander and the fall of the Achaemenids, and who spared no opportunity to strike back at the crumbling Greek domains. Staked on his slayer’s assegai, the world went dark for Lados, who was stomped, torpid, into the bloody mud outside Sagala. There, he spent almost two thousand years in a dreamless sleep, stirring beneath the earth only when the madness in his blood forced a defiant twitch.

A titan’s roar awakened the slumbering Malkavian, who had by then spent centuries tumbling through the nightmares of starvation made all the more harrowing by the curse of his clan. The titan — a smoke-belching metal monstrosity birthed from the loins of the gorgon herself — gouged Lados from the ground and spat him down, where her foul minions prodded him and gibbered in some debased form of the Empire’s enemy tongue. The savagery of the fire in his deathless Blood ignited and, freshly torn from torpor, Lados entered a frenzy as much from fear as from rage. When the low men who had woken him lay in tatters and the titan slumped lifelessly in the shadow cast by the moon, Lados calmed, gathered his wits, and walked back into the city once held by his patron-king.

No stranger to the depredations of the Malkavian mind, Lados thought himself in the throes of a fit, but the insanity refused to relent. The stone castles and metal spires surrounding him, and the million-plus desperate, filthy, beating mortal hearts surrounding him would not disperse. This was no dream. The titan had woken Lados from his troubled torpor only to throw him into the jaws of the Ancients. The madness of the earth and sky assailed him. These must be the End Times.

And yet… they weren’t. This madness that surrounded him, that must have leached from his mind into the domains of untold years before, teetered on the brink of world-ruin without plunging. Bit by bit, in the two decades since his emergence from torpor, Lados has gathered and synthesized what fragments he can of this inchoate time. Its veneration of metal and speed, it hypocrisies and its wealth and licentiousness and its thinking machines — these all elude Lados just enough to keep him forever on edge and occasionally beyond it. Oddly, he finds himself most comfortable with other Kindred, even when he knows they may oppose or betray him. At least, in his mind, their evil and frailties are understandable. The world-machine of the hateful demiurges, however, truly vexes him. Only in the unchanging culture of these Damned, whether they call it a “Camarilla” or “Sabbat,” does Lados find constancy.

How long can the world balance on the razor’s edge, on the scales of Themis, before it collapses into Typhon’s gorge? How long until the blood-gods erupt from Haidou and drag their progeny, burning, into Tartarus? And how much of his own private empire can Lados rebuild before then? Enough to make the scorched husk of the world his final, solitudinous tomb?

Sire: Lykia (unconfirmed)
Clan: Malkavian
Nature: Conniver
Demeanor: Conformist
Generation: 8th
Embrace: 322 BC
Apparent Age: late 30s
Physical: Strength 3, Dexterity 3, Stamina 4
Social: Charisma 4, Manipulation 3, Appearance 2
Mental: Perception 2, Intelligence 3, Wits 3
Talents: Alertness 2, Athletics 2, Brawl 2, Leadership 4, Subterfuge 3
Skills: Etiquette 2, Melee 4, Survival 3
Knowledges: Academics 3, Finance 2, Investigation 3
Disciplines: Auspex 3, Dementation 4, Dominate 4
Background: Allies (mortal family) 2, Resources 3 (non-renewing remains of the war chest)
Virtues: Conscience 2, Self-Control 4, Courage 4
Morality: Humanity 5
Willpower: 6
Blood Pool/Max per Turn: 15/3

Image: Lados has the classical build and striking features of antiquity. He is short by modern standards, with remarkably bronze skin that looks almost stony with the pallor of the Embrace. Lados still doesn’t have a solid grasp of modern style, and his clothing seems anachronistic if not outright bizarre as he find the pulse of the modern world.

Roleplaying Hints: Lados moves with the efficiency and authority of a military leader. He is accustomed to being heeded, so these millennia after his apex, he doesn’t understand how so many of the common folk seem to be so willful, and his interactions with modern people tend to be terse or even hostile. As well, with Kindred society having forgotten him, Lados often oversteps himself, not realizing that the Status he enjoyed in the courts of the Indo-Greek kings has left him. He is used to being granted an audience with Princes upon demand… which, with no current Status to speak of, typically isn’t how it works anymore.

Haven: The types of havens Lados seeks lie close to the territories where esteemed Kindred of power reside. Although he has fallen from favor, he seeks to introduce himself back into the society of the august undead, in whichever domain he may currently reside. Wherever he finds himself, he establishes a haven with a collection of artifacts from Antiquity that will soon be that darling of the Harpies in any domain that considers itself refined.

Influence: Over the millennia, Lados’ influence has waned and vanished, leaving him wholly alone in the modern nights with the exception of a handful of his mortal descendants, whose connection to the Malkavian is tenuous but reinforced by Dominate and frequent exposure to vitae. It has not always been thus, however, and Lados seeks to make powerful contacts in any domain where he settles, starting at the low end of the Status ladder, if need be, and clawing his way to the top. Despite his shattered mind and mad lineage, Lados recognizes that he is a stranger in a strange time, and unlike many modern Kindred, he doesn’t cast aside those who aid him as soon as they have no immediate use to him. He greatly fears once again succumbing to the cold nightmare of torpor, so he tries to stay on good terms with as many of the Kindred who have shown him favor as possible, in the interests of making as few enemies as possible.

Derangement: With his recent emergence from torpor, Lados is obsessed with the unknown number of Kindred he worries may have met a fate similar to his. In his mind, every stretch of land is the tomb of a ravenous Kindred, and on the fast-approaching night of Gehenna, the earth-sea will roil with the Damned, boiling up bloodthirsty vampires who will consume the world and then be consumed by their hellish progenitors. Indeed, the (comparatively) trusting nature Lados displays toward other Kindred he meets is justified by the fact that they’re lucid and at least a known quantity, unlike the monsters who will pry themselves up from their unmarked tombs and devour the land and everything upon it. In most cases, Lados is actually remarkably calm for a Malkavian, displaying only a mild paranoia that isn’t actually out of place in the world of the undead. When the true gravity of his fear grasps him, however, he is inconsolable, racked by fear and the agonies of knowing that he walks upon a landscape made of millions of fallen men and vampires who await only the cue of the End Times to become the pave-stones on the road to Hell itself. Lados is nigh upon fearless in the face of threats he can understand, a soldier tempered by war and savagery, but the horrors of his imagination reduce him to little more than a quivering invalid when confronted with the the terrifying loneliness of the final night.