You have in you the seeds of something great. Of meaning and power beyond imagining. All you have to do to unlock it is transcend your curse.
The Ordo Dracul follow in the footsteps of Dracula, the smartest and most dangerous vampire who ever unlived. Dracula knew that he had been cursed by God. Rather than be cowed, he plotted to turn the curse into a blessing. His disciples and his example inspired others.
The Dragons seek out the hidden truths of the World of Darkness… and wield those truths as weapons. Dragons are a great choice for players who enjoy investigative stories, and they’re a natural fit for dealing with the strange phenomena which exist outside of Kindred circles.
<Click here for the Ordo Dracul.>
(As usual, I’m going to ask that if you repost this, you not copy the document text, as I sometimes make small changes after posting.)
After reading this I realized what was missing from the Circle of the Crone write-up: the Circle’s connection with other supernatural creatures. Are the Dragons now the ones with all the connections? Granted, the Dragons have always been in a position to run across other creatures but the Circle seemed to have more “social” connections while the Dragons were treating everything else as experiments and only interested in what they could learn about vampirism.
Are Kogaion the new leaders are are they still the mystical cartographers? And what of the Sworn?
Dragons don’t have all the connections, but they have a leg up on the other covenants when it comes to recent information. For members of most other covenants, a changeling is going to be someone you know because you found her bleeding on the street and made a little bit of a deal. If you’re a Dragon, though, you might have access to a captured portal into the world of hedge and thorn.
That said, the Circle might have more notion what to do with a goblin fruit, the Sanctified might have old church records that document fae abductions, the Invictus could have a standing non-aggression pact with the changeling court, and the Carthians maybe know a doctor who’s treated the Lost before. But interaction with other kinds of monster is, as usual, not something we deal with extensively in this book.
O hai twee goth secretary. It’s so nice to have you back where you belong. ^__^
Oh, Frances [swoon]. She’ll be a much cooler signature character than Loki (not that he was bad or anything, I just never liked his…belly shirt…).
I always used the Kogaions as leaders of the Ordo, so I’m really glad this firmed up that concept. The phrase “mystical cartographers” from someone’s comment above makes me think of them as if they were the Navigators from Dune…
And the references to the Tzimisce are very cool. The Dragons were always smarter about transcendence than the Fiends…
I apologize if this comes off as a bit harsh, not really my intent.
I know this isn’t a final draft or anything, but we should comment on the writing and not just the ideas, right? Because as much as I like where the covenant is going with this, this was probably the draft most in need of more revisions/editing just in terms of language use. Lots of awkward sounding sentences and phrases:
You believe that being a vampire could be wonderful, and you want to find a way. (To do what?)
they still have a source of knowledge and experience (they still *are* a source of knowledge and experience)
But they yearn to find out, and when they do they will learn what they can, and they will look up to Heaven and they will spit in the face of God. (Will learn what they can is really weird in context there. Excising it completely should fix it though)
They use these truths as weapons – they always have – but at the same time, in threatening the truths to which the more traditional covenants have long held, they make the Kindred strong. And they always have. (And they always have always have! Eee. Sorry, that one is particularly bad.)
If some things perhaps should not have been discovered, the experience of learning about the thing unleashed and either using it or destroying it. (This one is also pretty bad, the second half of the sentence feels almost incoherent)
Elders send them to find artifacts and texts before the Sanctified squirrel them away, or sent into dangerous situations as tests. (‘sent’ needs to not be in this sentence)
They are made stronger by everything they experience: they are improved. (Unnecessarily redundant)
There are a few other things in there that are off: the bits about revenants and finding out that Dracula wasn’t the first or last felt a bit clumsy; the section on when they’re in power harps on how they drive the other covenants crazy by not caring about their issues to the point of redundancy; in general paragraphs, and sometimes individual sentences, don’t lead into each other as well as they could. And on a more subjective note, it feels a little sterile. It expresses it’s ideas in a way that doesn’t feel very evocative, at least to me.
whats all that about underground boxing?
how does that fit and occult scholar??
this is something new in blood and somoke rigth, because i cant remember it in the covenant book
The Ordo aren;t just about academia, they are about all sorts of experiential learning – the Sworn of the Axe don’t just hunch over books, the Impaled don’t just study ancient objects, their look into the Great Work is through physical self-experimentation, pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a vampire through turmoil and tribulation; it’s an ecstatic experience. I can definitely imagine a bunch of vampires getting together and forming a philosophical Fight Club
One question: How compatible will Blood Sorcery be with Strix Chronicles?
It will be usable almost entirely as-is. The adjustments for GMC extended actions and so on are covered in a sidebar.
I don’t really like the bent towards “we’re all crazy” and “we hate God.” Some Dragons might think that, but Dracula transcended his hatred for the Almighty in the Rites.
Also, are you changing the Rites, then? Because if Dracula did write them, they directly lay down the basic structure of the Order.
That last bit was also one of my questions/concerns?
I don’t think it has to mean retconning the Rites (unless they explicitly ARE). The modern Ordo’s connection to Dracula was always tenuous at best, or so the Ordo Covenant book would have you believe in a few places. Just because the Dragons modeled themselves on his purported testament doesn’t mean they didn’t steal his ideas. And they could have edited the Rites to make it seem as if they had a closer connection to Dracula than they did.
Except that Mara, Anoushka, and Lisette were all directly involved in the Ordo Dracul from its earliest nights. So you could make the argument that Dracula’s childer were more responsible for the Covenant than he himself was, but saying that the Ordo Dracul has a “tenuous” connection to Dracula is untrue. He is its direct founder.
In other words, what I am trying to say to the Blood and Smoke devs is: MORE Dracula. Not less.
If you believe Mara, Anoushka, and Lisette…
Sorry, I’m not being obtuse, I just think that’s a legitimate interpretation. I remember the Ordo book implied a lot of ambiguity over the whole mess, especially considering there’s very little detail of what they were up to between Dracula founding it and them openly declaring they were a Thing.
Also tenuous in the sense that they’re probably very different from what Dracula may have intended.
We’re not explicitly changing Rites. We’re going with Justin Achilli’s original concept that Rites, while basically true, is the work of multiple writers.
More Dracula is definitely in the cards for upcoming books. While we’ve got a sentence or two here that muddies the connection between Dracula and the organization that bears his name, I want to make the Ordo Dracul more involved with Dracula’s ideas and his legacy.
I also want the historical Dracula to loom a little larger over the organization… he walked the walk in a way that nobody has been able to since. He’s an aspirational figure for vampires, even those who may not be well-suited to the Order.
so, we r ignorig that thing about underground fighting rings, and vampire boxers?ok. cool
But yes, more Dracula! Either of them, really.
An underground boxer could be an example of metamorphosis through physical discipline and regimen without the distractions of rules or celebrity. Evolution is not confined to the intellectual.
Yes, that’s the idea. Perfecting oneself can mean physical perfection, and experimentation doesn’t always happen in a lab.
So, since the humanity preview it’s a question I have in the back of my mind, but what’s a Revenant ?
One of the things that always drew me to the Ordo Dracul are the ideas of transcendence. But as a larper as well as tabletop player I often saw the Coils being just ignored or played off as just a quirk of the covenant. If the Ordo redux is going to take a strong lean towards seekers of occult lore who apply their knowledge no matter how dangerous, can that possibly create some new discipline or “magic/pseudo science” that could compliment the coils? Perhaps a new transcendant Vicissitude? Of course let me know if I am a lunatic lol
To be honest, I’m not thrilled with the “we hate God” angle, either. It seems too… childish… for a covenant as cerebral and purportedly transcendent as the Ordo Dracul. I’d rather they sneered at God (and religion) with a kind of arrogant indifference. At their worst, they would be like “asshole atheists” that troll the internet from time to time, who are not so much declaring that they hate God, but that they are too smart to be suckered by anyone’s cargo cult. Who needs faith when you can get knowledge?
I’m getting that feel too. Particularly the part about “the defeat of God” being a potential Ordo goal. Just… why? To quote Vlad himself: “God is irrelevant to us”.
In fact, why are the Ordo accepting that God ordained that they all be vampires? Question everything dammit! We only know that God picked Vlad to be a vampire. And apart from the apocryphal existence of Longinus, God has otherwise been entirely silent towards vampire kind for pretty much the entirety of their history – there are several millennia of vampiric history before Longinus ever existed. If anything, God seems to be a late arrival to the vampire party and just pretending to be in charge of it all. Surely it’s more Ordo to reject the assertion that “God did it” and try and find the squamous truth behind that lie?