In our previous blog entry on the Hungry of Curseborne, we explored what the Hungry are and the self-appointed vampire nobles of House Báthory. Today, we go in a starkly different direction, a family of rebels who crave emotions. These Hungry obsess over humanity and hate other Hungry with a passion, and both lead them into intense emotional moments. Today we present…
The Black Hearts
Most Hungry see themselves as the top of the social ladder. Beautiful, confident, and proud leaders and game changers, titans among humanity. The Black Hearts drew a very different lot in unlife: every last one of them is an outcast, a black sheep, or a fuckup. They’re still strong, powerful, beautiful, confident, and proud, but they’re broken in some individual but irreducible way.
This outcast nature makes them surprisingly valuable in one distinct way: They work as excellent mercenaries for the politics of the Hungry, or the Accursed as a whole. Since they’re shunned by the political intrigues of the Hungry families, that makes them loyal to only three things: themselves, money, and their cravings.
Our narrator, Frederick Khan, explains more:
You may wonder how exactly we’re broken, and that’s a personal story for each of us, but I’ll tell you mine.
We do not lust for blood, or even flesh. We crave something more esoteric, something more fraught. We need emotions. Not need, no; hunger, crave, yearn, go into an absolutely bonkers frenzy over. Any emotion will do, as long as its strong, and as long as it is freely given, just like the other fuckers. Does that make us sound like the Dead? Huh. I guess it does.
We fall fast and do it hard. We need others. Specifically, we need people who feel emotions to the degree that we can take without leaving them insensate and are willing to share those emotions with us. God, if only we could take from the unwilling, wouldn’t that be so much easier? Instead, we have to painstakingly build relationships, evoke an emotional connection, and foster those emotions like helping a seedling find light. This is a two-way street.
Any emotion will do. I know it sounds like I’m talking about some lovey dovey bullshit, but a nemesis is probably an easier person to foster a relationship with than a lover. We aren’t trying to fuck people over here, but hate works just as well as joy or love, and hate is pretty easy to feel for long stretches. Not to mention that most people prefer to lose that emotion over any other.
So we like who we like, and we hate who we hate. That’s all well and good, but we still need to make scratch, and if we want to be respected by the other families, we need to pretend that we care about their politics. The best way to do that is to work for them, rather than against them. While other families may revile our cravings, they are more than happy to pay us in their scraps of thankfulness and cold hard cash if we’ll merc a few of their rivals.
But we keep loyalty to each other, and that’s the rule of law. If you fuck over a Black Heart, you fuck over every Black Heart. We’ll come for you.
These outcast vampires have fraught relationships with many other Hungry families as a result, finding the Báthorites (which we detailed last week) to be particularly pretentious. On the other hand, they easily make friends with other Lineages. They can feel the emotions of the Primals in abundance, as well as respecting their loyalty, and they understand the needs of the Dead in a way that few other Accursed do.
The Black Hearts have a distinctive inheritance, as their need for emotions draws them to others. Their initial positive relationships with mortals start off more intensely than others, and the same is true for initial negative relationships with other Hungry. They can also balance more of these intense relationships than most other people do, as they have experience navigating so many dramatic connections with others.
Play a Black Heart if you want to…
… yearn for an emotional connection, but fear you’ll take too much.
… make an impression on people, positive or negative.
… reject Hungry social strata as they rejected you.
Frederick Khan
Frederick Khan was born poor in London at a time when the British Empire was at its height. His family ended up bouncing from boarding house to boarding house, and Frederick (never “Fred” or “Freddie”) intensely felt every angry outburst, every racist slur, every hunger pang. Everyone told him he needed to toughen up, get a thicker skin, put his head down and just get through the day, but Frederick never listened. He always felt that if London was the greatest city in Queen Victoria’s empire, he was owed a better life. So he did whatever he could to make money: begged on the streets, performed shit jobs, even the occasional bit of prostitution. Anything to get a few more shiny pennies to get him and his family through the week.
Then he was changed into one of the Hungry, one of the Black Hearts, and the emotions he felt became painful in their intensity.
Over the years and decades, Frederick worked for the other Hungry families, doing the occasional odd job here or light wetwork there. During the course of his mercenary work, he saved more than enough pennies to buy himself a decent life, and more besides to help others. He has learned to control his own emotions, and stoke them in others. Mostly he’s found good benefits in building relationships with others in his community, helping out where he can and doing good deeds for those in the same kind of dire straits he grew up in. But when he wanders across the occasional violent racist, Frederick isn’t above draining all of the anger out of him before dumping the bigot’s body somewhere inconvenient for his friends.
