Welcome back, my beautiful freaks, to Sean's Workshop!
After playing Vampire the Maquerade: Bloodlines a lot recently, and talking with a coworker who plays pen and paper games, I'm reminded of my "post Gehenna" idea, the Antediluvian Chronicle. The idea was taken from the Storyteller's Handbook, where they talked about running a game during the 1st and 2nd cities.
This is the opening I had planned for the chronicle, from the "forgotten" member of the 2nd Generation.
Caine is deified. The clans tell tales of him. Few know the truth.
I am Namitara, the 4th direct childe of Caine. In the nights of antiquity, I was known as the Seeress, due to my ability see visions of the future, even as a mortal. These nights, I am merely the Forgotten.
I know many of you know of the Book of Nod, so you know of Enoch the Wise, Irad the Strong and Zillah the Beautiful, an epitaph I always found distasteful for her. I always preferred "the hunter" for her, due to her being a hunter of beasts before her embrace, feeding many in her camp with her skills, a focus she retained long after the embrace. Each of them embraced 4 childer, as did I. And thanks my curse, memories were altered and reshuffled among the 3rd and 4th generation who were around at the time, so some thought they were sired by others.
In truth, Enoch was the "father" of Veddartha, Arikel, Ashur and Lucien. Irad sired Ilyes, Namtaru, Mekhet and Dracien. Zillah sired Ennoia, Absimilard, Haqim and "Set", as we now call him. And I was responsible for Malkav, Saulot, Malakai and Nimug. Some of those names would be unfamiliar to modern Cainites, and as they should be, as they either didn't embrace or were destroyed outright.
However, 13 of them created the modern clans. Veddhartha the Ventrue, Arikel the Toreador, Ashur the Tzimisce, Lucien the Lasombra. Ilyes fathered the "true" Brujah as well as the one known as "Troile", Absimilard the Nosferatu, Ennoia the Gangrel, Mekhet the Cappidocians, Dracien the Ravnos, Malkav the Malkavians, Saulot the Salubri, "Set" embraced his "Followers" and Haqim his "Children".
Of the 3 remaining, Malakai, Malkav's sister while they were still mortals, shared his gift of prophesy, Nimug abandoned her name and calls herself "the Shaper", and Namtaru had to be destroyed due to falling to the curse. The first, to be exact, which taught us all the danger of surrendering our Humanity.
None of us understood what "the Beast" was back then. Due to his own curse, Caine was unable to lose himself to it, as he would be unable to remember that he was, and will always remain, the first murderer. But the rest of us? The curse he passed on would allow us to fall to the fear and rage, to become little more than animals.
But I digress. During those first nights, Caine ruled and we performed his will. At some point, Caine learned of the blood bond, and tricked Zillah into it, something I found distasteful then, and still do now. But it was not my place to tell her, if she would have believed it.
We ruled kindly and fairly. At least, we thought we did. The One Above, however, disagreed. He sent the flood, which killed our mortals and knocked us all into Torpor, leaving only Noah and his get alive. And for a time, the world was peaceful.
But eventually, we woke up. And once again, we began to rule over the Children of Seth. But Caine...Caine saw what his actions had done, and refused to once again take the reign. So Enoch became "first ruler", and his reign became far more brutal than Caine's had ever been.
We ruled for over a century, my siblings falling farther and farther into depravity. I tried to stem the worst of it, since I had foreseen out eventual end, but without Caine's influence, Enoch, Zillah, who had finally freed herself from Caine's blood bond, and Irad became more and more cruel as time went on. They called me weak, and refused my advice.
One night, I foresaw our end at the hands of our childer, and I fled to find Caine, so he could punish my siblings and our childer. But it took far too long to find him and even longer convince him to return, as he had washed his hands of his responsibility.
When we finally returned, Cain witnessed Absimilard cutting off Zillah's head with a stone axe, and this caused him to rampage across the Second City, violently gathering the third generation, demanding to know what happened to Enoch and Irad. And when they admitted what they had done, Caine laid their clan curses upon them and their childer. And when Caine was done, I laid my own curse upon them; for the remainder of their days, neither they nor their childer would remember that I existed. Even my own childer would forget that I sired them.
And so I remain, the last of Caine's direct childer, forgotten by all but my sire. I've watched through the ages, seeing the war of ages as it happened. And I have seen visions of the end. The end of everything. And God help us all.
And that's it for the opening. I'll be posting the rules of the Antediluvian Chronicle soon. And while it was written with Revised Edition in mind, I'm sure it will work well with 5th Edition. Until then, stay beautiful freaks!
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