Vampire: The Requiem is a role-playing game published by White Wolf, set in the World of Darkness, and the successor to the Vampire: The Masquerade line. It was first released in August 2004, together with a new core rule book for the World of Darkness. Although it is an entirely new game, rather than a continuation of the previous editions, it uses many elements from the old game in its construction, including some of the clans and their powers. The game's title is a metaphor for the way vampires within the game view their life.
Although it can be considered a full game in itself, Vampire: The Requiem requires the World of Darkness corebook for use.
Similar to the previous game, Kindred are brought into one of five clans as part of their transformation into vampires:
Daeva
Gangrel
Mekhet
Nosferatu
Ventrue
See Clans in Vampire: The Requiem for more information.
Each clan covers a broad range of vampiric archetypes. The Daeva, for instance, are both seductive and predatorial, evoking the image of vampires who glide through society as debonair hunters, much like Lestat in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. The Gangrel encompass the theme of the lone, savage and brutal hunters. The Mekhet are conspiratorial occultists, vampires who hide in the shadows gathering lore and knowledge while manipulating others from afar. Nosferatu vampires are the alienated or disfigured monsters of legend (such as Count Orlok of their movie namesake), while the Ventrue represent vampires possessed of an aristocratic, "lords of the night" sensibility, like Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Within these clans are many sub-clans, known as bloodlines.
There are also many political factions, known as Covenants. These include:
The Carthian Movement
The Circle of the Crone
The Invictus
The Lancea Sanctum
The Ordo Dracul
The Unaligned
Kindred (the word vampires use for themselves) can use a variety of supernatural powers called Disciplines. These are special abilities associated with their curse which, like their undead bodies, are "fed" in a way by the living blood they take from mortals. Many of the Disciplines provide Kindred with preternatural means of ensuring their continued existence, or of easing the process of hunting and stealing blood from mortals.
Disciplines can be broken down into four categories: common (common place among the Kindred and more than one clan has an innate knack for them), uncommon (the proprietary abilities of each of the five clans), covenant (possessed only by a specific covenant and never shared with outsiders), and bloodline (known only to the members of a particular bloodline within a clan). However, each Kindred has the capability to, given a tutor and the proper amount of time (sometimes years for powerful disciplines), learn a discipline that is not natural to their clan or covenant. In game mechanics, the experience point cost for such disciplines is higher than that of a clan discipline innate to a specific Kindred, and given the amount of time in a given storyline necessary to successfully master an other-clan discipline, many players never get the chance to fully master such things. However, some storytellers (the orchestrater and judge of the game) allow certain concessions, or "house rules", that enable players to learn out-of-clan disciplines more easily than is standard in the official rulebook; this allows for more powerful characters and decreases mechanical differences between the different groups.
In many ways, Vampire: The Requiem is very much like its predecessor, The Masquerade, but there are a number of important changes.
As far as physiological differences go, the first and most obvious divergence between the games is that the concept of "vampire generation" has been eliminated. A vampire's power is unrelated to that of the vampire who spawned him; instead, he starts off at the lowest level and steadily grows more powerful with age (though he can rise faster by committing diablerie).
Vampires now also have a variety of "plot devices" to help them uphold the Masquerade, including a blurred image on video cameras, as well as the previous games' device where a vampire may lick wounds he has inflicted to heal them.
Disciplines have also broadly changed, with a number of subtle alterations in power to make them less helpful in combat, and more helpful in other ways; in addition to this, a number of original clans (some now bloodlines) have changed in theme, and received a change in Disciplines to reflect this (an example might be the Nosferatu, who have gone from being revolting outcasts to actual monsters, with the entirely new Nightmare Discipline to help them maintain this image).
The more obvious and far more far-reaching differences are cultural ones, and this is where old Masquerade gamers will encounter the most fundamental differences.
The first and most noticeable change is in the clans. They have dropped in number from 13 to 5, each broadly representing a classic vampiric archetype from literature. This lack of choice in clan has been instituted to force players to think of ways to make their character unique, rather than rely on playing "the last member of a dying race"; a problem which some felt had become endemic among certain players.
The second significant change is the pronounced drop in the importance of a vampire's clan. In Masquerade, your clan informed most aspects of your social interactions with other clan members. In Requiem, the clan one is "born" into is less important than the political faction ("Covenant") one chooses to belong to. (This varies from game to game; sometimes neither has any bearing on the game) This has caused an overwhelming change to the way the politics of the game work; in Masquerade, almost all politics were inter-clan.
The most important change between games, however, is the shift in emphasis on the sect (now called "Covenant") that a vampire belongs to. In Vampire: The Masquerade, a vampire belonged to either the Camarilla (or their argumentative offshoot, the Anarchs), the Sabbat (and their secret, super-violent arm, The Black Hand), the Inconnu, or was isolated and alone. In the story, maybe 50 vampires were Inconnu, and they were all exceptionally ancient and powerful (and rarely, if ever mentioned in supplements after 1st edition; "Lair of the Hidden" being a notable exception). As a result, most vampires were a member of either the Camarilla or the Sabbat. Given that each sect existed in a state of near-perpetual political, ideological, and physical conflict with the other, this made it nigh-on impossible for any real political gaming between the two.
Requiem does away with this perpetual war, to create a world more in keeping with the themes of ennui and politics (and also to yet again scale down the violent action scenes that war made possible). The Covenants are the replacement for sects, and no Covenant is actually at war with any other. Broad comparisons between previous sects and Covenants may be drawn between the Carthians and Anarchs, the Invictus and the Camarilla. In many ways, the Circle of the Crone, Lancea Sanctum, Ordo Dracul, and Belial's Brood represent different faces of the Sabbat: the Ordo Dracul being the Sabbat drive to escape the vampiric state, the Circle of the Crone & the Lancea Sanctum are what have replaced much of the Sabbat's more openly pagan-styled or blasphemous ceremonies and philosophies, and Belial's Brood is essentially how the openly violent and monstrous Sabbat was conceived back in 1st edition Vampire: The Masquerade, before third edition made it more philosophical. VII (Seven) is clearly the replacement for The Black Hand, now with significantly less story baggage to it.
Furthermore, while members of each Covenant exist on every populated continent and most nations of the new setting, none of them possess the centralized hierarchy of either the Camarilla or the Sabbat from the old setting. Between this change, and the fact that all vampires succumb to long periods of Torpor which damage their memories, human development in the new World of Darkness has not been a result of behind-the-scenes manipulation by vampires (or any other playable supernatural type, for that matter).
A final, and very significant change to the game is the removal of the creation myth involving Caine and the Antediluvians. This story is no longer the only origin story; vampires are uncertain of their origin. In fact, the story of the Antediluvians has yet to be mentioned specifically in any Vampire: the Requiem supplement, although Caine is mentioned in the Circle of the Crone as one of many possibilities. Though vampires still conspire against each other, they are no longer puppets of ancient all-fathers, nor do they have a doomsday prophecy looming over them.
In relation to the origin of vampires in the Requiem, White Wolf has this time chosen to leave their beginnings a mystery up to the individual Storyteller to answer--if they choose to answer it at all. Due to Torpor, even the oldest Kindred have no clear memory of their past and are forced to guess at their races' beginnings. None of the Covenants even claim to know the origin of vampires, though the Lancea Sanctum and Ordo Dracul do claim that their founders were both uniquely cursed by God directly, instead of being Embraced.
This is partially tied into the addition of the Lancea Sanctum; in original Vampire: The Masquerade, Abrahamic 'Genesis' was assumed to be the "default" truth behind the World of Darkness. The introduction of Kindred of the East and the Laibon in later books caused huge problems for authors to retcon; making the "Caine" origin "true" essentially created huge problems for writers and storytellers who wished to play with a different belief system than Christianity. Thus, the Christian faith has now been utterly externalized, and is represented by its own notably Western Covenant.
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Did this post this after parting ways with Raph from Greg's haven. Thanks again oh noble Ventrue. Thanks to all for making the game interesting.
it is now 3:00 A.M. Phil Standard time. I am going to get a bite to drink.
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