So, we're getting close-ish to our release, and I thought it might be fun to preview one of two new covenants (well, 2.5) in our (None More Dark's) upcoming Ventrue book.
If you remember the Architects of the Monolith from Bloodlines: The Hidden — and I'm sure you do — you're probably wondering what's going on below. In that, uh, they're no longer a bloodline. Long story short, I didn't think the bloodline format was allowing the concept to fulfill its narrative promise or its conceptual potential (the long version is much less pretentious than that makes it sound). I'll have a more detailed explanation of this after the book comes out, but, for now, you can have a look at the result of a very long, silly argument I had with myself. And, just to be clear, if you prefer them as a bloodline, you'll have most of the tools to use them as such in the book, including a complete update of Gilded Cage. You'll just have to figure out a bane, because I ain't doing it (again, it's a long story).
Disclaimer: This text is subject to change.
Bon appétit, as Ermenjart might say.
The Architects of the Monolith: The Eye of the Pyramid
“This is our design. Pray you have a place in it.”
You want to join the Architects of the Monolith because
You see imperfection in the world and know you can fix it. You have plans in your head you need to see in concrete and steel. You know other Kindred are screwing around with game pieces when they could upend the board. You want to build something no one can ever tear down. You believe in the Carpenter’s vision.
The big picture
A city is nothing without its monuments. People remember metropoles like Athens, Giza, and Oaxaca because you can go out and touch their glory days. Step inside the Parthenon and know the wisdom of its goddess. Climb the pyramids (old world and new) and despair at your brief time upon the earth. Architecture is a soft power all its own — the popes knew it, and the Soviets, and Uncle Sam himself. A well-built city assures peace, order, and good government; it puts the people where they need to be. In theory, if you could set every road and home and business in its objective place, you wouldn’t need brittle things like leaders or laws. You could form a self-directed society, a social machine that works because you crunched the numbers better than anyone else.
The Architects of the Monolith work to remake the All Night Society in much the same way. Technocrats to the point of ecstasy, in their calculations the pillars of Kindred politics are utter failures: the Invictus rot, the Carthians burn out, and the others waste eternity modeling the “right” kind of monster. The only thing vampires get right is where they store their corpses. The city forced the dead to be more than prowling beasts. It gave them a muzzle for their bloody maws, and a food source packed into easy-access concrete cans. Yet they didn’t take it far enough, say the Masons. The Kindred lost themselves in the romance of city life, never realizing its full potential as an avenue of social harmony.
Moving beyond the micro squabbles of other vampires, the Eye of the Pyramid exists in the macro, working to engineer a utopia where no one holds the reins or cracks the whip. This is not democracy, collectivism, or even anarchism: It’s mechanism. The Architects believe in total freedom, with no Traditions, no princes, and no laws at all. Instead, their New Salvation will prevent problems before they ever arise, like a well-oiled urban machine. Everything in its right place. Everyone following their bliss.
Like the Sanctified, Masons believe in their cause with religious fervor, treating their founder as a nonspiritual prophet of the modern nights. Like the Dragons, they’re engineers par excellence, using Kindred administrative roles to experiment on and within the All Night Society. Via advanced and mystic sciences, they retune cities to exact specifications, redirecting emotional resonances and moving the very pavement under our feet. Their efforts have been mixed successes so far, but that’s the point. One death is a tragedy; a million, a statistic. All the more data to build a better world.
Where we came from
The Carpenter. She calls herself Ermenjart, but even she doesn’t remember who she was. It doesn’t trouble her. Sanctified heretic? Dragon apostate? Lady in the court of Louis IX? Some say she was a woman out of time, masquerading as a man to put her architecture into a world of patriarchal nobility. Idle speculation, no doubt. Such tales imply a fealty to labels she would dismiss as grossly immaterial. No. She is all of us, and we are the needlepoints of her compass.
When she rose from a long torpor at the end of the 17th century, she returned to the Kindred with a dream. In torpor visions, her beloved Paris spoke to her, revealing the lie of the All Night Society. Vampires could never be trusted to rule one another, so new mechanisms would need to be put in place, immune to political and personal agendas. The city revealed this new design through the secret language of ley lines, the energies that flow through urban paths and guide human lives. Ermenjart realized these forces were malleable, and that if they could be tuned to just the right frequency, the cold logic of architecture — math, steel, and objectivity — could guide the Kindred race, not the passions of the Beast or the ego of the Man.
From this principle she designed the science of Gilded Cage, a way of manipulating not only ley lines but the city’s physical form. In the New Salvation, every vampire is his own master. Those who seek power over other Kindred will find no foothold, for the city itself will not allow it. Like antibodies, the social forces of future domains will purge bad actors, and use their destruction to inoculate against similar disruptions. Ermenjart recorded these revelations in her seminal work, La Société autonome, the most important book ever written by a vampire. In a clear, sober style, she outlined her plan down to the exact year of the great work’s completion: 2600 CE.
As with many geniuses, she wasn’t appreciated in her time. The Parisian Kindred called her a fool and a thief, claiming she plagiarized the rites of the Sanctified and Dragons. However, knowing she was too powerful to mark for Final Death, they shunned her from the discourse of polite Kindred society. They burned her work and mocked her as la charpentière, failing to see the truth in their epithet. A carpenter mends, and so does she.
Their derision only proved her point. If they would reject her faultless logic, they were unfit to rule. Therefore, logic dictated she should destroy them. But war is costly. It’s also shortsighted given an eternity to work on perfection. Instead, she gathered followers, Embracing and then recruiting likeminded Lords. Her Architects would work in the backrooms of the All Night Society, twisting it to her faultless design.
Our practices
Like the Carthians, we adapt mortal organizational schema to our needs, but where the Firebrands look to radicals, we turn to the bureaucrats. If you’re looking for the Kindred deep state, you’ve found it. We are unelected and eternal, performing the tasks others push down the line, incorporating our sacred designs into things as simple as letterheads and as complex as the harmonic resonance of Elysium. Some call it ghoul work; we call it flying under the radar. The other covenants find us useful as seneschals and Elysium masters, and they’ll even suffer through a few pitches if we serve them well. We never coerce or manipulate converts: Reason is our greatest tool, though sometimes it’s a matter of finding those who recognize it. There’s nothing duplicitous about our work, we just don’t volunteer the fine details.
We seed our design through quality craftsmanship. After all, an incompetent Mason is a contradiction in terms. Efficiency comes before politics, and our organizing principles more resemble planning committees than ideologies or religions. The Eye of the Pyramid eschews the pomp of the other covenants… though we admit to a certain love of clean lines and jargon. Our philosophy does tend to attract a certain type.
Members who display exceptional ethics and aesthetics become our Keystones. Not so much political leaders as project managers, the clefs de voûte find the signal in the noise, deciding how best to focus our work in service to the New Salvation. They have a direct line to home office, as represented by the Carpenter’s eldest childer, la main de gloire. These three Kindred are the secular messiahs of our design, and will one night form the capstone of the New Salvation. For now they coordinate our global efforts and entrust us with their designs, but they aren’t above doing fieldwork. You’re just as likely to find one of them renovating the halls of power as you are searching through the hall of records.
Then there’s the Carpenter herself. Every mark of our pencils is an extension of her genius. Sometimes she even reaches out to us, sending emissaries to guide our designs or put an end to pointless diversions. Not all of our plans fit into Ermenjart’s; we consider her corrections as much an honor as her approval. How many Kindred can claim Longinus knows their deeds? The Crone? Dracula? If you impress her, she’ll even invite you to her Parisian haven to critique your work.
Make no mistake: we do not worship the Carpenter. She isn’t a deity, and the New Salvation isn’t a structure she’ll rule over when we finish doing her dirty work. She would reject anyone who comes to her theories without due diligence. However, through that same reasoning, we also recognize her as the most important Embrace in the modern era. Until the night comes when we make our dreams take form, she is the final arbiter on any issue pertaining to what is logical, ethical, or virtuous — a necessary evil in a world of needless ones.
Like the Carpenter, most of us are Ventrue, but over the centuries Kindred of all stripes have realized her singular brilliance. The others came in a trickle, skeptical of an institution founded on a Lord’s big idea. But clan is not a meaningful unit of measurement. Ventrue may have set the foundation, but the others have the tools we need to finish the job.
If you remember the Architects of the Monolith from Bloodlines: The Hidden — and I'm sure you do — you're probably wondering what's going on below. In that, uh, they're no longer a bloodline. Long story short, I didn't think the bloodline format was allowing the concept to fulfill its narrative promise or its conceptual potential (the long version is much less pretentious than that makes it sound). I'll have a more detailed explanation of this after the book comes out, but, for now, you can have a look at the result of a very long, silly argument I had with myself. And, just to be clear, if you prefer them as a bloodline, you'll have most of the tools to use them as such in the book, including a complete update of Gilded Cage. You'll just have to figure out a bane, because I ain't doing it (again, it's a long story).
Disclaimer: This text is subject to change.
Bon appétit, as Ermenjart might say.
The Architects of the Monolith: The Eye of the Pyramid
“This is our design. Pray you have a place in it.”
You want to join the Architects of the Monolith because
You see imperfection in the world and know you can fix it. You have plans in your head you need to see in concrete and steel. You know other Kindred are screwing around with game pieces when they could upend the board. You want to build something no one can ever tear down. You believe in the Carpenter’s vision.
The big picture
A city is nothing without its monuments. People remember metropoles like Athens, Giza, and Oaxaca because you can go out and touch their glory days. Step inside the Parthenon and know the wisdom of its goddess. Climb the pyramids (old world and new) and despair at your brief time upon the earth. Architecture is a soft power all its own — the popes knew it, and the Soviets, and Uncle Sam himself. A well-built city assures peace, order, and good government; it puts the people where they need to be. In theory, if you could set every road and home and business in its objective place, you wouldn’t need brittle things like leaders or laws. You could form a self-directed society, a social machine that works because you crunched the numbers better than anyone else.
The Architects of the Monolith work to remake the All Night Society in much the same way. Technocrats to the point of ecstasy, in their calculations the pillars of Kindred politics are utter failures: the Invictus rot, the Carthians burn out, and the others waste eternity modeling the “right” kind of monster. The only thing vampires get right is where they store their corpses. The city forced the dead to be more than prowling beasts. It gave them a muzzle for their bloody maws, and a food source packed into easy-access concrete cans. Yet they didn’t take it far enough, say the Masons. The Kindred lost themselves in the romance of city life, never realizing its full potential as an avenue of social harmony.
Moving beyond the micro squabbles of other vampires, the Eye of the Pyramid exists in the macro, working to engineer a utopia where no one holds the reins or cracks the whip. This is not democracy, collectivism, or even anarchism: It’s mechanism. The Architects believe in total freedom, with no Traditions, no princes, and no laws at all. Instead, their New Salvation will prevent problems before they ever arise, like a well-oiled urban machine. Everything in its right place. Everyone following their bliss.
Like the Sanctified, Masons believe in their cause with religious fervor, treating their founder as a nonspiritual prophet of the modern nights. Like the Dragons, they’re engineers par excellence, using Kindred administrative roles to experiment on and within the All Night Society. Via advanced and mystic sciences, they retune cities to exact specifications, redirecting emotional resonances and moving the very pavement under our feet. Their efforts have been mixed successes so far, but that’s the point. One death is a tragedy; a million, a statistic. All the more data to build a better world.
Where we came from
The Carpenter. She calls herself Ermenjart, but even she doesn’t remember who she was. It doesn’t trouble her. Sanctified heretic? Dragon apostate? Lady in the court of Louis IX? Some say she was a woman out of time, masquerading as a man to put her architecture into a world of patriarchal nobility. Idle speculation, no doubt. Such tales imply a fealty to labels she would dismiss as grossly immaterial. No. She is all of us, and we are the needlepoints of her compass.
When she rose from a long torpor at the end of the 17th century, she returned to the Kindred with a dream. In torpor visions, her beloved Paris spoke to her, revealing the lie of the All Night Society. Vampires could never be trusted to rule one another, so new mechanisms would need to be put in place, immune to political and personal agendas. The city revealed this new design through the secret language of ley lines, the energies that flow through urban paths and guide human lives. Ermenjart realized these forces were malleable, and that if they could be tuned to just the right frequency, the cold logic of architecture — math, steel, and objectivity — could guide the Kindred race, not the passions of the Beast or the ego of the Man.
From this principle she designed the science of Gilded Cage, a way of manipulating not only ley lines but the city’s physical form. In the New Salvation, every vampire is his own master. Those who seek power over other Kindred will find no foothold, for the city itself will not allow it. Like antibodies, the social forces of future domains will purge bad actors, and use their destruction to inoculate against similar disruptions. Ermenjart recorded these revelations in her seminal work, La Société autonome, the most important book ever written by a vampire. In a clear, sober style, she outlined her plan down to the exact year of the great work’s completion: 2600 CE.
As with many geniuses, she wasn’t appreciated in her time. The Parisian Kindred called her a fool and a thief, claiming she plagiarized the rites of the Sanctified and Dragons. However, knowing she was too powerful to mark for Final Death, they shunned her from the discourse of polite Kindred society. They burned her work and mocked her as la charpentière, failing to see the truth in their epithet. A carpenter mends, and so does she.
Their derision only proved her point. If they would reject her faultless logic, they were unfit to rule. Therefore, logic dictated she should destroy them. But war is costly. It’s also shortsighted given an eternity to work on perfection. Instead, she gathered followers, Embracing and then recruiting likeminded Lords. Her Architects would work in the backrooms of the All Night Society, twisting it to her faultless design.
Our practices
Like the Carthians, we adapt mortal organizational schema to our needs, but where the Firebrands look to radicals, we turn to the bureaucrats. If you’re looking for the Kindred deep state, you’ve found it. We are unelected and eternal, performing the tasks others push down the line, incorporating our sacred designs into things as simple as letterheads and as complex as the harmonic resonance of Elysium. Some call it ghoul work; we call it flying under the radar. The other covenants find us useful as seneschals and Elysium masters, and they’ll even suffer through a few pitches if we serve them well. We never coerce or manipulate converts: Reason is our greatest tool, though sometimes it’s a matter of finding those who recognize it. There’s nothing duplicitous about our work, we just don’t volunteer the fine details.
We seed our design through quality craftsmanship. After all, an incompetent Mason is a contradiction in terms. Efficiency comes before politics, and our organizing principles more resemble planning committees than ideologies or religions. The Eye of the Pyramid eschews the pomp of the other covenants… though we admit to a certain love of clean lines and jargon. Our philosophy does tend to attract a certain type.
Members who display exceptional ethics and aesthetics become our Keystones. Not so much political leaders as project managers, the clefs de voûte find the signal in the noise, deciding how best to focus our work in service to the New Salvation. They have a direct line to home office, as represented by the Carpenter’s eldest childer, la main de gloire. These three Kindred are the secular messiahs of our design, and will one night form the capstone of the New Salvation. For now they coordinate our global efforts and entrust us with their designs, but they aren’t above doing fieldwork. You’re just as likely to find one of them renovating the halls of power as you are searching through the hall of records.
Then there’s the Carpenter herself. Every mark of our pencils is an extension of her genius. Sometimes she even reaches out to us, sending emissaries to guide our designs or put an end to pointless diversions. Not all of our plans fit into Ermenjart’s; we consider her corrections as much an honor as her approval. How many Kindred can claim Longinus knows their deeds? The Crone? Dracula? If you impress her, she’ll even invite you to her Parisian haven to critique your work.
Make no mistake: we do not worship the Carpenter. She isn’t a deity, and the New Salvation isn’t a structure she’ll rule over when we finish doing her dirty work. She would reject anyone who comes to her theories without due diligence. However, through that same reasoning, we also recognize her as the most important Embrace in the modern era. Until the night comes when we make our dreams take form, she is the final arbiter on any issue pertaining to what is logical, ethical, or virtuous — a necessary evil in a world of needless ones.
Like the Carpenter, most of us are Ventrue, but over the centuries Kindred of all stripes have realized her singular brilliance. The others came in a trickle, skeptical of an institution founded on a Lord’s big idea. But clan is not a meaningful unit of measurement. Ventrue may have set the foundation, but the others have the tools we need to finish the job.
Comment