Vampire: The Masquerade is a storytelling game of personal horror. In Vampire, players take on the role of the Kindred: vampires. Vampire was the first game to be set in the old World of Darkness, and was the first new game to be published under the White Wolf banner. The original Vampire: The Masquerade rulebook was published in 1991, and the last Vampire: The Masquerade games and novels were published in 2004. In 2010, White Wolf/CCP announced that the forthcoming World of Darkness Online MMORPG would be based primarily on Vampire: The Masquerade.
Kindred[]
Vampires, known to one another as Kindred or Cainites, possess many of the characteristics that they are given in folklore and popular culture. They are ageless undead, vulnerable to sunlight, and are possessed of a ceaseless thirst for blood. Not all vampire folklore holds true, however: the Kindred are unaffected by garlic, silver, or running water, and are only repulsed by crosses and other holy symbols if they are wielded by a person possessing great faith.
The Kindred are driven by a ceaseless, predatory hunger, the Beast, which can pull them into a state of feral bloodlust called frenzy or a primal fear called Rotschreck. The only thing preventing the Beast from completely subsuming the vampire's personality into its own animal desires is the vampire's tenuous grasp on their own Humanity. However, Humanity is anathema to what is needed for a vampire to endure: any act of violence - from wanton murder to the act of feeding on a mortal - strengthens the Beast. Every vampire must thus walk a tightrope between starving the Beast by denying themselves the blood of the living, and thus making themselves susceptible to the Beast's frenzies, or indulging the Beast and further losing their already fragile hold on humanity.
Kindred possess the capacity to use the blood they have consumed to regenerate from wounds that would be fatal to a mortal, as well as to boost their own physical capabilities, but the most potent abilities of the Kindred are their Disciplines: mystical abilities that amplify their own undead powers, or work magical effects unique to each Discipline. Each vampire's capacity for certain Disciplines is inherited from the vampire that created them, their sire, who inherited it from their sire, and so on. These lineages of blood, the clans, represent one of the most fundamental divisions of Kindred society. Each clan has a weakness of its own however; for example, the Nosferatu are all cursed with a monstrous appearance, and the Gangrel come to resemble animals as they give in to their Beasts.
For centuries, the nocturnal society of the Kindred have been divided into several sects. The Camarilla, seeks to conceal itself within the shadow of mortal society, and enforces the Masquerade to maintain the fiction that vampires are only creatures of myth. The Sabbat embraces their state as monsters, and indulges its members' baser instincts and their desire to rule over mortals in cities where they hold sway. The Anarchs attempt to maintain independence both from the influence of these sects but also from the elders.
Origins[]
Vampires, known to one another as Kindred, trace their origins to the Biblical figure Caine, the first murderer; many vampires eschew the term "Kindred" and instead call themselves Cainites in his honor. Most of what modern vampires known of Caine and his progeny can be traced to the Book of Nod, a tome that compiles the oral history of the first vampires. According to the Book of Nod, Caine was cursed by God's angels for the crime of killing his own brother, Abel. The curses of these angels bestowed him with the weaknesses of the Kindred - vulnerability to fire, to the sun, and to eternal strife - but also gave him the hope of redemption through the possibility of the enlightened state of Golconda. During his exile in the land of Nod, Caine encountered Lilith, the first wife of his father Adam, who taught him to harness the power of his curse in the form of mystic Disciplines. After Caine and Lilith parted ways, Caine, in his loneliness, created three vampires, the Second Generation. Caine established the First City, where he would rule over his childer and they would rule over humanity.
In the First City, the Second Generation created thirteen vampiric childer between them. These childer, the Third Generation, became the founders of the original thirteen clans. Caine established the Traditions - guidelines of the actions of his progeny - but the vampire population of the First City continued to expand until it became unbearable not only to Caine but even to God himself. While Caine was content to leave the city of his progeny, God sent a flood, the Deluge, to scourge the Earth of the First City and its inhabitants. Humanity endured the Great Flood, as did the Second and Third Generations, but the Second Generation would not last much longer: the Third Generation, unchecked by Caine's rule, rose up against their sires and slew them. Thus, the Third Generation became the Antediluvians, the only known Cainites to predate the Flood.
The Antediluvians established their own city, the Second City, where they ruled over humanity as their sires had in the First City. The Antediluvians' clans grew in number here, and established much of the character and identity that they would pass on to their descendants for millennia to come. The Second City fell, too, this time not to an outside threat but to internecine warfare between the Antediluvians, with their clans fighting and dying in their sires' names. After the Second City fell, the Antediluvians and their clans scattered across the Earth.
History[]
Vampiric history crosses into verifiable mortal history en masse for the first time in the city-states of Rome and Carthage. The Brujah clan ruled in Carthage, which they had attempted to build up into a Third City. However, the Ventrue clan instigated Rome against them with the assistance of other clans, notable Toreador and Malkavians. In the end, Carthage was razed and its earth salted, leading to an enmity between the Brujah and Ventrue that lingers to this night. No other city would ever boast the same level of vampiric presence; during the Dark Ages that followed the fall of Rome, only Constantinople approached that level of grandeur among the undead.
The fall of Constantinople during the Crusades heralded a militancy in undead society, and soon after, the Inquisition would arise from the mortal populace, targeting the innocent and the damned with equal rigor. Additionally, the medieval and Renaissance eras saw the fall of several Antediluvians, supposedly destroyed by diablerie: the founders of the Salubri, Lasombra, Tzimisce and Cappadocian clans were all apparently slain - in the case of the Lasombra and Tzimisce, their own clans rose up against these ancients. This time of tumult led to the Anarch Revolt, in which younger vampires first had the numbers and power to rise up en masse against their elders. The Anarch Revolt was ended by the 15th-century peace treaty that formed the Camarilla and codified the Masquerade as the cornerstone of Kindred society, but soon after, the Sabbat arose in response, initially formed from the ranks of disaffected and disenfranchised Anarchs and spearheaded by the Lasombra and Tzimisce. This began a new era in the Jyhad, a state of sectarian conflict that continues to this day.
In the modern nights, a number of upheavals have rocked Kindred society. In 1999, warriors of the Gangrel clan encountered a being that was believed to be an Antediluvian; after receiving no assistance from the Camarilla against the creature, the clan withdrew almost completely from the sect. Elsewhere during that year, the Antediluvian founder of the Ravnos clan awoke and fought and slew numerous opponents in India before it was utterly destroyed under the light of the sun. The death of the Antediluvian drove the Ravnos to turn on one another in frenzy, decimating the clan's ranks from within.