Sorry for the blackout, gang. I’ve been moving and starting a new job, and with no reliable Internet and tons of new work to do, V20 Companion has had to undergo a brief period of radio silence. But now that things are settling down (and it’s Saturday), we’re back on the wagon. And that’s not a booze metaphor.
Since working on the V20 Companion, I’ve showed a bit more of the non-Camarilla material, but I don’t want to give the impression that the book is going to neglect them. The Ivory Tower remains the (probably) largest vampire sect in the World of Darkness, and in introducing some of its titles, it receives a bit of an overview that helps frame the function of the titles.
<2>The Camarilla
<n>While it is by no means the oldest Kindred sect, the Camarilla is likely the most widespread and certainly among the most stable. This is due in large part to the Ivory Tower’s laissez-faire attitude toward domains. So long as whomever claims Praxis over the domain enforces the Traditions and respects the customs and primacy of the Inner Council, the domain receives the Camarilla’s blessing and support.
The philosophy and hierarchy is unabashedly feudal: Those of high Status in the sect may be said to “rule” those of lesser Status (through setting or at least influencing domain policy and custom), but they also owe them some degree of protection against the outside world, as represented by the enforcement of the Traditions. The practical reality of the matter varies by domain — some domains are exceedingly formal and do in fact resemble courts of aristocrats, while others are practically frontier territories, standing boldly but precariously against threats from other Kindred, suspicious kine, and the unknown horrors of the World of Darkness.
Thus, to the average Camarilla Kindred, sect rarely factors into nightly unlife — except when it does. Princes and Primogen may have a handful of very strict rules, but for the most part, Camarilla Kindred can do whatever they like, so long as they abide by the Traditions of the domain and heed the pecking order. To this end, the Camarilla typically practices a policy of inclusion, in that it considers all Kindred members of its sect unless they formally exclude themselves from it (such as by pledging allegiance to another sect).
As a result of this inequitable distribution of power and duty, the Camarilla is also probably the sect that has the most infighting. With its members disparate and united only under the variable authority of the Prince’s title — whose own powers vary from domain to domain — the Camarilla has little to bring it together aside from the charisma of the Prince and the threat of other sects’ encroachment. Feuds, vendetta, treachery, and scheming are as ubiquitous among Camarilla Kindred as is the need for blood.
One characteristic of the Camarilla, despite its decentralized power structure among the lower echelons, is an extremely potent and organized top tier. The Inner Council of the Camarilla is universally respected (though some attribute this more to fear) by the members of the sect, even if they disagree with its decisions or flout them in their provincial shadows. Powerful agents of this high council, like the Justicars, Archons, and Alastors, command respect wherever they travel, as they are mobile extensions of the will of the Inner Council, who are the most ancient monsters most members of the Ivory Tower can imagine.
Proponents of the Camarilla structure compare it to halcyon days of Rome, which granted citizenship to those it conquered and allowed its citizens to do whatever they wised, so long as the tribute arrived on time. Critics use that same argument, and compare the Inner Council to the most deluded of emperors, playing their violins while the empire collapsed in flames.
By comparison, here’s the expanded information on the Tal’Mahe’Ra, with the same intent as prefacing the titles section, to provide a little more context for those titles. The info in V20 proper is deliberately vague, so this sheds a little more light on the True Hand so that Storytellers and players can have a little more sense of what’s happening (and can make better use of the titles).
<2>The Tal’Mahe’Ra
<n>The other Sects are largely unable to fathom the goals and methods of the Tal’Mahe’Ra, which lends an air of mystery and suspicion to the True Hand. This suits the Sect’s tastes, however, for the fewer Kindred that are wise to its aims, the fewer Kindred who can oppose them, at least consciously.
In truth, many members of the Tal”mahe’Ra do not themselves understand the ways of their most venerable leaders. Unlike the Camarilla, the True Hand does work toward a purpose, however occulted that purpose may be. Unlike the Sabbat, the True Hand often eschews the violent overthrow of mortal institutions and Cainite tradition, preferring instead to work through subtlety, misdirection, and the employment of supernatural secrets. The Tal’Mahe’Ra lacks the worldly ambitions of the Anarch Movement, the existential curiosity of the Inconnu, and the parochial interests of the Independent clans.
What the Tal’Mahe’Ra does pursue is a position of vampiric supremacy. They see themselves as the shepherds of mortals, who exists to sustain them on their quest to re-establish the point of vampiric genesis in the form of the First City. The True Hand’s stronghold in the Underworld is in fact believed to be the mystical resonance of the Kindred’s First City, and through extended supernal manipulations of the death-energies inherent to the vampiric form (and even a few outside those of the Damned condition), the Tal’Mahe’Ra desires to either bring down the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead, or to push the First City back through that veil. Until that time, they serve also as warders of ancient Kindred secrets, some of which reside in the form of torpid Ancients — perhaps even counting among their number some of the progenitor Antediluvians. Members of the True Hand see vampirism as both a cursed but exalted state, and mortals, who make possible the existence of the Damned, must be cultivated and even protected in order that the Kindred may continue to exist. Of course, the fragility of mortal lives and minds means they must often be protected, both from things they were not meant to know and those callous Kindred who would prey on them without restraint. The True Hand is patient, understanding the inexorability that comes with the flawed immortality of the Damned. It is highly structured, its formality occasionally appearing to outsiders as a rigid politeness — or a dispassionate cruelty.
The Tal’Mahe’Ra counts as its greatest enemy an undefinable force or collective consciousness that exists beyond the boundaries of most vampires’ perception. These mind-searing monstrosities, call Souleaters, can take many forms and manipulate many pawns. Members of other Sects may well be under the sway of the Souleaters, as might any number of other denizens of the night. Werewolves, mortal mages, and the occasional inchoate nightmare-creature that finds its way into the world might be in league with these dark powers, knowingly or, more likely, completely obliviously. This war against the Souleaters is known as the Shadow Crusade among the devoted of the Tal’Mahe’Ra.
With that said, the mindset of the True Hand is night incomprehensible to many modern Kindred. The Tal’Mahe’Ra is part death cult, part archaeological society, part witch’s coven, and part a conspiracy of secret masters. “Protecting” mortals may take the form of absconding with them, conditioning them, exsanguinating them, or binding them into deathless oubliettes to protect or rebuild shattered minds and broken bodies. The Tal’Mahe’Ra has seen firsthand some of the most earthshaking horrors the World of Darkness has to offer, and in some cases accidentally unearthed it. Elements of their philosophy are wholly alien to the Kindred of the more prevalent and accessible Sects, making cross-purposes accidentally contentious at times. The True Hand realizes this and tries to move as invisibly as possible, in order to keep their secrets hidden.
Those who hold titles in the Tal’Mahe’Ra know their place and their responsibilities. Theirs is a very caste-like society, with some amount of meritocratic Status mobility among its field operatives, but with an elaborate body of chthonic mandates and occult predestinations among its aristocratic ranks. Its members are often devoted to the point of fanaticism, and even though a strong case could be made for True Hand members having greater opportunities for comfort or peace if they left the Sect, they remain stead fast, unwavering. Although their ways are horrifying and the Beast lies ever-proximate to the surface, the Tal’Mahe’Ra comprises ranks of true believers.
The part-time proofreader notices a few typos – “whatever they wised,” – “mortals, who exists” – “night incomprehensible”.
Like the Camarilla description, particularly the emphasis on infighting, a major feature back when we didn’t know what the Sabbat and Independents were like.
The Souleaters were never my favourite, but I don’t mind the vague version here as much as the original rationale.
And I’d love to know where the pic comes from, it’s.. charming.
Thanks for the eyes — will fix!
All part of the service, least I could do. 🙂
I just don’t like and never liked the soul eaters and the fight to eliminate viccitude, but I know some do and I’ll respect that. For me it was to alien (no pun intended) for the setting. Aside from that good stuff …thanks!
Some time ago I happened to think, there’re only 2 and half (well… 4 and half) sects?
Ok, we got the Camarilla and the Sabbat
Anarchs (who are, teorically, part of Camarilla)
Inconnu (some cainites don’t think they really exists)
True Hand/Tal’Mahe’Ra (most cainites don’t even know its name)
what about the spawn of minor sects an insular society like the Cainite’s one may have spawned?
ok, some Clan are really similar to sects: like Giovanni, Setites, Tremere, Assamites and Baali (and, of course, Children of Osiris)
but I think it can be really rich of story hook an eye on “minor sects” (greater than a 1-coterie-“secret society”, but small enough so to not draw the attention of some Camarilla’s Big Gun)
We already have the Ashirra as a minor sect (which, incidentally, I would not mind seeing more of, at least in the modern nights). Apart from that, I have mixed feelings on smaller societies: on one hand, they would probably be more appropriate in clanbooks and stuff… On the other hand, there are some tropes that I think haven’t been fully exploited, like a Baali Apostate cult of Kindred (and really callous kine) committing truly vile atrocities for a greater good. You can’t go wrong with Baali Apostate followers of the Path of the Hive protecting reality from the Earthbound sleeping beneath the earth. “Oh, yes, I DID slaughter those pregnant women, but the Children were stirring. My actions helped keep them slumbering. I’d call it a bargain.”
I, personally, also don’t like the souleater’s idea. As said above, do not fits quite well with all else. Worry about the antidevluvians is enough, and the WoD already has its bunch of ancient evils. I know it has some historical significance for the canon, but I didn’t missed it when it was cut out in “revised era”, if I’m not mistaken. Honestly, it sounds too overpower for me, even for a sect which is nased in Enoch.
Maybe they could stay, but with a box mentioning that they could be some kind of invention of the Hand, or maybe a name given to something more “palpable” in kindred lore, like the madness network, or even the servants of the Tzimisce antideluvian.
How did you resist calling this Sects and Violence?
By necessity, these write-ups are a bit disjointed; the True Hand part especially flows poorly from paragraph to paragraph. Still, you manage to pack a frankly stunning amount of information into a svelte wordcount, and if the cost of that is some flow? I’m happy to see that cost paid.
Excellent, excellent, excellent pieces, overall. I love how you keep the sense of the Camarilla that I remember–an oppressive feudal dinosaur ruled by inhuman vitaecrats–but without describing a setting that inhibits agency in actual games. Sure, it’s ostensibly controlled from the top-down, but there’s pleasingly little way to enforce that until someone fucks up enough to bring attention to themselves.
The True Hand is as wahoo! as ever, and maybe even manages to be moreso for being all stuffed into so short a description. Vampire supremecists! Who live in the ghost of a mythical city! That they want to shove through a ghost-wall into reality! While fighting Lovecraftian Monster Conspiracy! If you want to run the souleaters through a round of smoothing-out to make them fit into the CWoD a bit more cleanly, you could always imply they’re related to the all-consuming-spectral-horrors-from-beyond-time that Wraith had in abundance.
I love that you’ve kept both groups distinctive, and working on entirely different levels of the game (night-to-night social politics, and balls-to-the-wall crazy supernatural conspiracy) while maintaining the basic themes of Vampire in both: that vampires are horrible parasites who do horrible things to each other and whose ridiculous social structure creates horrible consequences for unsuspecting people, and, guess what, the player-characters risk falling into the same patterns if they’re not careful to hold their humanity dear.
Well said!
And this is one more vote for Sects and Violence 😀
I prefer “The Joy of Sects”. Make love, not war, people
LOL! 🙂
I think the best idea would be to let the Souleaters’ real nature to be presented only as speculation. Is Vicissitude itself a disease? Is it made of tiny particles of the Tzimisce Antediluvian? If so, shouldn’t the Tal’mahe’Ra actually help spread it? Are Souleaters an alien race of shapechanger parasites from the Deep Umbra? Or are they really an infection of the soul spreading from the Mouth of Oblivion to anything having a material body? What if they are another aspect of the Wyrm?
“I think the best idea would be to let the Souleaters’ real nature to be presented only as speculation.”
Which is, of course, a magnificent way to handle things. Hell, the True Hand might be tilting at windmills–trying to fight an “enemy” they’ve put together from pieces of delusion, folklore, misunderstanding, and misinformation. In the end, as you rightly imply, the truth doesn’t matter for the setting (though it might for individual chronicles). What matters is that the Tal’Mahe’Ra’s “souleater” orthodoxy, like Sabbat Noddism or Inconnu Golconda-mysticism, has motivated them to create an elaborate infrastructure that would be beautiful if it weren’t so casually harmful to so many both within and without it.
As you more or less say, the goal should be inspiring hooks, not implied plotlines. “Maybe it’s Oblivion, maybe it’s Antediluvians, maybe it’s Lovecraft with the numbers filed off! Regardless, here’s a big stack of people, places, and ideas involved with it” can create much more diverse, interesting gaming than “They are weird Vicissitude parasites, here is a sample stat block, if you can get to their secret base in Spiritlandia you can end their threat forever”.
Part of the plan here is not to nail the Souleaters down much more than this. I didn’t want to completely ignore it, because somewhere, someone who’s playing Vampire is using it, and it’s not realistic to just drop the parts that I don’t like personally. On the other hand, I do think it’s fair to paint the Souleaters in broader strokes than how they were previously covered, so individual Storytellers can pick and choose or even rebuild them to suit.
Yes, they’re disjointed. They actually come from two different sections in the titles chapter, so when the rest of the content is in its proper place, it’ll be better grouped with relevant material.
“Critics use that same argument, and compare the Inner Council to the most deluded of emperors, playing their violins while the empire collapsed in flames.”
I have a feeling Nero is being dragged into texts about the Cammy almost every other time I read about them… It’s getting old.
With that out of the way…
I absolutely loved both the texts.
The Cammy bit places the sect as the selfproclaimed sheppards of the stray Kindred. We take responsibility because you need us to do it, that sort of thing. Maybe this could be emphasized a bit more in the paragraph that describes the power heavy top tier? They rule with an iron fist through the alastors, justicars and archons because the inner circle knows what is good for you.
The TBH text does a good job placing them as supremist occultists, that secretively strive towards an nigh-impossible goal. In all honosty, I could never really find a place for the TBH in my stories, expect as some way-out-there threat to the PC’s. I played a TBH in a Transylvania Chronicle, but never really got the hang of it. I guess they’re a bit too bathed in shadows for my taste. Kinda like the Inconnu. Both sects are extremely powerful Cainites that choose to work from behind the curtains rather then take an active stand. Difference is that the TBH has some occultist goal where the Inconnu just seem to like to watch (ick).
Anyway. I like the inclusion of the Shadowcrusade. Here we have an uberpowerful sect of Thinkers, that are all puffy-eyed and runny-nosed due to some weird infection that they can’t seem to shake. And to make it worse, the disease is spreading like it’s the next black plague, dispite all their efforts and research to counter it.
Is it kinda alien for the VtM setting? Maybe. Depends on what you turn the souleaters into in the end. For me, it’s always been: Souleaters = Viscisstude = Tzimisce Antediluvian. The souleater label is simply a misundertanding of the symptons. That really helps tone down the alieness of it. Some weird multi-taloned spirit-entity from beyond the shroud? Yeah, that’s where you loose me too.
“We take responsibility because you need us to do it, that sort of thing”
http://www.geneticanomaly.com/RPG-Motivational/slides/ventrue.html
Yup, nice poster. It’s not easy to be the designated driver you know 😉
I’ve never focused on the True Hand, as they don’t have much presence in most of the books I’ve seen. Revised metaplot more or less obliterated them, and I can’t say that I felt a need to bring them into my games.
I can see a place for them in elder-level games, where by the time you get enough power to start messing with bits of reality itself as a vampire you start having to deal with things that matter a little more and aren’t as predictable. You may be able to hold a small nation in your thrall due to Disciplines, but you flip over to the other side of the Shroud on the wrong night and find out that you’re a 600 point neonate focused on material things that don’t exist and mental effects against things without an understandable mind. Likewise, I’d image the TBH has some crazy powers that don’t work unless you’re in their realm.
I think that part of the challenge of V20’s “embrace everything” (no pun intended) philosophy is finding a way to bring things like the Children of Osiris, egg-laying vampire gargoyles, and the Tal’Mahe’Ra into the setting (and make them accessible to the average group of players) without compromising either these more ridiculous elements, or the setting itself. So far, the approach seems to be smiling slightly, looking you square in the eye, and telling you about these things with the same tone of voice used to describe everything else. Sure, some parts are emphasized or downplayed to make things work together more readily; but, in the end, everything gets in without much value judgment.
Part of why I love this approach is because I was so serious about the WoD as a teenager. This wasn’t just gaming, it was Mature and Literary! Souleaters and Abominations and the like were offenses to my teen hipster-nerd sensibilities. As things moved into the late ’90s and then toward the end of the cWoD, White Wolf’s output seemed increasingly to endorse this view, replacing flesh-eating vampires battling angry space ghost disease from inside of a spirit-fortress (obviously immature, right?) with Catholic lesbian vampire assassins (totes mature and realistic because LGBTQ people, Catholicism, and assassins are all real!).
Being now older and happier, I look back and see that it was always ridiculous–all of it. Ur-Shulgi (deathless child blood-god who flexes his ancient muscles to break an ancient wizard-curse) is just as preposterous as Temporis; the diablerie madness of the post-Nightmares Ravnos is just as goofy as the “Are they Antediluvians in cold storage?” Aralu. And if we’re going to have a big pile of crazy anyway, I’d love to see all of the crazy included, not just the parts that were presented with a straight face between 1998 and 2003. A lot of people aren’t too keen on souleaters–but they’re part (even if a very small part) of the game’s identity and its history, and there’s no reason to be dismissive of them any more than of thin-bloods or Paths of Enlightenment or Obtenebration.
There’s actually less reason to be embarassed about souleaters (or the breath-stealing vampire cats of Hong Kong, or Schere’s disease, or…) than of any of the ethnic stereotypes that appeared in the cWoD.
So, if True Black Hand, souleaters and all, are being included in the Companion anyway: why not make them accessible to more than just elder chronicles? A gonzo, ancient, otherworldly conspiracy can still recruit initiates, or deploy foot soldiers. Maybe the new recruits don’t meet mummies and abominations or see the Aralu tombs right away, but surely there’s some way to use these weird pieces of Masquerade‘s setting lore, from Tal’Mahe’Ra to Inconnu and back again, in a perfectly standard neonates game. Heck, maybe they do see these more extreme bits right away–The X-Files and Fringe sure didn’t wait to throw high weirdness at the viewer.
The cliche is “if you can’t fix it, feature it”. V20 thus far has avoided trying to “fix” the quirkier parts of Vampire, presenting the whole spectrum of Vampire: The Masquerade with equal ease. Souleaters and the True Hand that hunts them occupy a far edge of that spectrum, but they are unavoidably part of it. If they’re going to be part of the game, there’s no point in trying to downplay what makes them distinctive. They become generic if you eliminate the parts some people hate, and have little in-game use if you slap an Elders Only, Do Not Touch label over them. You can’t fix these guys; so feature them. Embrace everything.
There seems to be an assumption in the comments that Souleaters = Vicissitude. That’s in Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand. It’s not in the V20 Companion excerpt that Justin posted. In fact, he specifically mentions werewolves and mortal mages as souleater pawns as well. Souleaters sound to me like Great Old Ones or Outer Gods, or (given the True Hand’s underworld ties), never-born Malfeans, not Vicissitude-as-a-disease.
The Shadow Crusade as an elder-level Call of Cthulhu game is an interesting idea. It’s a way to bring personal moral dilemmas to a high-power, high-stakes chronicle. Would you kill a hundred people to stop them from being sacrificed to open the gates of hell, thereby saving seven billion people from death or torture? That style and power level isn’t to my personal taste, but I find it intriguing as a concept.
The Camarilla is basically an elder franchise organization. But how do the individual franchises and the central HQ communicate and interact? It’s not as though the Inner Circle sends out a newsletter when the appoint a new group of Justicars. Presumably, we’re looking at communication via trusted courier combined with word-of-mouth amongst the more itinerant type of elder, possibly supplemented in the modern nights by encrypted electronic communications (see also under Technology), but a few suggestions would be very helpful. I realize that this is an overview and word count is tight, but it’s worth devoting a few sentences to this, because it offers lots of potential plot hooks.
For instance, “powerful agents of this high council, like the Justicars, Archons, and Alastors, command respect wherever they travel”. But how do the Justicars, etc, identify themselves in the strongly decentralized domains you’re describing?
“Good evening, Prince Alucard. I am Jane Q. Alastor, personal agent of Justicar Petrodon”
“Justicar Petrodon was assassinated years ago”
“He was? I wondered why I hadn’t been paid recently”
I like all of this except, the Souleaters bit. I’ve never liked that in any of the Vampire books. I though that in Dirty Secrets, the Souleaters = Vicissitude was the worst thing I’d read at the time, and it’s still up there. It’s not stated in this write-up, and this leads me to think that the now the True Hand is fighting the Wyrm too… and that’s… just silly. It doesn’t really make sense.
Anyway, if all that about the Souleaters was taken out, I’d love all of this.
What if they just called it ‘a disease of the blood’? That would leave the plothook there and remove all the bad taste of wyrm/cthulhu/virulent vampire that all those years of DSOTB has left.
(a book I actually enjoyed to be honest. If you read past the Abominations, sleeping Antediluvians, etc.)
Nope, that wouldn’t work for me either. I like Vic being a real discipline, not some blood disease/Wyrm infestation.
BTW, I love Dirty Secrets, pretty much everything in it except for the Souleaters stuff. It’s the mention of Souleaters that I really don’t like. I want that aspect of Vampire to go away and never come back. I don’t mind that Mages and Werewolves get Cthulhlu-esq Elder Gods to deal with, but please, leave that out of Vampire. So unless there’s going to be a lot of awesome crossover information in the Tal’mahe’Ra parts, like talking about how they incorporate Mages, Vampires, Mortals, and Wraiths and how that affects what they do (and if you do, let’s leave out the Abomination this time please :)) then leave out hte Souleater aspect.
I remember reading somewhere (probably on the White Wolf forum boards) about an idea that the Souleaters were not so much a disease as they were actually very old practitioners of Vicissitude. Such a creature could take the Blood Form and then use its blood to possess a younger Cainite, maybe even split its consciousness across many bodies. It was essentially a pernicious use of a very high level power of Vicissitude to make one nigh indestructible (not unlike the idea of horcruxes in Harry Potter), but few had ever seen it occur. From the outside, to one who did not know, such ‘Souleaters’ would appear as a blood borne parasite.
It’s too much to drop into this chapter of the book, but it’s something to consider.
You may want some reference to the fall of the Tal’Mahe’Ra, even if you don’t discuss it totally past tense.
I’m not sure, actually. In the sliding scale of Vampire chronicles, I’d rather present the sect as still vital, I think, and then let individual Storytellers fine-tune, as mentioned above. But you bring up a reasonable point, so maybe I’ll devote word count to a sidebar that allows for update with the metaplot as previously published.
I don’t know if this would be a net wordcount loss compared to conveying the information in regular prose, and I don’t know if this conflicts with intentions to keep V20 metaplot-neutral, but:
You could create a chronology that tracks important developments for the various sects–all the sects in one timeline, not one timeline per sect. (Although, riffing here, you could have little symbols to denote sects to whom each event is important). When you get to the modern nights, instead of listing events by year, arrange events according to their assumed canonical sequence, but do not date them. Instead, bullet them and identify the book(s) in which the event appeared. So you might have:
With PDFs and Now In Print, the books are or soon will be available to anyone who wants to read the sources cited. This could centralize what would otherwise appear in sidebars throughout the chapter, and free up the rest of the text to focus exclusively on the “iconic” V20 modern nights.
You could easily open up the word-count for that by getting rid of all the Souleater mentions. 😉
That’s good.
A sidebar should be spent to choose the desired metaplot of Tal’Mahe’Ra/Black Hand …
as the one on the Week of Nightmares and others …
It would be nice if also some of the more important smaller sects got mentioned, as well as those sects that are very large, but more geographically limited.
* Ordea League: An organization ruled by Old Clan Tzimisce, but employ and is allied with members of various other clans, especially conservative Gangrel, Nosferatu and Ventrue. Very powerful in eastern Europe. Enemies of the Sabbat, but do not like the Camarilla either.
* Ashirra: An much older sect than the large ones. Centralized around the Islamic faith. It was very powerful in the dark ages. The sect is now strongest in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan, though it has some influence in Egypt as well. Any clans except Tremere, but also Ventrue and Tzimisce is extremly rare. Most influential in the sect is the Lasombra and Assamite. Many Dark Ages-books, and Cairo by Night.
* Laibon: Thou not truly a “sect”, this culture of Sub-Sahara kindred society could very well presented among such. Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom.
I agree that the smaller organizations should get a mention also, though I doubt that the Laibon will be given space since they, along with the Kindred of the East, were left out of the main V20 book as they used different rules. Which is forgivable since the KotE book should be going POD at some point and it has everything needed (or at least already produced for the Laibon) in one convenient package.
I would like to hear about the Ashirra in modern times both because the world is once again turning it’s attention toward the Islamic world (the Arab spring, Israel/Palestine, Diasporas, Terrorism, Muslim Miss USA, etc) and because information on them is inconveniently scattered among the books you mentioned.
As for the Ordea League, I haven’t heard about them but I would certainly want to.
Oh, and Justin: I just saw your Linkedin update. Congrats on the new job 🙂
I really like this writing. The Camarilla section is written from the point of view of the neonate, looking up from the bottom. I think that anything that brings VTM back to the Punk part of the Gothic-Punk roots, full of motorcycle jacket-clad neonates raising hell and avoiding their omnipotent elders makes it the game I love to play.
(though I don’t really like the “frontier territory” metaphor I get what you’re trying to say)
The TBH sections is right on the money as well. The intergalactic conspiracy is done just right, its there for people who want to use it, and it helps provide meat for the stomach of the imagination.
(maybe I’m not that good at metaphors either)
Please, let’s not forget about the ‘normal’ Black Hand.
I loved ‘Caine’s Chosen’ … the difference between Tal’Mahe’Ra and Black Hand has to be explained.
In my current ‘revised’ chronicle Tal’Mahe’Ra has been destroyed in the Shadowland (Enoch), according to the Storyteller Handbook. Pheraps, in the V20, you should let the Storyteller decide which option he prefers : setting the story before the destruction of Enoch with Tal’Mahe’Ra still strong and able to manipulate Sabbat, Black Hand and Camarilla ….. or setting the story after the destruction of Tal’Mahe’Ra, with Black Hand rebuilding his forces (looking for new seraphs) to aid the Sabbat and prepare to destroy Antidiluvians and bring Zillah back to ‘unlife’.
‘Normal’ Black Hand has a really cool Roleplay and Story … please do not make them disappear …
I like a lot of this, especially how some things that are implied elsewhere are explicitly stated here. The notion of the Camarilla’s Traditions trumping anything so passé as sect affiliation is wonderful.
However, I will say that the paragraph about the Black Hand’s enmity toward the Souleaters is jarring. I don’t dislike the idea of Souleaters, per se, but I think it gets hit a little too hard in that paragraph. What might suit better would be a more expanded view of the various enemies, philosophical conflicts and challenges that the Tal’mahe’Ra faces. Throw the Souleaters in there, for sure, but maybe you could add in some of the the notions of internal and external struggles that the sect faces. The east-vesus-west thing within the Hand would be nice to see, and maybe something about the odd issues with the Setites and strange bedfellows with the Assamites. I’d just like to see that the True Hand has more going on that just fighting Souleaters.
Also, I gotta say that I love the description of the Camarilla’s ‘laissez-faire attitude toward domains,’ which is the way I’ve always played it. The entire power structure works, but the justicars and the archons (and indeed the Inner Circle itself) can’t be bothers to give a fuck about how Prince Wassername appointed her sheriff. As long as the Traditions — and foremost the Masqueraded — are upheld to a basic level, a prince won’t be bothered. I see that as why the Camarilla allows the anarchs to persist. The Ivory Tower doesn’t really love the free-wheeling expression of the anarchs, but there are more pressing matters for the sect…