Inspired by the amazing writeups in Blood and Smoke, I though people might want to share their cool ideas for atypical domains. Here are a few I knocked up quickly. One is a fairly obvious reference. I decided not to tie them to real world cities so they're more customisable and generally wanted none of them to fit the classic model.
The Mother’s Army
This used to a textbook domain. A permissive tyrant Prince, bickering underlings and an awkward tension between Covenants.
Then the Prophetess came from far away. She claimed the power of prescience. She saw the Prince’s inner circle dying in fire. She saw Carthian agitators ripped limb from limb. She saw priests forced to drink from veins in a blasphemous parody of communion before they were nailed to crosses to face the rising dawn.
And her visions came true.
Many would argue it’s cheating to prophesise deaths that you orchestrate, but naysayers didn’t live long enough to debate the point.
A loyal cult of assassin-mystics protected the Prophetess, their mastery of little-known Cruac rituals giving them an edge over their opponents, as well as their fanaticism – some of them walked without fear to deaths supposedly prophesised.
Perhaps oddly, it was the Dragons who the Circle devoted the most attention to destroying. Perhaps they had a clue about what was coming. In any case, if any remain alive, they are in torpor or (probably literally) deep underground.
But it wasn’t the mastery of prophecy or the powerful assassins that won the domain. It was the dreams. Every day, when the rested, the Kindred dreamed of something. The Mother of Monsters herself. Converts willing, grudging and terrified flocked to her banner. Despite divergent goals from different interpretations of the dreams, the Prophet united them and together they won the domain. Those who refused to convert were killed. The few that did not flee remain in hiding, the few that remain loyal to the Spear hide in priest-holes in the homes of surviving ghouls and fortify hidden chantries.
Now, with the war over, an uneasy peace reigns. The dreams get stronger every night. Something is coming. Many of the cult devote themselves to speeding the arrival of the Mother of Monsters and the city is full of terrifying omens. Occult symbols form from the cracks on pavement slabs. Blood oozes from the spaces between bricks on the facades of buildings. Dust-devils scatter grit and garbage into sinister mandalas. Sensitive humans go mad or flee the city.
Some, heretically, fear and seek to prevent whatever is happening, seeing the dreams as warnings. Others try to focus on the more nurturing aspects of Crone beliefs, others jockey for position within a new political landscape and a Prince uninterested in rulership.
Everyone agrees on one thing; the dreams and the war were just the beginning. And only the Prophetess knows what comes next.
***
The Dead Boys Club
(Best suited to cities famed for universities and learning such as Cambridge - both England and Massachusetts)
Do domains shape the vampires on them directly, the blood of its citizens slowly changing the Kindred who feed upon it? Or are certain types of vampires merely drawn to places that match their personalities?
It’s a question that might be debated by the thoughtful Kindred of this domain in a city famous worldwide for its universities, an academic powerhouse. Certainly, they are an appropriate group for such a place, with praxis held by a strange, exclusive club/fraternity of scholarly vampires.
Politically, it’s a curious domain, where covenants matter little and the elders exist in their own complicated clique above such concerns. Indeed, to an outside observer it appears a perfect Invictus domain, though some of the elders would profess to be Carthians, and they’re not wrong. Another observer would note the prevalence of Dragons and the widespread acceptance and cooperation with their experiments among other elders and assume they were, at least philosophically, dominant.
The elders, who are unusually numerous, run the show in this city. They’ve entered a stable peace - though they’re all rivals point-scoring is the name of the game rather than the occasional betrayals and attempts at murder that characterise other domains. The games are played almost entirely through neonates and mortals. They perform psychological experiments on both. Two elders on good terms with one another trick younger Kindred into fighting brutal proxy battles as though they were old men playing chess in a park. There is no Prince, and should anyone try to fill a throne that seems vacant, the Dead Boys Club will close ranks and tear them apart.
To the Invictus, it’s a model society with elders in their rightful place. To the Carthians it’s a place with an unconventional government (some of the right-wing vampires proclaim it a libertarian paradise, their opposites consider it more of a socialist democracy, and neither are entirely right or wrong) that has no single tyrant holding the reigns and with power shared. The fact that it’s nearly all in elder hands, what some would call in contravention of the Carthian aim, is ignored. The Dragons are free to experiment, colonise Wyrm’s Nests with impunity and even encouragement from those outside the Ordo. The Lancea et Sanctum contingent is larger than one might expect, perhaps as a result of the city’s history, though very liberal. Their priests cheerfully debate on the existence and nature of god with maltheistic Dragons and atheistic Carthians. Only the Circle has no real presence here, though a few young vampires with ties to the student body profess some similar beliefs.
***
The Ghoul Kingdom
This domain represents something all Kindred fear. The hidden masters of the kine made into slaves. The predators made into cattle.
The city’s name is spoken in hushed whispers among kindred that know of it. It’s a warning to control ghouls well, to keep them satisfied but not to allow them too much freedom. It’s an example of why the Masquerade is most important of all Traditions.
Here, ghouls and hunters joined forces. Here, vampires who had coiled themselves around the veins and arteries of a city’s political structure, who hid in secret vaults in old homes and sewer tunnels carefully erased from maps, were destroyed over the course of several days. Some havens burned. Some vampires were pulled from their tomb-beds and thrown into the noonday sun. Most, however, were staked into torpor and carefully transported.
Now they are milked. Kept as cattle, a source of Vitae by a cult-like group of humans who quietly stepped into the Kindred's role behind the scenes, using their Disciplines and carefully rationed blood to keep their former supporters and attendants in line.
The ghoul-kings, however, face some difficulties. The blood bond is a risk they strive to avoid but even by talking blood from many different vampires it is an inevitability, and many still feel a conflicted loyalty for their former regnants. The vampires (mostly younger, weaker Kindred) are carefully imprisoned, weakened by Banes, caged by fire and sunlight, prevented from using Disciplines to escape, but one slip-up would be enough for the Kindred to begin a bloody vengeance. Some of the humans have got a little too eager to sell Vitae as a drug and will eventually attract attention from organised crime or law enforcement that isn’t local (and already addicted), and others (recognising the dangers of drawing attention or increasing demand of their finite Vitae supply) oppose them, threatening to tear the group in two. Finally, there is the constant risk of vampires from other domains coming to set things right, to fix this terrifying and disgusting inversion of the unnatural order.
***
The Downward Spiral
This city fell into decay, with organised crime and rampant corruption, as well as economic failure, poisoning it. To all but a few rich and corrupt, the city was a hellhole. To Kindred, however, it was a paradise, where they infiltrated the infrastructure far more thoroughly than the criminals (who they also quietly suborned).
Then the deaths started. Some said it was VII, or Belial’s Brood, the Strix or some other supernatural being. Others insisted it was hunters, and that the vampires had been too brazen, too secure in their position, and doomed themselves.
The domain fell into chaos. Then the Prince died in his Haven. And rumours began of a figure that was stalking them, killing them off. A hunter, a vampire, many men in the same mask… The rumours are constant. But the power vacuum was the real threat here. With the Prince and his Invictus court broken, the mad scramble for praxis began. The mysterious forces targeted elders and covenant leaders (groups with considerable overlap), ultimately splintering the covenants and turning the city into a mess of neonate gangs, some led by the occasional ancilla.
The Circle is a tiny gang of blood-mystics. The Lancea’s ragged, shrinking congregations wear different gang colours and fight on the streets, though every week they meet in peace for mass. The Priests strive to remain neutral, but have been known to perform Theban rituals for gangs dominated by believers or, occasionally, to the Invictus.
The Ordo Dracul are particularly few here. There are only three Dragons, the youngest an ancilla more than fifty years dead. That they sidestep the mysterious figure that mostly targets older Kindred has not gone unnoticed. The rarity of Dragons is not due to a lack of interest or enemies moving against the covenant; there are always young vampires interested in joining the Order. But the Order’s usual punishing treatment of initiates is taken to extremes here, driving every aspirant away, many believe intentionally. They are forced to undertake countless menial tasks and errand for the Dragons. They are subjected to cruel, seemingly pointless, experiments. Forced to submit to Blood Bonds. To face fire and starvation and sunlight. Those who don’t give up, cursing the Dragons, tend to die. Yet the Triumvirate insists they would welcome new blood if any neophyte proved themselves worthy and every year another neonate is convinced they might just be that one.
The Invictus ruled this domain once. Then the chaos came, covenants collapsing into gangs and cults. They floundered before taking the same route themselves; the organised crime model is one the First Estate is comfortable within and even the more traditionalist members shifted into it quickly enough. They wear expensive suits with cufflinks made from pulled fangs. They have deep roots in human criminal fraternities and the city's shockingly corrupt law enforcement and vie with other Kindred over sources of wealth. And they do what little they can to enforce whatever remains of the Masquerade, brutally. Their thuggish enforcers still call themselves knights, though most are far more comfortable with a tire iron than a sword.
The Carthians collapsed into dozens of splinters, many clinging to diverse ideologies, with most devolving into petty gangs built around charismatic leaders.
Other notable gangs include a brood of atavistic Nosferatu who roost in the subway systems and sewers, demanding tribute from the vampires who rest or hunt in such an ideal territory, a nomadic group dominated by Daeva and Gangrel who delight in mayhem and violence (sworn enemies of the Invictus) and a doomsday cult of Sanctum fundamentalists. Notable individuals include a Mekhet ‘problem-solver’ who hires himself to gangs for a variety of tasks, a Nosferatu who runs a popular nightclub that serves as a rough Elysium, protected by a small cadre of ghoul bodyguards, a former-Crone who performs ritual murders to fuel strange blood magic and of course the mysterious figure that still hunts and kills Kindred every night. But with the Traditions poorly enforced, Embraces are as common as Final Deaths, and the Masquerade gets thinner and thinner...
The Mother’s Army
This used to a textbook domain. A permissive tyrant Prince, bickering underlings and an awkward tension between Covenants.
Then the Prophetess came from far away. She claimed the power of prescience. She saw the Prince’s inner circle dying in fire. She saw Carthian agitators ripped limb from limb. She saw priests forced to drink from veins in a blasphemous parody of communion before they were nailed to crosses to face the rising dawn.
And her visions came true.
Many would argue it’s cheating to prophesise deaths that you orchestrate, but naysayers didn’t live long enough to debate the point.
A loyal cult of assassin-mystics protected the Prophetess, their mastery of little-known Cruac rituals giving them an edge over their opponents, as well as their fanaticism – some of them walked without fear to deaths supposedly prophesised.
Perhaps oddly, it was the Dragons who the Circle devoted the most attention to destroying. Perhaps they had a clue about what was coming. In any case, if any remain alive, they are in torpor or (probably literally) deep underground.
But it wasn’t the mastery of prophecy or the powerful assassins that won the domain. It was the dreams. Every day, when the rested, the Kindred dreamed of something. The Mother of Monsters herself. Converts willing, grudging and terrified flocked to her banner. Despite divergent goals from different interpretations of the dreams, the Prophet united them and together they won the domain. Those who refused to convert were killed. The few that did not flee remain in hiding, the few that remain loyal to the Spear hide in priest-holes in the homes of surviving ghouls and fortify hidden chantries.
Now, with the war over, an uneasy peace reigns. The dreams get stronger every night. Something is coming. Many of the cult devote themselves to speeding the arrival of the Mother of Monsters and the city is full of terrifying omens. Occult symbols form from the cracks on pavement slabs. Blood oozes from the spaces between bricks on the facades of buildings. Dust-devils scatter grit and garbage into sinister mandalas. Sensitive humans go mad or flee the city.
Some, heretically, fear and seek to prevent whatever is happening, seeing the dreams as warnings. Others try to focus on the more nurturing aspects of Crone beliefs, others jockey for position within a new political landscape and a Prince uninterested in rulership.
Everyone agrees on one thing; the dreams and the war were just the beginning. And only the Prophetess knows what comes next.
***
The Dead Boys Club
(Best suited to cities famed for universities and learning such as Cambridge - both England and Massachusetts)
Do domains shape the vampires on them directly, the blood of its citizens slowly changing the Kindred who feed upon it? Or are certain types of vampires merely drawn to places that match their personalities?
It’s a question that might be debated by the thoughtful Kindred of this domain in a city famous worldwide for its universities, an academic powerhouse. Certainly, they are an appropriate group for such a place, with praxis held by a strange, exclusive club/fraternity of scholarly vampires.
Politically, it’s a curious domain, where covenants matter little and the elders exist in their own complicated clique above such concerns. Indeed, to an outside observer it appears a perfect Invictus domain, though some of the elders would profess to be Carthians, and they’re not wrong. Another observer would note the prevalence of Dragons and the widespread acceptance and cooperation with their experiments among other elders and assume they were, at least philosophically, dominant.
The elders, who are unusually numerous, run the show in this city. They’ve entered a stable peace - though they’re all rivals point-scoring is the name of the game rather than the occasional betrayals and attempts at murder that characterise other domains. The games are played almost entirely through neonates and mortals. They perform psychological experiments on both. Two elders on good terms with one another trick younger Kindred into fighting brutal proxy battles as though they were old men playing chess in a park. There is no Prince, and should anyone try to fill a throne that seems vacant, the Dead Boys Club will close ranks and tear them apart.
To the Invictus, it’s a model society with elders in their rightful place. To the Carthians it’s a place with an unconventional government (some of the right-wing vampires proclaim it a libertarian paradise, their opposites consider it more of a socialist democracy, and neither are entirely right or wrong) that has no single tyrant holding the reigns and with power shared. The fact that it’s nearly all in elder hands, what some would call in contravention of the Carthian aim, is ignored. The Dragons are free to experiment, colonise Wyrm’s Nests with impunity and even encouragement from those outside the Ordo. The Lancea et Sanctum contingent is larger than one might expect, perhaps as a result of the city’s history, though very liberal. Their priests cheerfully debate on the existence and nature of god with maltheistic Dragons and atheistic Carthians. Only the Circle has no real presence here, though a few young vampires with ties to the student body profess some similar beliefs.
***
The Ghoul Kingdom
This domain represents something all Kindred fear. The hidden masters of the kine made into slaves. The predators made into cattle.
The city’s name is spoken in hushed whispers among kindred that know of it. It’s a warning to control ghouls well, to keep them satisfied but not to allow them too much freedom. It’s an example of why the Masquerade is most important of all Traditions.
Here, ghouls and hunters joined forces. Here, vampires who had coiled themselves around the veins and arteries of a city’s political structure, who hid in secret vaults in old homes and sewer tunnels carefully erased from maps, were destroyed over the course of several days. Some havens burned. Some vampires were pulled from their tomb-beds and thrown into the noonday sun. Most, however, were staked into torpor and carefully transported.
Now they are milked. Kept as cattle, a source of Vitae by a cult-like group of humans who quietly stepped into the Kindred's role behind the scenes, using their Disciplines and carefully rationed blood to keep their former supporters and attendants in line.
The ghoul-kings, however, face some difficulties. The blood bond is a risk they strive to avoid but even by talking blood from many different vampires it is an inevitability, and many still feel a conflicted loyalty for their former regnants. The vampires (mostly younger, weaker Kindred) are carefully imprisoned, weakened by Banes, caged by fire and sunlight, prevented from using Disciplines to escape, but one slip-up would be enough for the Kindred to begin a bloody vengeance. Some of the humans have got a little too eager to sell Vitae as a drug and will eventually attract attention from organised crime or law enforcement that isn’t local (and already addicted), and others (recognising the dangers of drawing attention or increasing demand of their finite Vitae supply) oppose them, threatening to tear the group in two. Finally, there is the constant risk of vampires from other domains coming to set things right, to fix this terrifying and disgusting inversion of the unnatural order.
***
The Downward Spiral
This city fell into decay, with organised crime and rampant corruption, as well as economic failure, poisoning it. To all but a few rich and corrupt, the city was a hellhole. To Kindred, however, it was a paradise, where they infiltrated the infrastructure far more thoroughly than the criminals (who they also quietly suborned).
Then the deaths started. Some said it was VII, or Belial’s Brood, the Strix or some other supernatural being. Others insisted it was hunters, and that the vampires had been too brazen, too secure in their position, and doomed themselves.
The domain fell into chaos. Then the Prince died in his Haven. And rumours began of a figure that was stalking them, killing them off. A hunter, a vampire, many men in the same mask… The rumours are constant. But the power vacuum was the real threat here. With the Prince and his Invictus court broken, the mad scramble for praxis began. The mysterious forces targeted elders and covenant leaders (groups with considerable overlap), ultimately splintering the covenants and turning the city into a mess of neonate gangs, some led by the occasional ancilla.
The Circle is a tiny gang of blood-mystics. The Lancea’s ragged, shrinking congregations wear different gang colours and fight on the streets, though every week they meet in peace for mass. The Priests strive to remain neutral, but have been known to perform Theban rituals for gangs dominated by believers or, occasionally, to the Invictus.
The Ordo Dracul are particularly few here. There are only three Dragons, the youngest an ancilla more than fifty years dead. That they sidestep the mysterious figure that mostly targets older Kindred has not gone unnoticed. The rarity of Dragons is not due to a lack of interest or enemies moving against the covenant; there are always young vampires interested in joining the Order. But the Order’s usual punishing treatment of initiates is taken to extremes here, driving every aspirant away, many believe intentionally. They are forced to undertake countless menial tasks and errand for the Dragons. They are subjected to cruel, seemingly pointless, experiments. Forced to submit to Blood Bonds. To face fire and starvation and sunlight. Those who don’t give up, cursing the Dragons, tend to die. Yet the Triumvirate insists they would welcome new blood if any neophyte proved themselves worthy and every year another neonate is convinced they might just be that one.
The Invictus ruled this domain once. Then the chaos came, covenants collapsing into gangs and cults. They floundered before taking the same route themselves; the organised crime model is one the First Estate is comfortable within and even the more traditionalist members shifted into it quickly enough. They wear expensive suits with cufflinks made from pulled fangs. They have deep roots in human criminal fraternities and the city's shockingly corrupt law enforcement and vie with other Kindred over sources of wealth. And they do what little they can to enforce whatever remains of the Masquerade, brutally. Their thuggish enforcers still call themselves knights, though most are far more comfortable with a tire iron than a sword.
The Carthians collapsed into dozens of splinters, many clinging to diverse ideologies, with most devolving into petty gangs built around charismatic leaders.
Other notable gangs include a brood of atavistic Nosferatu who roost in the subway systems and sewers, demanding tribute from the vampires who rest or hunt in such an ideal territory, a nomadic group dominated by Daeva and Gangrel who delight in mayhem and violence (sworn enemies of the Invictus) and a doomsday cult of Sanctum fundamentalists. Notable individuals include a Mekhet ‘problem-solver’ who hires himself to gangs for a variety of tasks, a Nosferatu who runs a popular nightclub that serves as a rough Elysium, protected by a small cadre of ghoul bodyguards, a former-Crone who performs ritual murders to fuel strange blood magic and of course the mysterious figure that still hunts and kills Kindred every night. But with the Traditions poorly enforced, Embraces are as common as Final Deaths, and the Masquerade gets thinner and thinner...
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