False Gods: Ventrue Now Available at Storytellers Vault

[Yossarian]

Just when you think you're out, the Ventrue pull you right back in.

https://www.storytellersvault.com/pr...e-Gods-Ventrue

We’ve met before — you just don’t know it.

You’ve walked these halls,
you’ve sipped my wine,
you’ve let me peel back the layers of your mind.

You wouldn’t believe the things I learned
or the things we did.

It’s coming back, isn’t it?
The fear, the hate, the broken will?

Perfect.

Now we can do business.

— Zachery Carter, Malocusian entrepreneur

The Ventrue make a famous boast: They win. They always win. That’s the party line, at least, but other Kindred have their own maxim: Never trust a Lord. Now, for the first time in 13 years, revisit the beautiful lies of Clan Ventrue.

False Gods is a complete guide to the Ventrue for Vampire: The Requiem Second Edition, with updates and expansions to their original clan book, Lords Over the Damned. It includes:

• Eight Lord bloodlines: The Adrestoi, Malocusians, Melissidae, and Rotgrafen, back in the black and ready to cash in, along with upstart go-getters like the Gottlings, Keravnos, Typhos, and Warumono.
• The Malkavia Chronicle, a surreal reimagining of the Lords’ greatest fear and a complete guide to its mind-bending terrors.
• Ghoul families, covenants, and other horrors to obey or betray your Lords: Play a hand or two with the sleazy Crassus, but make sure to keep your footing as the Architects of the Monolith move the world beneath your feet.
• Exciting new fiction from the Chronicles of Darkness: Chicago setting, picking up where The Danse Macabre left off.
• New Devotions, Merits, banes, and more tools for players and Storytellers alike!

I cannot emphasize enough how much you're gonna want this book if you're a Requiem fan. This book includes eight bloodlines (four new, four classic), a whole chapter reworking Malkavia into Second Edition, ghouls, horrors, covenants, and multiple ST and player tools. If you've bought our work before, you know the kind of work we put into these, but if you're hesitant to try community content, I really encourage you to give us a shot. The quality of our books is professional and created by people who LOVE Vampire (and some who've even done some OPP books). You won't be disappointed. If you like our work, leave us a review. It really helps put eyes on these things. And check out our page on FB: https://www.facebook.com/nonedarker

Watch this space for previews. And yes, there will be some bundles, I just need to set them up.

[Yossarian]

Bundles:

High Clan / Low Clan (BF: Nosferatu and FG: Ventrue): https://www.storytellersvault.com/pr...-Bundle-BUNDLE
Hidden Masters (SS: Mekhet and FG: Ventrue): https://www.storytellersvault.com/pr...-Bundle-BUNDLE
Sneaks, Terrors, and Kings (All Three): https://www.storytellersvault.com/pr...-Bundle-BUNDLE
Twists of the Blood (All three clan books, plus Bloodlines: The Resurrected and Devoted): https://www.storytellersvault.com/pr...e-Blood-BUNDLE

[Ur-Than]

Dang it ! I had managed to not succumb but you just had to bundle your work ! Here, take my money for all threes !

Damned Deava and their damned Majesty...

[Yossarian]

Dang it ! I had managed to not succumb but you just had to bundle your work ! Here, take my money for all threes !

Damned Deava and their damned Majesty...

Oh, just WAIT till you see what we have in store for the Serpents...

[Ur-Than]

Well I'm more a Savage guy myself but...

You just used Majesty again, didn't you ?

[Yossarian]

Well I'm more a Savage guy myself but...

You just used Majesty again, didn't you ?

I don't kiss and tell.

[Nicolas Milioni]

It's probably not your intention,but I think the title False Gods creates a neat link to the Masquerade Ventrue. Many of them posed as Gods and had the power to back it up.

[Guest]

Just bought this book like right now. I really liked Strange Shades and Better Feared and I’m definitely looking forward to reading it.

[LostLight]

Aaaand got it. Probably just briefly go through it right now and will give it a deeper look tomorrow.

[Yossarian]

It's probably not your intention,but I think the title False Gods creates a neat link to the Masquerade Ventrue. Many of them posed as Gods and had the power to back it up.

Mithras was definitely in the back of my mind as I developed this book (as is his wont). And there are a lot of little (and...huge) Masquerade easter eggs throughout the book too. The cover is actually an homage to both Clanbook: Ventrue Revised and Lords Over the Damned.

[Dark Lord Potato]

So I've owned Strange Shades but not Better Feared up until now, and was planning to get the latter in a bundle with False Gods. Turns out, 'Sneaks, Terrors, and Kings' is actually cheaper than High Clan / Low Clan after the discount for already owning Strange Shades was factored into the former. It's a small difference (About 3 dollars Canadian), but it's so odd that I felt I had to mention it.

I can't tell if this is very on point for the Mekhet, or way too unsubtle for them. I know you're doing this, Shades, I just can't tell why.

[Yossarian]

So I've owned Strange Shades but not Better Feared up until now, and was planning to get the latter in a bundle with False Gods. Turns out, 'Sneaks, Terrors, and Kings' is actually cheaper than High Clan / Low Clan after the discount for already owning Strange Shades was factored into the former. It's a small difference (About 3 dollars Canadian), but it's so odd that I felt I had to mention it.

I can't tell if this is very on point for the Mekhet, or way too unsubtle for them. I know you're doing this, Shades, I just can't tell why.

It's more or less intentional. I try to make it a bit cheaper if people have already bought the older books at full price, so if you've got Strange Shades, it's a better deal to get the triple bundle, even though you've already got the Mekhet book. And some people will only really want their favourites, so the twofers are there for them too.

Long story short, I want previous purchasers to have a little discount. There might be odd loopholes if you buy them in the right order, but as long as people are buying 'em, I don't mind at all.

PS: I also know the pain of buying in CAD, so it's a little for the non-Americans too.

[Yossarian]

Alright, let's have an excerpt/dev diary/thing.

Normally, I start by going through the bloodlines, but this time I thought it'd be better to begin with the thing that requires the most unpacking: Malkavia.

So, I didn't want to do this book next. I even got a Daeva outline going, briefly. While I really love the Ventrue (but Mekhet 4 unlyf), I knew if we were going to tackle systems from Lords Over the Damned, we'd have to do the M. And I really, really, really didn't want to.

Not because I didn't like Malkavia, but because I didn't know how to approach it. There were two reasons for this: mechanics and theme. Mechanically, it didn't need an update. As we note in a sidebar, you can accomplish pretty much all of first edition Malkavia with Auspex, Nightmare, and Dream Visions. Add the Delusional Condition and you're good to go; indeed, that's mostly how we ended up doing the Malkovians. There are some finer points you might port from the original, but so many of the oracular and mind-bending powers were covered by the basics. There probably are ways of doing a more traditional update with wholly new mechanics, but from a design point of view, it felt like a mistake to reinvent the wheel. I just wasn't interested in that. Especially because this concept had to cover a whole chapter, and you could probably update the original in about 500 words if you set your mind to it.

Thematically, I've never quite been on board with mental illness as a game trait, or at least one associated with supernatural powers and experience point costs. I think the original Malkavia does it about as well as can be done, for various reasons, but I also think Chronicles of Darkness in 2021 has come a long way in shedding some of its more dated horror tropes. That's not chiding anyone who likes the old version (or the current Malkavians in V5, for that matter), but it wasn't a thematic space we were interested in, or one that we felt equipped to handle.

So, I was at a bit of a crossroads. I'm a weird pedant who was raised by a lawyer, so I didn't like the idea of breaking the "looped" alphabetical order we were doing — but the whole Malkavian thing was, appropriately, a massive mental block.

But then I started thinking about the problem from, well, the Malkavian perspective: What if they're right, and we're wrong? I've always loved the Cassandra trope, and it got me thinking of ways you could have Malkavians being perceived as mentally ill. That led me to look at their original presentation in early Vampire: The Masquerade, where they had a lot of links to the fae and mages. And at their core, what do faeries and wizards in the Worlds of Darkness do?

They change the rules. They break reality.

So, our Second Edition Malks would be causality benders. Initially, my concept was a more severe reality editing power, but I was (wisely) reined in by my chapter co-author, who had the idea that it should be more fate-based, as befits the mage/changeling inspiration. Once that concept was in place, things really came together: Malkavians create self-fulfilling prophecies by warping the underlying laws of physics and magic, but anyone who perceives this basically gets a hammer to the brain from the severe wrongness of the act. Hence, Malkavians are "crazy" and "spread madness". Their insights fall on ears that quite literally can't believe what they're talking about.

Anyway, all of this is to say, I'm really proud of the Malkavia Chronicle (a title that led to...so much more wordcount than I meant to give myself). Here's an excerpt:

Secrets

This is what most Kindred say: Malkavia is a supernatural form of madness. It spreads like a disease among the Lords, laying low their mantle of leadership in the All Night Society. In exchange, the M grants them a kind of second sight, and the ability to leverage their instability into powers over a victim’s mental health. This is simple, observable fact. It’s a narrative that fits well within an easy mortality-tale view of the Ventrue — that they get what they deserve in the end, descending into insanity for their power-mongering ways.

These surface details are correct. Malkavia is a disease, and it mostly affects the Lords, but the Afflicted aren’t mentally ill. You’re not paranoid if people are really out to get you. You’re not crazy if you can change the world with a word.

Malkavia gives its victims the power to twist causality, drawing on an extrasensory perception that (for all intents and purposes) seems like foresight. The Afflicted see patterns of probability and magic other vampires simply can’t, and in turn, they can manipulate those forces. With self-fulfilling prophecies, a Malkavian retunes fate when it displeases her.

Nothing is coincidence to the Afflicted. Like finding animals in cloud patterns, a Malkavian experiences meaning in chance. An outsider might call that synchronicity, but that implies the convergence is meaningful only to the Afflicted. The difference between a Malkavian’s insight and coincidence is that the Afflicted are right. Raindrops really are forming the face of a mortal soon to die, and the traffic lights blinking in Sanskrit aren’t just the pressure finally getting to you. More than a sixth sense, Malkavian perception is holistic and piercing, taking in signals the world normally programs us to ignore. This goes beyond even a Mekhet’s third eye. Whereas a Shadow’s Beast screams obtuse prophecies while she lies paralyzed in a coffin, a Malkavian just has to look out a window.

So, why are the Afflicted written off as insane? It’s not that Malkavians are delusional, it’s that everyone else is. What others think of as intellectual decay is their own minds not processing a Malkavian’s power. The Afflicted know what sages and other creatures of the night take for granted: The world is elastic. It’s a mask you can peek behind and tear if you know the right tricks. If you could only see its underpinnings, you could shape it too.

But you can’t — and that’s a problem.

Lies

Malkavia is a lie. It’s the worst kind of lie because it’s built on a seed of truth. Maybe it’s a cliché that the most effective propaganda is based in fact, but it’s an illustrative one. Give the people just enough truth and they’ll follow whatever cause you pin to it. In this case, the cause is to spread. Malkavia has no agenda beyond self-propagation, and it sells its victims all sorts of fantasies about knowledge, beauty, and power to meet that selfish, viral need. In this way, Malkavia might be the purest expression of the Lords. It makes you think you’re in control.

They say Malkavia is mental illness. Another lie. The biggest whopper of the bunch. Mental illness has form and depth. It has patterns and clinical diagnoses. It’s chemical imbalance and trauma and the cost of living in this world. Malkavia is none of these things — yet, to a rational observer, the Afflicted have lost the plot. The distinction between a sick mind and professing Truth with a capital T is moot if everyone else is locked out of knowing what the hell you’re talking about.

Indeed, many Malkavians believe they really are mentally ill, wrapped up in an elaborate collective delusion that warps the minds of friends, loved ones, or anyone else unlucky enough to cross their paths. That the world sometimes bends to their wills is just further proof of their instability, and they rationalize their reality editing as post hoc delusions.

Yet another lie: Only the Lords catch it. That’s an easy one to debunk; just ask any Shadow who’s infected herself with the M on purpose in the hope of finding “genuine” insight. But debunking that lie is a secondary concern — and it’s a valuable weapon against the Lords. They really do get it most often though, and if you hear about an outbreak, you probably don’t need to look much further than the local Ventrue.

Why is that? What about the Lords makes them the perfect vectors?

Truth

Dominate.

Malkavia is an infection of the Ventrue’s unique Discipline, extending their power’s reach beyond its grasp, from minds into causality. All you need to know are a few of the Lord’s words and you’re vulnerable. That’s why it seems to be attracted to the Ventrue. They just happen to be really good at Dominate.

The Lords’ power over minds turns inward, breaking down the self so they might see beyond the ego. In cruder terms, it rides you, not the other way around. Malkavia bolsters a Ventrue’s self-perception as Lord over the Damned. What other clan can manipulate reality? Many Ventrue begin their Affliction thinking they’ve achieved a higher form of vampirism, a state the Ordo Dracul has chased since Vlad the Impaler wanted to be more than King of the Cannibals. Malkavia brings the kind of power a Lord lusts for from the moment she died.

The trouble is, reality persists. It does its best to repair the damage, like blood clotting over an open wound, but more deleterious to your standing in society. The universe gaslights you, using its occupants to convince you the thing you just said — the thing that came true — had nothing to do with you. That you can’t trust your own senses. Or maybe the world just manages to fix itself before anyone else notices, with a split second of debugging only you can perceive.

[Guest]

Alright, let's have an excerpt/dev diary/thing.

Normally, I start by going through the bloodlines, but this time I thought it'd be better to begin with the thing that requires the most unpacking: Malkavia.

So, I didn't want to do this book next. I even got a Daeva outline going, briefly. While I really love the Ventrue (but Mekhet 4 unlyf), I knew if we were going to tackle systems from Lords Over the Damned, we'd have to do the M. And I really, really, really didn't want to.

Not because I didn't like Malkavia, but because I didn't know how to approach it. There were two reasons for this: mechanics and theme. Mechanically, it didn't need an update. As we note in a sidebar, you can accomplish pretty much all of first edition Malkavia with Auspex, Nightmare, and Dream Visions. Add the Delusional Condition and you're good to go; indeed, that's mostly how we ended up doing the Malkovians. There are some finer points you might port from the original, but so many of the oracular and mind-bending powers were covered by the basics. There probably are ways of doing a more traditional update with wholly new mechanics, but from a design point of view, it felt like a mistake to reinvent the wheel. I just wasn't interested in that. Especially because this concept had to cover a whole chapter, and you could probably update the original in about 500 words if you set your mind to it.

Thematically, I've never quite been on board with mental illness as a game trait, or at least one associated with supernatural powers and experience point costs. I think the original Malkavia does it about as well as can be done, for various reasons, but I also think Chronicles of Darkness in 2021 has come a long way in shedding some of its more dated horror tropes. That's not chiding anyone who likes the old version (or the current Malkavians in V5, for that matter), but it wasn't a thematic space we were interested in, or one that we felt equipped to handle.

So, I was at a bit of a crossroads. I'm a weird pedant who was raised by a lawyer, so I didn't like the idea of breaking the "looped" alphabetical order we were doing — but the whole Malkavian thing was, appropriately, a massive mental block.

But then I started thinking about the problem from, well, the Malkavian perspective: What if they're right, and we're wrong? I've always loved the Cassandra trope, and it got me thinking of ways you could have Malkavians being perceived as mentally ill. That led me to look at their original presentation in early Vampire: The Masquerade, where they had a lot of links to the fae and mages. And at their core, what do faeries and wizards in the Worlds of Darkness do?

They change the rules. They break reality.

So, our Second Edition Malks would be causality benders. Initially, my concept was a more severe reality editing power, but I was (wisely) reined in by my chapter co-author, who had the idea that it should be more fate-based, as befits the mage/changeling inspiration. Once that concept was in place, things really came together: Malkavians create self-fulfilling prophecies by warping the underlying laws of physics and magic, but anyone who perceives this basically gets a hammer to the brain from the severe wrongness of the act. Hence, Malkavians are "crazy" and "spread madness". Their insights fall on ears that quite literally can't believe what they're talking about.

Anyway, all of this is to say, I'm really proud of the Malkavia Chronicle (a title that led to...so much more wordcount than I meant to give myself). Here's an excerpt:

Secrets

This is what most Kindred say: Malkavia is a supernatural form of madness. It spreads like a disease among the Lords, laying low their mantle of leadership in the All Night Society. In exchange, the M grants them a kind of second sight, and the ability to leverage their instability into powers over a victim’s mental health. This is simple, observable fact. It’s a narrative that fits well within an easy mortality-tale view of the Ventrue — that they get what they deserve in the end, descending into insanity for their power-mongering ways.

These surface details are correct. Malkavia is a disease, and it mostly affects the Lords, but the Afflicted aren’t mentally ill. You’re not paranoid if people are really out to get you. You’re not crazy if you can change the world with a word.

Malkavia gives its victims the power to twist causality, drawing on an extrasensory perception that (for all intents and purposes) seems like foresight. The Afflicted see patterns of probability and magic other vampires simply can’t, and in turn, they can manipulate those forces. With self-fulfilling prophecies, a Malkavian retunes fate when it displeases her.

Nothing is coincidence to the Afflicted. Like finding animals in cloud patterns, a Malkavian experiences meaning in chance. An outsider might call that synchronicity, but that implies the convergence is meaningful only to the Afflicted. The difference between a Malkavian’s insight and coincidence is that the Afflicted are right. Raindrops really are forming the face of a mortal soon to die, and the traffic lights blinking in Sanskrit aren’t just the pressure finally getting to you. More than a sixth sense, Malkavian perception is holistic and piercing, taking in signals the world normally programs us to ignore. This goes beyond even a Mekhet’s third eye. Whereas a Shadow’s Beast screams obtuse prophecies while she lies paralyzed in a coffin, a Malkavian just has to look out a window.

So, why are the Afflicted written off as insane? It’s not that Malkavians are delusional, it’s that everyone else is. What others think of as intellectual decay is their own minds not processing a Malkavian’s power. The Afflicted know what sages and other creatures of the night take for granted: The world is elastic. It’s a mask you can peek behind and tear if you know the right tricks. If you could only see its underpinnings, you could shape it too.

But you can’t — and that’s a problem.

Lies

Malkavia is a lie. It’s the worst kind of lie because it’s built on a seed of truth. Maybe it’s a cliché that the most effective propaganda is based in fact, but it’s an illustrative one. Give the people just enough truth and they’ll follow whatever cause you pin to it. In this case, the cause is to spread. Malkavia has no agenda beyond self-propagation, and it sells its victims all sorts of fantasies about knowledge, beauty, and power to meet that selfish, viral need. In this way, Malkavia might be the purest expression of the Lords. It makes you think you’re in control.

They say Malkavia is mental illness. Another lie. The biggest whopper of the bunch. Mental illness has form and depth. It has patterns and clinical diagnoses. It’s chemical imbalance and trauma and the cost of living in this world. Malkavia is none of these things — yet, to a rational observer, the Afflicted have lost the plot. The distinction between a sick mind and professing Truth with a capital T is moot if everyone else is locked out of knowing what the hell you’re talking about.

Indeed, many Malkavians believe they really are mentally ill, wrapped up in an elaborate collective delusion that warps the minds of friends, loved ones, or anyone else unlucky enough to cross their paths. That the world sometimes bends to their wills is just further proof of their instability, and they rationalize their reality editing as post hoc delusions.

Yet another lie: Only the Lords catch it. That’s an easy one to debunk; just ask any Shadow who’s infected herself with the M on purpose in the hope of finding “genuine” insight. But debunking that lie is a secondary concern — and it’s a valuable weapon against the Lords. They really do get it most often though, and if you hear about an outbreak, you probably don’t need to look much further than the local Ventrue.

Why is that? What about the Lords makes them the perfect vectors?

Truth

Dominate.

Malkavia is an infection of the Ventrue’s unique Discipline, extending their power’s reach beyond its grasp, from minds into causality. All you need to know are a few of the Lord’s words and you’re vulnerable. That’s why it seems to be attracted to the Ventrue. They just happen to be really good at Dominate.

The Lords’ power over minds turns inward, breaking down the self so they might see beyond the ego. In cruder terms, it rides you, not the other way around. Malkavia bolsters a Ventrue’s self-perception as Lord over the Damned. What other clan can manipulate reality? Many Ventrue begin their Affliction thinking they’ve achieved a higher form of vampirism, a state the Ordo Dracul has chased since Vlad the Impaler wanted to be more than King of the Cannibals. Malkavia brings the kind of power a Lord lusts for from the moment she died.

The trouble is, reality persists. It does its best to repair the damage, like blood clotting over an open wound, but more deleterious to your standing in society. The universe gaslights you, using its occupants to convince you the thing you just said — the thing that came true — had nothing to do with you. That you can’t trust your own senses. Or maybe the world just manages to fix itself before anyone else notices, with a split second of debugging only you can perceive.

I love it!!! Can’t wait to read your take on Malkavia.

[21C Hermit]

Hedgespinning, but for vampires in the real world!