Everything

“I rebel; therefore we exist.”

PAYING IT FORWARD

Shelly clutched her stomach as she stumbled down the street. She’d lost a heel from one of her shoes, and that made walking complicated. The trauma of her attack made it even more so. Part of her was still amazed to be alive and relatively unhurt. When the asshole in the leather trench coat grabbed her and dragged her into the alley, she felt sure that she was about to be raped and probably killed. Instead, there was a sharp pain in her neck, and then she woke up sometime later with a headache and a burning sensation in her throat. Dazed, she staggered out of the wrong end of the alley and was a few blocks away before she realized that she was lost. Then she heard the whistle.

Turning quickly, Shelly saw a trio of young gangbangers step out onto the street and start walking towards her. She remembered now that she’d been heading for an underground party in a less-than-safe part of Chicago, but she’d told her friends that it would be okay as long as they didn’t go past the expressway. She now realized that she was quite a ways past 51st Street. Now, she wasn’t okay. She had dodged one encounter only to stumble into another, and it looked like she might well get raped and killed after all. Yet somehow, that pounding in her skull and that burning in her throat actually seemed like bigger problems to her than the approaching thugs.

“You look a little lost, pretty thing. Don’t you worry. Me and my boys are gonna take good care of you. Show you a real good time.” The leader of the trio leered at her, and his two buddies laughed cruelly. She should have been afraid. Of course, being angry at her circumstances was an understandable reaction too, but fear should have crowded out the anger. Tonight, it didn’t. The boys laughed and advanced. The pounding and the burning got worse. Then everything went red, and the screaming started. The tiny part of Shelly that retained some awareness of her surroundings was genuinely surprised that the screams weren’t hers.

Everything was red, fuzzy, and unbearably hot. The sensations subsided for a moment as something warm and delicious flowed down her throat, easing her strange thirst. However, as soon as the liquid stopped flowing, the red came back stronger than before... right up until something that felt like a sledgehammer struck her right between the eyes.

She awoke sometime later in another place. The thirst was still there, but weaker and, for the moment, manageable. The pounding in her head was much fainter but still there, as if waiting for the right moment to crank back up again. She was on a couch in a tasteful yet Spartan apartment. Framed pictures of concert posters covered the wall. Across the room was a young black male who looked to be in his early twenties if not younger, sitting in a leather office chair behind a smart IKEA desk. He was wearing a Versace suit over a T-shirt, and was reading an “Intro to Conversational Greek” textbook. As Shelly sat up, he set the book aside on top of some other books about Greek philosophy, mainly Aristotle.

“So,” he said. “Are we cool? Or are you gonna frenzy again?”

“Frenzy?” she asked weakly.

“Yeah, it’s what we call it when we go crazy and kill everything that moves. You feel like you’re gonna do it? Because I’d hate to have to punch you out again before we talk. I mean, a black guy hitting a white girl just looks bad, you know? Makes me feel like I’m conforming to stereotypes.”

At those words, she suddenly felt a brief stab of... not pain, exactly, but a flash of anger so intense that it made her head hurt again. Then it was gone. “I’m okay. You don’t need to hurt me.”

“I don’t plan to. When were you Embraced?”

She just stared at him, and he rolled his eyes. “Okay, when were you turned? You know, into a vampire?”

“A... vampire?”

He sighed and then opened his mouth. Shelly gasped as his incisors slid down into wicked fangs.

“What’s your name?” he asked, retracting the fangs.

“Sh... Shelly.”

“Okay, Shelly, my name’s Dre. Now, I’m gonna spell things out for you. Sometime recently, maybe earlier tonight, some asshole attacked you, bit you on the neck, and made you pass out. When you woke up, you were thirstier than you’d ever been and you had this splitting headache that grew and grew until those idiots pissed you off and then everything went black. Sound familiar?”

She nodded quietly.

“Now here’s what I need to know. Did you see the vampire who did this to you? Or did he say anything?”

“I... I didn’t see his face. He was big and wearing a heavy coat. But he did say something.” She wiped a tear from her eyes and then froze when she realized it was blood. “He said... ‘Tell ‘em Jack sent you.’” She didn’t look up from the bloody tears on her fingertips.

Dre cursed softly. “Well, then, I guess that makes you my little sister or something. Smiling Jack is my sire too. He blows into Chicago like clockwork every few years, Embraces someone into Clan Brujah — that’s what you are now, a Brujah like me — and then splits, leaving all the other Brujah to clean up his mess.”

“Bruja? That’s Spanish for ‘witch,’ isn’t it?”

Dre laughed. “You know, I said the exact same thing when I was in your shoes. Don’t worry, though. I got a guy you can talk to tomorrow night, once you’ve rested. He’s a Brujah too, but he’s old as shit and pompous as hell. But he answered all my questions after my Embrace, and he can do the same for you.”

Without meaning to, Dre glanced over to the mirror on the wall and took in his reflection. He hadn’t aged at all, but the expensive suit he wore instead of threadbare gang colors was just one sign of how he’d grown in the last twenty-five years. He turned back to Shelly. “Consider this me paying it forward.”

THE TRUE HISTORY OF REBELLION

IN THE BEGINNING

Our Clan’s origins date back to the first human city, Enoch, which was founded more than 10,000 years ago. Accordingly, reliable records about our earliest nights are... spotty. There are disagreements as to names, dates, genders, and motivations. What I tell you of those nights is merely the most commonly recited fable.

Caine, the first vampire, founded the city of Enoch, and abandoned his childer and grandchilder after the Great Flood destroyed the city. His heirs rebuilt, but conflict broke out in the Second City between those of the Second and Third Generations, with the latter destroying the former. The city fell soon after. At some point during this conflict, the one we call Brujah was slain. Most say one of her Fourth Generation childer, a man called Troile, committed diablerie upon her, but there are other stories saying that Brujah was murdered by the Ventrue Antediluvian and Troile diablerized him in retaliation. According to those stories, the bloody enmity between the Brujah and the Ventrue dates to that night. Then again, other stories say Troile was the Antediluvian and Brujah his murdering childe (or maybe hers, since even the genders of the relative parties are speculative).

The early Brujah were considered a Clan of learning, at least according to our collective mythology. It seems unlikely to me that the entire Clan had such restrained proclivities. After all, our Clan is known for strength, speed, emotional manipulation, and berserker furies, and while many ancient Brujah were philosophers, it seems improbable that our ancestors collectively played the role of “The Learned Clan” assigned to us by antiquity. Then again, perhaps the earliest Brujah, resentful of our legendary temper, sought to fight against their natural instinct for violence by becoming more intellectual and philosophical. Troile’s Fourth Generation peers supposedly were more emotionally restrained than those descended directly from him, so perhaps our historical reputation stems from them. In any case, it’s a moot point — no one has called us “The Learned Clan” in a long time.

THE TIME OF CARTHAGE

Those early Brujah certainly played important roles in Mesopotamia, in Athens, but most importantly, in Carthage. The jewel of the Phoenician Empire, Carthage was one of the most cosmopolitan cities of its day, and had Hannibal been just a bit more successful in his endeavors, it would have been the center of Western civilization instead of Rome, and we’d all be much better off. While the Roman Ventrue encouraged all vampires to hide their activities from mortals, the Brujah of Carthage walked a different path — open and direct involvement with the city’s mortals under the rule of Troile himself as the city’s god-king. The Idealists among us say that it was a utopia in which Kindred and kine lived together in peace and mutual respect. The Ventrue, unsurprisingly, disagree. Moreover, since the winners write the history books, most mortal historians ascribe to Carthage a lurid culture of human sacrifice, and most Kindred historians accuse Troile of consorting with demons. It didn’t help that while Brujah dominated the city’s Kindred population, Troile also allowed a sizeable population of Assamites and Setites to make their havens there. Despite Troile’s best efforts, there were probably many abuses of mortals by members of those Clans and by younger Brujah corrupted by them.

The initial conflicts between Carthage and Rome were the sort of military skirmishes that one might expect to flare up between two competing empires sharing spheres of influence. We don’t know what led the Roman Ventrue to conclude that Carthage was an existential threat and to commit themselves to its annihilation, but something did. Probably the Malkavians, who infested Rome and spread madness and paranoia in their wake. Eventually, Rome took the city, burned it to the ground, and salted the earth, supposedly to prevent any Kindred who had melded into the soil from emerging. According to some tales, Troile himself lies buried beneath the Tunisian soil, trapped for eternity. Certainly, he has never made his presence felt in all the nights since. Well, not his physical presence. Some think our hereditary tendency towards frenzy is a result of a blood-based link to a crazed Clan founder who lies trapped for eternity in agonized hunger beneath the sands of Tunis.

The broader effect of the loss of Carthage can be seen in the rise of Roman (and therefore Ventrue) hegemony. At the time Carthage fell, it was the only civilization remotely capable of counterbalancing Rome’s power. Without Carthage, there was nothing to stop Rome from becoming the dominant socio-political force in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. With it came the authoritarian megalomaniacs of Clan Ventrue, who spent the next two millennia convinced that their destruction of Carthage justified their right to rule over all other Kindred. Carthage fell long before Caesar, but few Brujah were surprised when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, and the very idea of individual liberty was sacrificed on the altar of Roman nationalism. There’s a reason the twentieth century fascists picked the Roman image of an eagle clutching a bundle of sticks as their symbol, after all.

FROM INQUISITION TO REVOLT

The Roman era and the later “Dark Age” that accompanied Rome’s fall represented a dark time for Clan Brujah. No, that’s inaccurate. We honestly haven’t had a time since Carthage fell that wasn’t dark by some measure. Our successes since then have been sporadic and have often cost us more in lives and principles than we’ve gained. The first stab at a Brujah resurgence came in the Middle Ages during the Anarch Revolt. The Revolt had its origins in the Catholic Church’s Inquisition against the Catharist heresy. While in the process of burning Albigensians at the stake over various doctrinal disputes, the Inquisitors discovered to their surprise that some of the Cathars were, in fact, vampires. Upon finding conclusive proof of our existence, Mother Church did exactly what one would expect of a religion that sprang from authoritarian soil fertilized by the Ventrue — they tried to kill us all.

For a time, they were quite successful. So much so that the European elders decided to send their own childer to their Final Deaths against the Inquisition in the hopes that once all the foot soldiers were dead, the Church would think the war over. Understandably, some of those childer balked at dying for such a purpose, but they lacked not just leadership but the ability to articulate a response other than suicidal obedience. As it happened, there were relatively few Brujah Princes in Europe caught in the path of the Inquisition. Our anti-authoritarian bent, combined with the antipathy of the Ventrue and their bootlickers, largely prevented the Brujah elders of the day from achieving temporal power.

Ironically, this was a boon to our Clan during the Inquisition. Barred from the levers of power but still gifted at persuasion and rhetoric, those Brujah found themselves uniquely positioned to offer an alternative course of action to the terrified childer of the other Clans: Just Say No! The Brujah presented young vampires of the other Clans with an idea that had honestly never occurred to them: rebellion. Defy your sires. Reject their commands. Live your own unlives free of the dictates of others. Have no ruler. The idea spread so well, a word developed for those Kindred who would have no ruler: Anarch.

While our Clan certainly led the Anarch Revolt, we are not so arrogant as to claim we did everything. The Tzimisce Anarchs defeated the blood bond with a ritual that rescued many potential recruits from slavery. The Lasombra also played their part, though in a way that even many of the Brujah Anarchs found troubling — they diablerized their own Clan founder — an event that sent shockwaves through the Kindred of Europe, and one soon repeated against the Tzimisce founder.

Frankly, I’m not so squeamish as to recoil from the idea of Amaranth, although I have never partaken myself. It was a War of Generations, after all, and diablerie was one of the few ways to even the odds between elders and ancillae. However, to every Kindred back then diablerie was the vilest of sins, and cannibalization of two Antediluvians shook the Anarchs even as it galvanized the elders into harsher countermeasures. Then, one of our own elders, Patricia of Bollingbroke, attacked Hardestadt, one of the most influential Ventrue in Europe, and according to some tales, actually diablerized him. Whether that’s true or not, the entire Clan turned against our movement with the same ruthlessness than had annihilated Carthage.

The forces against us were insurmountable no matter how hard we fought, but I chose to believe that in the end, we defeated ourselves. The moral clarity of the Anarch cause was blurred and sullied by the high-profile diableries, and even more so when the Assamites offered us their assistance. Basically, if we would provide information on the movements and havens of traditionalist elders, the Assamites would remove said elders, claiming their blood in the process. What started out as a movement of noble freedom fighters fell into a disarrayed collection of Judas goats. It didn’t help when the Anarch leaders learned the price they’d paid for help from the Tzimisce: the Vaulderie ritual that allowed us to sever blood bonds did so by replacing those bonds with equally strong emotional ties to the Anarch Movement as a whole. We weren’t really freeing the childer of our enemies. We were just enslaving them to different masters.

FROM REVOLT TO “LOYAL OPPOSITION”

Just like that, it was over. Beset at all sides by the nascent Camarilla, by the Inquisition, by the Assamites, and by bloodthirsty cannibals within our own ranks, the Anarch leaders simply surrendered. The Treaty of Thorns allowed most of us — mainly the ones with no black marks in our auras — to join the Camarilla. For many of the Revolt, especially those of Tzimisce or Lasombra stock, that was unthinkable. First, their pride would not allow it. Second, many of them were exuberant diablerists and would never have been accepted. Finally, most of them had become addicted to both the Vaulderie and the taste of elder blood. Thus, from the ashes of our noble idea, the nightmare of the Sabbat was borne. To this day, the Ventrue point to the Sabbat as an example of why other Kindred should never listen to us. Pompous fuckers.

After Thorns, a small percentage of our Clan chose to join the Sabbat as antitribu, but the rest of the Brujah returned to the fold. To be honest, we didn’t miss the antitribu, as many of them were the ones most prone to frenzy and the ones least likely to present a reasoned argument for, well, anything. They see it as a strength, but we know it for what it really is. We Brujah anticipated being terribly misused by the victorious Ventrue elders, and most of us made a show of how angry we were over the treaty’s cruel abuses. In fact, the wiser of the Brujah Anarchs were quietly delighted with the concessions we’d won, particularly once it was clear how those concessions could serve us in practice.

The treaty guaranteed the right of the Anarchs to “work peacefully” to achieve our ends, but did not specify what those ends might be. It guaranteed us all the same rights and privileges of any other Camarilla member. It required anyone who had seized our domains to return them to us, while requiring us only to return assets we had seized to our sires or Clan elders, most of whom were Anarchs just like us. Most importantly, the treaty contained the following incredibly ill-conceived language: “Anarchs are guaranteed the freedom to act as they please short of breaching the ‘Masquerade’ imposed for the protection of all Kindred from the kine.” To put that another way, as long as we helped to preserve the Masquerade and refrained from outright violence against our Camarilla peers, we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted.

I’m still amazed that the Camarilla put such language in a treaty that they considered a binding magical document. I can only assume that the Ventrue were so arrogant that they couldn’t imagine the possibility of truculent Brujah insulting them in the heart of their Elysiums. To be honest, I cannot say for sure that the treaty itself was a binding magical document, but we have certainly spread the rumor that it was far and wide, and the Tremere have never openly contradicted us. The Treaty of Thorns was also (or so I’m told) the mechanism by which the Tremere bound the Assamites with their famous blood curse, and as far as most Camarilla vampires know, violating the treaty by engaging in sect-wide suppression of the Anarchs could potentially free the Assamites to start their campaign of diablerie again. Then again, it’s possible that everything I just told you is nonsense. The Tremere aren’t saying either way, and even if the treaty is not magically binding, they might be using it to subtly keep the Anarch Movement around as a way to indirectly undermine the Ventrue. That’s certainly consistent with how the Tremere operate in my experience.

Regardless, most Camarilla elders have been remarkably tolerant of Anarchs — and Brujah are largely synonymous with Anarchs in most Camarilla domains — unless they can prove that we’ve breached the Masquerade or engaged in unprovoked violence, at which point that generally try to crush us like bugs. It’s a loophole we’ve used with considerable success ever since. Instead of interfering directly with Camarilla politics, we go after the mortals. We don’t breach the Masquerade, but we push against it as much as we can get away with, using our Presence to inspire mortals to rise up against autocratic governments. In the American colonies, Brujah lit the spark of the American Revolution. In France, we watched from the shadows as angry peasants stormed the Bastille in the name of Liberté, Equalité, and Fraternité.

FANNING THE FLAMES OF REVOLUTION

FRANCE

Unfortunately, almost immediately, the French Revolution was co-opted despite our best efforts. Not that it was ever really our Revolution. Despite what our more prideful kin would tell you, the Kindred rarely have the power and freedom to directly shape mortal society. We Brujah can at best nudge revolutionaries and then fume when our enemies nudge back. In France, those enemies were not the Ventrue for once. The Inquisition had decimated the so-called “Kings” who barely maintained any influence over the Ancien Régime. No, it was the Toreador under the leadership of Francois Villon who adroitly undermined us. A whispered word here and there, and the Montagnards wiped out the Girondists whom we supported and ushered in the Reign of Terror. The bloodshed quickly grew beyond even Villon’s power to contain, but the results suited him just fine, as every single mortal suspected of being an agent of the French Brujah lost his head. Within ten years, Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, and when he proved inadequate for the job of conquering Europe, Villon blocked our efforts to preserve the Republic while the monarchists who subsidized his decadent lifestyle helped the Bourbons back onto their old throne. The Brujah of France were never fully defeated, though, and France has been a hotbed of revolutionary thought ever since, with Toreador-influenced governments repeatedly brought down by popular revolt.

Finally, the rise of the Third Republic in 1870 ended the monarchy for good, and in the twentieth century, the Toreador and the Brujah actually joined forces in the face of Nazi invasion. The Camarilla denies any Kindred involvement in the rise of Hitler, but you’ll never persuade me that the Third Reich doesn’t have the fingerprints of some Ventrue bastard all over it. Anyway, in the aftermath of World War II, a surprisingly conciliatory Francois Villon made many concessions to his Brujah allies.

The era of détente between the French Brujah and Toreador ultimately allowed for an intriguing cross-fertilization of ideas between artists and revolutionary ideas, one that had its origins in an unusual movement among the kine: The Situationist International. Born in the aftermath of World War II, the Situationists were a group of artists, political activists, and armchair revolutionaries drawn together by a common interest in neo-communist theory and avant-garde art. The group, which was Marxist in nature but opposed to the authoritarianism of the communist dictatorships of the day, sought to use surrealist art to critique the role capitalism played both in destroying the quality of human life and in making a global fetish out of rampant consumerism. The Situationists earned the name because of their belief that it was possible to counteract the pervasive spectacle of capitalism by creating “situations”: moments of self-awareness and self-discovery that would inspire individuals to reject mass media culture in favor of the pursuit of their own individual needs and desires. Initially a purely artistic movement, the SI became increasingly anarchist and revolutionary in character, culminating in its role in the 1968 insurrections at universities across France and Belgium. After that apex, the SI’s influence declined until its dissolution in the early 1970s.

Whatever influence the Situationist International had on mortal politics, it was definitely influential among the Kindred of France, especially a small coterie of artists and activists who had been effectively shut out of the Paris art scene by more traditionalist Toreador who were scandalized at the idea of using art as a vehicle for revolution. Dada and Surrealism had been around for decades, and in France they had been important avenues for Kindred artists, particularly Malkavians, the more avant garde Toreador and, of course, the Brujah. Generally, however, the intensely conservative French Toreador establishment rejected those movements as serious art. However, of all the Kindred Situationists, only the Brujah would go so far as to see surrealist art as a weapon to use against their political opponents.

Brujah Situationism manifested as an effort to use artwork to galvanize public opinion and undermine Camarilla authority in a way that the Camarilla leaders could barely even understand, let alone suppress. Some Situationists made heavy use of performance art, often using their powers to compel others to perform strange acts in public places that confused or enraged onlookers. Others found ways to incorporate their Kindred disciplines into works of art or musical performance that could affect viewers. In the 1980s, the Situationists incorporated magical techniques derived from the so-called Punk sorcerers who had been forced to flee Britain for France. The extreme countercultural themes that impregnated Punk Sorcery were a good fit for the absurdist revolutionaries of the Situationist movement, and members who had initiated themselves into Punk Sorcery devised several art-themed rituals designed to shock and infuriate the Toreador art establishment and, by extension, the Toreador Camarilla leadership with which it was largely synonymous.

AMERICA

Let me take a step back for a moment. Across the Atlantic, the American Revolution was generally better for our aims. Some of our elders insist that the Brujah played a direct role in the Boston Tea Party, and that the Idealists advised many of the Founders on how to establish a modern democratic state free of the excesses of monarchy. I don’t know about all that, but I do know Crispus Attucks ended up in our Clan, so that’s something to be proud of.

From our perspective, the results of the American Revolution were imperfect but largely successful. The main sticking point was that the Southern states were unwilling to consider any federal interference in the slave trade, let alone abolition of it. According to some tales, this obsession with chattel slavery was driven in part by the presence of Autarkis vampires — mainly Ventrue, Malkavians, and Toreador, but with a surprising number of Tremere and Setites — who were using the slave plantations as herds and, in some cases, as fodder for vile blood magic experiments. I don’t know if there’s any truth to that, but many Brujah elders who supported the North in the later American Civil War considered the abolition of American slavery to be a small revenge on the Ventrue for the fall of Carthage.

Today, the Brujah may not control American democracy, but we have ensured that no other Clan does either. In the 1940s, a Brujah Justicar forbade the Prince of Washington, D.C. from interfering in the affairs of the federal government, a fact that rankles the odious Prince Vitel to this day. Of course, the 1940s would also mark another important moment in our history, this one taking place on the opposite side of the country, but I get ahead of myself.

RUSSIA

Our third major revolutionary effort was perhaps our most successful, but also the one about which our Idealists are most ambivalent. In 1917, after decades of planning, a council of European Brujah engineered the fall of the Tsarist regime and exterminated the Kindred alliance that had quietly dominated Russia for centuries. While the Brujah Council’s influence over the Soviet Union fluctuated over the coming decades, their hold on the Soviet Kindred would be nigh absolute... until 1991, when something woke up and apparently killed them all. After a quarter-century, we still don’t know what it was, and neither does anyone else. For the moment, the Brujah mostly ignore the issue. Let the Ventrue and the Tremere send their spies and assassins to certain, if mysterious, death.

From the start, the Soviet experiment was troubling to many in our Clan. Our traditions call for us to seek a closer relationship with the kine (at least to the extent permissible under the Masquerade) and to seek individual freedom for ourselves and egalitarianism for all. The Menshevik faction of the Revolution best represented the ideology of the Russian Brujah. Unfortunately, the Mensheviks lost rather decisively to the Bolsheviks, forcing the Brujah revolutionaries to make the best of things. The “best of things” ended up being a brutal totalitarian society as repressive as anything ever fashioned by the Ventrue. By some accounts, the death toll attributed to Stalin is greater than Hitler’s, particularly if one subscribes to the view that the 10 million or so Ukrainians who died during the Holodomor (a famine so severe that it was given a name) died by deliberate genocide rather than mere grotesque incompetence.

It is unclear whether the Brujah Council ever directly controlled Stalin in any way, and certainly not enough to stem his abuses. On the other hand, the Council had enormous access over the Soviet society as a mechanism for spreading communist revolutionary thought. During their regime, the Council was quite free in financing Anarch activities around the world; so much so that when the Council fell, Anarch cells across the world were caught flat-footed and put at a serious disadvantage in their revolutionary activities.

THE ANARCH FREE STATES

However, the true jewel of Clan Brujah is the Anarch Free States. It represents the clearest expression of Brujah ideals and Anarch thought. It is the closest we’ve been to the dream of Carthage in two millennia. Naturally, it’s a barbarous shit hole. The Free States came into being in 1944, when the Prince of Los Angeles, an obsequious Toreador twit, ordered that a Brujah named Jeremy MacNeil be severely beaten for the crime of seeking justice after the Prince’s lackeys abused a number of Caitiff.

In doing so, Don Sebastien made two fatal mistakes. First, Sebastien assumed that MacNeil was a typical Brujah relatively new to the Embrace. MacNeil was, in fact, a battle-hardened 400-year-old elder. Second, Sebastien, who was surprisingly ignorant of Camarilla traditions for the Prince of a major city, failed to realize that unprovoked state-sanctioned violence against an Anarch leader violated the terms of the Treaty of Thorns. In so doing, he effectively gave the Anarchs of L.A. an excuse to violently retaliate to a degree unprecedented since the end of the Anarch Revolt. MacNeil, who was more versed in the details of said treaty than Sebastien, concluded that the Anarchs of L.A. were now in a state of war with the Camarilla, and he treated it as such. Unfortunately for Sebastien and most of the L.A. Camarilla, MacNeil was quite good at warfare. Within a month, L.A. was the first truly Anarch city the world had seen outside of the Soviet Union. Within six months, most of Southern California was an Anarch-held territory, which the Camarilla, still grappling with post-War chaos, could not address.

Unfortunately for the Anarchs, Jeremy MacNeil seems to represent the best and the worst of our Clan. An Idealist dreamer committed to anarchism (with a small “a”), MacNeil not only refused to seize direct control of the Free States, but also took steps to prevent anyone else from doing so, whether in or out of our Clan. The result is not a New Carthage where all Kindred share power as equals. Instead, it is a demilitarized zone where informal vampire gangs claim control over however much territory they can reliably hold. MacNeil installed permanent committees to preserve the Masquerade and to defend the city against counter-revolution, but beyond that, he failed every test of Kindred governance.

Yet somehow, he’s still there. Despite everything, MacNeil and his Brujah allies (Foccart, Attucks, and García, among others) have kept the Free State project working, defending it against the Camarilla, the Sabbat, the Setites, and internal civil war. As most Brujah come to learn, though, history always repeats itself.

REBELLION TONIGHT

The Rabble are a complicated family. We are more than we appear to those outside. We are also less than we wish to be and far less than we were in the noble past we imagine for ourselves. We are more in touch with humanity than any other Clan, having spent millennia seeking to elevate our mortal brothers and sisters into equivalence with the Kindred. We are also more divorced from them than most Kindred, for the passions that flare up inside us often burn too hot for the mortals nearby to endure.

INDIVIDUALITY

I like to think that the defining characteristic of a Brujah is her intense desire to maintain her individuality in the face of powerful social groups that demand conformity, whether through the Traditions or the Vaulderie. We seldom seek out overt power among either the Kindred or the kine. A position of authority necessarily carries a requirement of conforming to the expectations of those in authority over you, as well as those over whom you hold authority. Politics is an addicting game: as an addiction, it undermines one’s free will, and as a game, it ultimately is nothing but a petty distraction.

Even those of us who do hold power still strive to maintain that sense of individuality. Brujah Princes (and Archbishops, if you’re a part of that lot) are rare compared to the other Camarilla Clans. Most Princes rule through rigid social control; their power lies in the ability to force their peers to act in a certain way or risk shunning. A Brujah Prince rules by the force of her will, by her charisma, by her passion. Failing that, she rules by being supernaturally strong enough to crush her enemies, whether through the cruel subtlety of emotion-shaping disciplines or the more direct means of a vitae-augmented lead pipe to the head. Regardless, the Brujah Prince will usually be more direct than rivals of other Clans will. The courtly parties might not be as ostentatious, but at least you always know where you stand.

RAGE

Of course, while I think individuality defines the Brujah, many others would say that what most defines us is rage. Anger burns hot in the soul of every Brujah. Your subconscious, my friend, is dry tinder awaiting a spark, and it always will be. The fire of a Brujah’s soul has an inexhaustible fuel source. Personally, I think the fury of the Brujah, though a disability to be mastered, also carries a potent benefit — our rage prevents us from stagnating by making complacency an impossibility for us. All the other Clans gradually devolve into static, unchanging mockeries of humanity, but the Brujah are blessed with a boundless, barely constrained fury. From time to time, we must upset the status quo. Spend a hundred years studying a Brujah, and you still won’t know what might set him off. Even among Brujah Princes, it is simply not possible to be a static creature when you might rip apart a trusted lackey just for delivering bad news. That is not to say we are proud of our rage. It is a curse, no doubt, and one we must resist, particularly so long as we are bound to respect the Masquerade. But it is a simple fact of our unlife — a Brujah will frenzy, and nearly every time he does, his world will somehow change.

It is difficult to explain the nature of Brujah frenzies to the other Kindred. All vampires suffer frenzy, after all, and our brethren often fall into the trap of thinking that Brujah are simply weak-willed when it comes to resisting it. They don’t understand. A Brujah does not frenzy because some stimulus or frustration has destroyed her calm and unleashed her Beast. We don’t have calm. Every Brujah I know is angry all the time. Every minute of our collective unlives is filled with a relentless, barely concealed annoyance with the universe. Some Brujah get headaches before it happens. Some have told me that at all times they hear a faint ticking, or the sound of distant never-ending drums, or perhaps even an annoying tune that got stuck in their head 300 years ago and has never gone away. The fury always manifests as something different, but it’s always there, waiting for its opportunity. We are not provoked to mindless anger. We are always angry, and eventually something provokes us into letting go.

INTERNAL POLITICS

Unsurprisingly, we Brujah lack the structure of some of the other Clans. Certainly, we are not as structured as the Ventrue or the Tremere, both of whom style themselves less as Clans than global conspiracies. At best, we have three... descriptors, terms that we use to define different approaches to the Brujah condition: Iconoclast, Idealist, and Individualist. These are not political movements, nor even clear social divisions. Nor are they permanent states, as Iconoclasts who survive long enough often become Individualists or even Idealists, while Idealists sometimes tire of the ivory tower artifice of their unlives and become Iconoclasts, if only for just long enough to bash a few heads. As always, we Brujah are agents of change.

To many outsiders, an Iconoclast is the stereotypical Brujah. She is the head banger, the barn-burner, the raver and ranter, the Brujah who spends the first thirty minutes of each night meticulously shaving her head down into a Mohawk so that there will be no question about how much contempt she has for social conventions. The term iconoclast literally means “one who destroys sacred relics,” and Iconoclast Brujah are eager to tear down everything the other Kindred venerate. Well, almost everything. Most Iconoclasts respect the Traditions, if only to the extent self-preservation demands. Even then, the Iconoclast saves her greatest respect for the Masquerade, without which we all court Final Death. The other Traditions are often objects of derision. Who is that Toreador to say the Brujah cannot enter his domain? Who is that fat Ventrue Prince to say the Brujah cannot Embrace whomever she wants? In Camarilla domains, being an Iconoclast is often a prelude to becoming an Anarch, usually when the Iconoclast goes too far and is banished from acceptable society.

In many ways, the Iconoclast is synonymous with the Anarch, and cunning Iconoclasts are skilled at using the loopholes provided by the Treaty of Thorns to vandalize the Prince’s home and crank-call the harpy’s personal cellphone. Among the mortals, the Iconoclasts are likely to have herds among biker gangs, radical student groups, and the violent fringe of political activism, ranging from the ELF to the KKK. An Iconoclast is the Brujah most likely to stir a mob into burning down the same neighborhood where her haven sits. She is also the Brujah most likely to revel in her frenzies, treating the burning madness of her fury as an orgiastic release of pent-up frustrations. Not that she’s stupid, mind you — many Iconoclasts are quite intelligent and creative in their destruction. She just doesn’t see any real value in the status quo. Which, for an immortal predator with emotion-controlling powers, is as frightening a mindset as one can imagine.

An Idealist, on the other hand, considers himself the thinking man’s Brujah. He resists frenzy, at least until a rival provokes him during a debate by refusing to submit to his superior reasoning. The elders of our Clan insist that the Idealist was the original archetype of the Brujah, dating back to the salons and debate halls of Carthage, Athens, and Rome. Where Iconoclasts settle disputes by barroom brawls, Idealists really do debate, often in stultifying formats that risk provoking frenzy among Iconoclasts who show up to watch and are then bored into a violent tantrum. Sometimes, the Iconoclasts are right to be angry, as some Idealists become so hidebound and conservative they become obstacles to change rather than agents of it.

The rational intellects of the Idealists have been invaluable to the Clan, however. It was the Idealists, after all, who negotiated the provisions of the Treaty of Thorns that allow the Iconoclasts to get away with their antisocial activities. Unlike the Iconoclast’s embrace of the Brujah frenzy, the Idealist rejects that part of his nature. Most Idealists strive with all their unbeating hearts to resist frenzy every step of the way. Supposedly, some of the eldest of them work towards a new philosophy that will supersede Humanitas and grant greater control over frenzy. They call it the Path of Entelechy, though I know little of its precepts and less of how successful it is in its intended purpose. Idealists often develop herds among student groups, political activists, trade unions, and local government officials.

Individualists fill in the gaps between Iconoclasts and Idealists. Well, that’s what the Iconoclasts and Idealists say. Most Individualists would say they’re just doing their own things and avoiding of the violence of the Iconoclasts and the pomposity of the Idealists. The Individualist charts his own course and pursues his own agenda, neither demanding that others follow him nor setting fire to the haven of anyone who disagrees with him. Alas, the price such a Brujah pays for individuality is, well, being an individual. Iconoclasts can always find someone else to help them form a mob. Idealists can count on the support of any peers they have persuaded through reasoned debate. An Individualist is on his own unless he actually cultivates allies who share his goals. Where frenzy is concerned, he neither delights in it nor suppresses it. Frenzy is simply part of what he is, one more thing to deal with in the night. Individualists can acquire herds and followers among nearly any social grouping consistent with their personal agendas.

Traditionally, either the Idealists consisted of the elders of our Clan (the ones who honed their debate styles while wearing a toga) or younger Brujah stepped in intellectual forms of rebellion (mostly communists or devotees of more obscure socio-economic theories). Iconoclasts, on the other hand, consisted of younger Brujah of violent proclivities who lacked political acumen, while Individualists checked the box marked “Other.”

In recent nights, though, we have seen the birth of new strains of Brujah thought that combines all three philosophies into something new. Inspired by mortal movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous, these twenty-first century revolutionaries take their debates to private Internet forums and seek to convert the Internet into another battlefield of the Jyhad. While their identities are a secret, most believe that the kind of computer-savvy Brujah who work to undermine the “hyper-capitalist global control” model favored by our rival Clans dominates the leadership of the Red Question faction of the Anarch Movement. Their manifesto, Anarchs Unbound, displays the sophisticated reasoning of our Idealists, but yoked to an aggressive libertarian philosophy that speaks in the language of the Individualists. However, when the time for debate is over, the Red Question employs cutting edge cyber-terrorism techniques to engage in creative destruction on a scale the bullying Iconoclasts find delightful.

GATHERINGS

Any large gathering of Brujah is fraught with tension — we do frenzy at the drop of a hat, after all — but despite that, we do gather. The nature of a particular Brujah gathering is shaped by the politics and personalities of those on hand, from the frenetic cacophony of an Iconoclast rant to the staid aesthetics of an Idealist debate.

The rant is probably the oldest form of Brujah gathering, since the basic concept of people gathering to argue about something of mutual importance has probably been around since the caveman days. Any Brujah can call a rant, from the hoariest elder to the wettest neonate, but there’s no guarantee anyone will show up unless either you have some degree of clout in the Clan or the issue up for discussion is so important that the Rabble come out anyway.

Rants can take place anywhere, from coffeehouses (after the kine have been “asked” to leave) to abandoned warehouses to private estates, provided it’s big enough to accommodate the city’s Brujah. Crowding makes us anxious, after all. Generally, the Brujah who called the rant is the one to first raise the matter under discussion, after which everyone else who can bully their way up onto the stage gets their say. Nor are the Brujah limited to the official topic of debate — anyone who can gain the crowd’s attention can argue about whatever they want. Unsurprisingly, given the anarchic nature of the rant, frenzies are common, which is another reason kine are not welcome. In fact, frenzies are not the only source of violence. There are apocryphal tales of anarchist Brujah who grew so bored with the political bromides of some communist Clan member that they threw a Molotov cocktail onto the stage while he was talking. Seems a bit extreme, but that’s the Iconoclasts for you.

Another common Brujah gathering is the rave. While most associate the term with the mortal underground party scene briefly ascendant in the 1990s, our use of the term is far older. As early as the fifteenth century, European Brujah often made a point of eschewing the elaborate courtly balls favored by Ventrue and the Toreador in favor of reels, barn dances, and other raucous entertainments favored by the peasant classes. We are creatures of passion, and the free-spirited dances of the common folk have always appealed to us in a way that the bloodless, metered steps of the waltz or the gavotte never could. Our pet name for such revels — the rave — comes from an archaic definition of that word meaning, “to rush wildly or furiously.” Originally, it was no doubt an insult levied by some Ventrue or Toreador, but we adopted it as merrily as we have most of the insults of our pompous blowhard rivals.

To be honest, I don’t know whether mortal DJs in Chicago back in the 1980s took the name from one of our dance parties or came up with it independently, but by the mid-1990s, the word rave was synonymous with “underground dance party” around the world. It was a glorious time to be a young Brujah, feeding on the driving pulse of rave music that beat in time with the hearts of a veritable sea of passion-fueled mortals. So of course, the police, conservative politicians, parent groups, and other emanations of the Ventrue mentality had to put a stop to it, using hysterical tales of rampant drug abuse and criminality to suppress the underground party scene. Sure, the Ventrue did not personally as a Clan go after raver culture. Probably. They just created a world ruled by boring fuckers who can’t stand to see anyone else having fun. Not that it stopped us. Brujah raves still happen all over the world, whenever one of us finds a venue big enough and a DJ hot enough and decides it’s time for the Rabble and our herds to gather for a good time.

Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the social universe, is the debate. There is no music at a debate, and no drugs, unless an Iconoclast observer has taken some tranquilizers from the veins of a blood doll just to get through the gathering. Debates are the purview of elder Brujah, along with a smattering of younger intellectuals who aspire to be as pompous as those elders are, or who really need something from an elder and think that participating in a debate is a good way of sucking up. Debates are formal opportunities for old Idealist Brujah to gather and argue about issues they consider important. Unlike the arguments at a rant, however, there are few frenzies (though the ones you do see can be particularly explosive), and even fewer occasions when anything is actually decided. In fact, I think the primary purpose of the debate gathering is to encourage attendees to force their rage deep down inside and internalize it completely. Yeah, because suppressing your violent tendencies never causes problems later.

Most of the time, debates are not actually opportunities for Brujah in disagreement to come to a consensus. Rather, they represent a chance to argue for argument’s sake, to hone one’s rhetorical skills, and to bask in the warm sensation of talking endlessly about something rather than actually doing anything. Hell, I’ve attended debates where it was required that after three hours of discussion, all participants had to switch sides and argue against their own favored opinions. Which, I suppose, is good practice for understanding the nuances of your own position, but it’s exasperating when there’s actually something important to discuss.

Another form of Brujah gathering that has emerged in recent years is the bash, or, in some domains, “fight club,” after the film of the same name. Brujah bashes come in two forms. Common bashes include mortal participants (willing or no) who fight one another in unarmed combat for the entertainment of vampires who are there to bet on the outcome or just enjoy a good bloodletting. Often, Brujah attend common bashes when looking for potential prospects for ghouls or servants. Given our revolutionary proclivities, we prize fighting skills among our mortal allies and agents.

Elite bashes, on the other hand, are fights between rival Brujah, between Brujah and members of other Clans who aren’t afraid to get beat up, and sometimes, between Brujah and other kinds of supernatural beings. Betting is common, of course, and many Iconoclasts who wouldn’t be caught dead at a debate will instead settle their differences with a few rounds at a bash. Surprisingly, Idealists (and especially elder Idealists) also love bashes, though they’re more inclined to natter on about Olympian ideals and athletic perfection. I’m surprised they don’t show up in togas and insist that all fights be in the nude.

Bashes are more than just a chance to butt heads, however. Many participants have told me that the catharsis of fighting in a bash has made it easier to resist frenzy, at least for a few hours. Naturally, we don’t allow kine at elite bashes unless they are already blood bound or otherwise compelled to preserve our secrets.

One last kind of gathering is the gauntlet. It’s an informal gathering, and we don’t always call it that, but everyone present knows what it is. We call for gauntlets when one of our number has fucked up and it’s time for the whole Clan to pass judgment on them. Often gauntlets evolve spontaneously out of rants when the topic of discussion is “what that asshole did to get us all in trouble.” Such gauntlets are sometimes referred to as punishment rants, judgment rants, or even spite rants.

Regardless of the preferred local term, the basic principle is the same. The Brujah of the city gather to hear what one of their number has done and why he deserves to get his ass kicked. If the consensus is that he needs to get his ass kicked, then that is what’s going to happen. Sometimes, the miscreant gets his ass kicked to Final Death, which requires remarkable dedication if you’re assaulting a vampire with a blunt instrument. A Brujah judged guilty of the most serious crimes — breaches of the Masquerade, serious violations of Elysium, Amaranth — is often beaten into torpor and then delivered to the Prince.

Crimes against Clan Brujah — betrayal of Clan members, conspiring with our enemies (whoever that is this week), selling out the revolutionary movement du jour, or just being a dick to too many influential people — are met with less serious punishments. Sometimes, the miscreant really does have to walk a gauntlet, making her way through a path of fellow Rabble who strike at her with tire irons and crowbars as she passes. Sometimes, someone shatters her bones while restrained, forcing her to spend blood to mend the injuries improperly, which means later she will have to break those bones again herself to heal them correctly. Lesser offenses might be met with a red-hot branding iron that leave scars that spell out the Brujah’s crimes. In one city I’ve visited, the Brujah punish minor screw-ups with “the Walk of Shame”: They transport the victim fifty kilometers outside the city limits and then abandoned naked to make his own way home. The addition of tar and feathers or embarrassing slogans applied with permanent markers is sometimes a part of that punishment as well.

Another common punishment in some European domains is the Tantalus Box. They stuff the Brujah into a barrel that they then fill with quick-drying concrete up to her neck. She is then tormented with hot wax or other annoyances until she frenzies... to the amusement of the assembled Rabble, since she can’t do anything except scream incoherently while immobilized by the concrete. It’s not all fun and games, though. The Tantalus Box is also punishment for the most heinous crimes against Clan Brujah, such as diablerie of a respected Clan member, but in those cases, the assembly doesn’t just laugh at the guilty vampire’s frenzy. Instead, he’s nearly drained of blood first, and the moment the frenzy starts, the other Brujah finish filling the barrel up with concrete, and either bury it or drop it into the sea once it’s dried, leaving the doomed vampire trapped in a never-ending frenzy of impotent rage and endless hunger.

OTHERS OF THE BLOOD

As one might expect, we Brujah have our share of bloodlines.

The True Brujah are almost certainly extinct. I say “almost certainly” because there has been no hint or sign that they ever existed in our recorded history outside of a few apocryphal tales that predate Carthage. That has not prevented them from being the bogeymen we use to frighten our neonates. “Don’t breach the Masquerade or else the True Brujah will show up and erase your from history!” Yeah, the stories are that absurd. The gist of the True Brujah legend is that there is a tiny bloodline of vampires descended from all of Brujah’s Fourth Generation progeny who weren’t Troile. They’re sort of “anti-Brujah” according to the legends. Where we’re passionate, they’re emotionless. Where we use Celerity to move at superhuman speed, they have some weird, vaguely understood time-control power that lets them slow other people down. Anyway, they have been plotting against us to avenge the death of Brujah for approximately 10,000 years. I’m sure they’ll get around to it any day now.

Moving on to actually real vampires, the Osebo are an African bloodline that’s part of the Pan-African Cainite society known as the Laibon. I don’t really know much about the Laibon or the Osebo (beyond the fact that they’re descended from our Clan). I’m told that the Laibon all have weird spiritual affinities and are very different from Western Kindred in important ways that no one has ever explained to me in a way that makes sense. Something to do with local spirits, as I recall. The Osebo, in the unlikely chance you bump into one, is more likely to see well instead of manipulate emotions, but they still have the same violent tendencies as the main Clan.

Finally, the Brujah antitribu aren’t really a bloodline so much as a dissident group. Like us, they are prone to frenzy. Like us, they favor the same Disciplines. Like us, they really hate the Ventrue. The difference between us is philosophical. The antitribu have encouraged their passions to overcome their reason, and in doing so, they have let it overcome their heritage as well. The stereotypical antitribu is most likely a recently Embraced punk who frenzies on people who look at him wrong. The dangerous antitribu are the ones who forge their anger into a tool to advance some higher purpose within the Sabbat, the True Believers who are so devoted to some facet of their cult that the even Lasombra and Tzimisce will say “Dude! Chill the fuck out!” Regardless, whether he’s a mindless thug or a driven fanatic, the antitribu is a traitor to the Brujah legacy.

Since Carthage, if not before, we Brujah have strived to find ways to interact with mortals in a way that recognizes their value as something more than a food source. We party with mortals at our raves so that feeling their passion reminds us of the source of our own. The antitribu reject that view of humanity and, in doing so, reject their own intrinsic worth. To a Brujah antitribu (like all of the Sabbat), a human being really is no different than a cow, except that the human tastes better and is more filling. Having rejected the value of both humanity and Humanitas, the antitribu lack any bulwark against the fury of their own rage. Thus, there are very few Individualist and Idealist antitribu as those terms are understood by Camarilla or Anarch Brujah. Just a sea of Iconoclasts more violent and self-destructive than any Iconoclast of the main Clan could ever be.

Even though we Brujah were the architects and generals of the Anarch Revolt (and remain the leaders of the Anarch Movement today wherever it is found), the antitribu play a limited leadership role in the modern Sabbat. Whatever prestige and status the antitribu ever had among the so-called Sword of Caine is now reserved for a handful of elders who have little but contempt for the throngs of young antitribu shovelheads with whom they have no common heritage except for a once proud name.

Character and Traits

Concepts

Basher Champion

Part of you thinks that you’re revitalizing the ancient Greek traditions of personal excellence through athleticism. The other part of you think you just like to hear the roar of the crowd and feel the crack of someone’s jaw under your hand in an underground fighting arena. It takes your mind off how Eurotrash bankers have wrecked your homeland with their greed. You spend as much time as your unlife permits training, honing your combat skills, and preparing for your next fight somewhere in the slums of Athens. You’ve fought bruisers from nearly every Clan and more of your fellow Brujah than you can count, and on some days, you’re actually arrogant enough to wonder if you could take on a Lupine with your bare hands.

Branded

You sold out and paid the price. Life in the favelas of São Paulo was too much for you, so you took money from that Ventrue bicha in exchange for information on the havens of some other Brujah who had pissed her off. The Brujah ended up dead, and you ended up in front of a gauntlet where the others judged you guilty of betraying the Clan’s principles. They beat you for about an hour with iron pipes and then branded you with a red-hot poker they first treated with some weird magical goop. Now, you’re banished, homeless, and you have a scar in the shape of a dollar sign on your left hand that won’t heal no matter what you do.

Debate Moderator

You were the captain of the school debate team, and you so loved the activity that you got a Classics degree with a specialty in Rhetoric at Cambridge. Funny the things that will attract an elder’s attention. The Idealist Brujah of London had found their debates bogged down with irrelevant points and critical fallacies, so they decided they needed a moderator who knew what she was doing, one who could shake up their stodgy debates with new topics and incisive critiques. It is highly unusual for a Brujah of your comparative youth to have the privilege of critiquing the debate styles of centuries-old polemicists. Also highly dangerous, as you learned the first time one of those elders took your comments too personally and had to be restrained from attacking you. You think it should be a rule that frenzying during a debate means automatically losing the argument.

Elysium Gadfly

Everyone expects the Brujah to frenzy in Elysium. Few Kindred expect the Brujah to cause frenzies in Elysium. Even fewer suspect that you subtly do so at every opportunity. There is no greater example of Kindred stodginess than the Elysium, which is why you delight in saying just the right thing to piss someone off. Just the right snide remark about the Toreador’s new dress. Just the right comment on how the Ventrue’s portfolio isn’t doing so hot. Just the right gibberish to the Malkavian about how annoying it must be to have spiders infesting your clothes. Then step back out of the way quickly and watch the fun as those stodgy boring vampires flip out in the place they want to least.

Engine of Destruction

They call you Iconoclast. That’s stupid. Oh, you want to destroy icons all right. You just don’t want to stop there. Smash the Camarilla. Consume the elders. Annihilate the Antediluvians and their pawns. Burn it, burn it all. In time, even the Sabbat that birthed you will burn at your hand. Why? Because you had a life, and they took it... on a whim. The circumstances of your Embrace — which snatched you from your family and friends and turned you into a blood-crazed animal — has proven conclusively the randomness of existence, an existence you are now committed to destroying. To you, the existence of the Sabbat proves that nihilism is the only rational philosophy, and only when there is nothing left to destroy will you smash the final icon: yourself.

Master of Metal

Rave is dead! Metal rules! You never understood how the Brujah became associated with raver culture. As far as you’re concerned, the only music for any self-respecting Brujah is metal. Death metal, black metal, Goth metal, classical metal, even. But your favorite is speed metal. Your Celerity lets your fingers fly across the strings faster than any mortal eye can follow. Your Presence has the crowd eating out of your hand. Your Potence comes in handy when your more violent songs trigger riots among your fans. You guess you’re an Iconoclast, because you love tearing down the conventions of music almost as much as you love driving your audience to violent distraction. But your skill and love of the genre means that you also try to build something new in place of what you’ve torn down, even if it’s something that the Ventrue and Toreador would never recognize as music.

Occupy Elysium

The whole thing is just so... feudal, isn’t it? One-Percenters rule over the kine, and elder vampires rule over the Kindred, and all for no good reason except different forms of inherited wealth. You were community organizer in life, back before politicians made that into a dirty word, and you saw no reason not to continue that profession among the community of the undead. You quickly learned that the social conventions of your new society made it difficult to organize protests against the ruling class. However, as you learned about the Masquerade, the Traditions, and the Treaty of Thorns, you found an alternative means of protest. Acting through proxies, you have encouraged mortal protesters to engage in sit-ins at Elysium sites to protest financial corruption among the wealthy elites. The mortals don’t know that the people they’re protesting aren’t just rich bastards but are actually vampires, and those vampires can’t respond without breaching the Masquerade. Admittedly, your own actions flirt with breaching the Masquerade as well, but so far, no one has figured out that you’re the reason angry young students and homeless people keep staging loud protest events every time the Prince visits Elysium.

Red Question Hacker

Once you wore a suit you hated every day to work. The pay was good, and the vitae of your Ventrue employer was even better, but you still hated that suit she made you wear. She needed an IT guy for her dot-com startup company and thought you’d make a serviceable blood slave, but she was insistent that you wear a suit when you came to work. It rankled, but you put up with it because you loved her. Then in 1999, something happened that caused her to abruptly skip town, leaving you behind like yesterday’s garbage. The dot-com bubble burst and you ended up homeless, heartbroken, and aching for vitae.

Some Brujah hackers found you, cleaned you up, and explained the peculiar twists of the Jyhad that made your former regnant abandon you because she thought that the Y2K bug would cause the Antediluvians to rise. In time, you proved your worth to them — both as a hacker and as someone with a serious grudge against Ventrue idiots — and the same West Coast Anarchs who first asked you “Why do you obey?” Embraced you. Your answer was to take that damned suit and burn it in a trash can. You’ve been setting both the computer world and Kindred society on fire ever since.

Situationist Graffiti Artist

In life, you were another failed artist hawking your wares along the Champs-Élysées. In death, you found your true inspiration: The recognition of the meaningless absurdity of the life that ended with your Embrace. That realization inspired a new passion, one that found its expression through the intersection of art, politics, and madness: Situationism. Your preferred medium is graffiti, and you like to think of yourself as the Banksy of the Damned. Most people walk by your work without noticing one more splash of color on the wall. Those who do notice are transfixed... and then transformed.

Unlife Coach

You’d been a Brujah for decades but had become bored and jaded, with nothing to offer the world but violence and destruction. Then you found your guru (though he hates it when you call him that), an elder Brujah who beat some sense into you and educated you on the value of self-control and having a higher purpose. He got you started on the Path of Entelechy, and now, after several years of study and of physical, mental, and spiritual development, you are out on your own, in search of new recruits. It will be a long struggle to elevate the Rabble back into Philosophers, but it will be done, one Brujah at a time.