Mariners
Bloodline · Vampire
Why did I leave the land? Because in the sea, the sharks just swim up and bite you. They don’t smile first.
The Mariners are Gangrel who have chosen to dwell full-time in the ocean. Gangrel aquarii (as they are sometimes known to scholarly Kindred) swim below the sunlit zone, their Fortitude Discipline keeping them safe from the pressure that would otherwise crush them. They ascend at night to feed, usually on sharks and whales, but they aren’t choosy — anything with blood is fair game. A shipwreck is a smorgasbord for the Mariners, and a large enough disaster is one of the few events that might draw more than one to the same region.
Mariners sometimes act in defense of the oceans, sneaking aboard polluting vessels and killing everyone aboard. One some level this makes sense — if their prey dies off, they’ll have to return to the land (or quest ever further into the Deeps).
The Camarilla and the Sabbat have, on the rare occasions they find them, offered Mariners membership. The Mariners decline. They have no sectarian interests, and escaping the Jyhad might have been why the first Mariner left the land to begin with. No one knows how long ago that was, but most of the Mariners are of low Generation, and some of them date to the Age of Exploration.
Nickname: None (the few Kindred that know of them simply call them “Mariners” or “aquatic Gangrel”)
Disciplines: Animalism, Fortitude, Protean
Why did I leave the land? Because in the sea, the sharks just swim up and bite you. They don’t smile first.
Weakness
As with most Gangrel (p. 55), the Mariners gain an animalistic feature each time they frenzy. These features, though, resemble fish, aquatic worms, cephalopods, and other sea creatures (the rare Gangrel develops a cetacean or seal-like feature). The alien nature of these features should be taken into consideration by Storytellers determining the mechanical impact of such features.