Your Tzimisce Experiences?

[No One of Consequence]

Did it... work? :<

Results were ... mixed. Apparently when not being directly controlled or given specific orders, they tended to horde food, gnaw on things, groom each other and pee on everything.

That is, the ones who didn't go insane and commit suicide by bashing their heads into a wall.

[Irontsim]

I once played a Tzimisce who experimented with removing his own skin for the purposes of doing so with others to make quick and easy disguises from other people; it involved using Vicissitude to remove the little giblets that hold the skin in tandem, as well as reducing the sensation within the nerves. Naturally, combined with essentially stretching the mouth wide open, it makes for a scenario out a nightmare fuel-filled cartoon.

[Anarade Relle]

I once played a Dark Ages character who was obsessed with human anatomy and his pet project was trying to replace the brains of people with ghouled rats so they'd be his legion of obedient Animalism puppets.

Did it... work? :<

[Gurkhal]

Transhumanism, in the way I understand it, means altering the human form while keeping the spirit of humanity intact.

As long as the essence of what they are remains undamaged, a fiend can sculpt themselves into an utterly terrifying monstrosity without having to relinquish who they are as a person.

The problem isn't that the Tzimisce are inherently evil, but rather it's the fact that most of them simply don't care enough about their humanity to try and maintain it. I believe that a fleshcrafter on the Road of Humanity could accomplish miracles, if they felt inclined to do so.

I totally agree that fleshcrafting combined with a high humanity would be a boon to the world. I can't speak for the modern times but I've understood it to be such that in the Dark Ages there's ALOT of peer pressure on both Sire and Childer that a new Tzimisce should distance itself from humanity in all forms, to the point that they'll be killed if they keep to the Road of Humanity. Either as an honor killing by the Sire, or consanguine relatives, or that they'll get killed by the followers on the Road of Metamorphis who seem to take exceptional offense at a Tzimisce with the Road of Humanity.

Or at least that's how I see it.

[Vladikov]

I run a Dark Ages Fiend obsessed with making more and more hideous ghouls to fight against the local Ventrue. However, the rest of the PCs came up with the idea that my kingdom and everything in it came from a Gwar video and renamed my domain "Gwarsylvania."

[No One of Consequence]

I once played a Dark Ages character who was obsessed with human anatomy and his pet project was trying to replace the brains of people with ghouled rats so they'd be his legion of obedient Animalism puppets.

[Matt the Bruins fan]

My most-frequently-played character was/is Tzimisce, but Old Clan so there weren't any of the fleshcrafting-related shenanigans that become so prominent for a lot of characters of that clan. He was more about personal honor, respect for tradition, and territoriality—his introduction to the campaign was in the midst of anarch guerilla warfare, he ended up seizing a few blocks of contested ground and viciously defending it against all comers, and becoming accepted as a stabilizing influence by the longer-term residents of the city when the fighting died down. I always had fun playing him as this lothario with a habit of collecting dangerous and vengeful former lovers, with the bonus that this created a lot of drama for the whole group to get embroiled in. (Another player's character got caught in his haven when a stalkery ex-girlfriend firebombed it, and the latter threw her lot in with the campaign's principal antagonist.)

[Nyrufa]

Second, inhumanity and transhumanism do not equal cruelty and sadism.

Transhumanism, in the way I understand it, means altering the human form while keeping the spirit of humanity intact.

As long as the essence of what they are remains undamaged, a fiend can sculpt themselves into an utterly terrifying monstrosity without having to relinquish who they are as a person.

The problem isn't that the Tzimisce are inherently evil, but rather it's the fact that most of them simply don't care enough about their humanity to try and maintain it. I believe that a fleshcrafter on the Road of Humanity could accomplish miracles, if they felt inclined to do so.

[Ana Mizuki]

I admit that VtM isn't really my game, but I do love Tzimisce as a clan a lot and I have read a lot of the the content about them, so here are some things I'd note about playing one or using one as a NPC.

For one, enough with the Hellraiser copying. The Cenobites' designs have a purpose, they are creatures of sensations beyond human heights and morals. Thus, the BDSM inspired design and the 'fleshcrafty' bits. This is great if your Tzimisce is a pleasure seeker, but otherwise it often railroads the poor fiends into a type.

Second, inhumanity and transhumanism do not equal cruelty and sadism. The whole point of the Clan's beliefs is that they want to transcend humanity in either in what they are (Dark Ages) or seeking a nirvana of sorts (Modern Day). However, this does not need to include blood and guts, fleshcrafted walls or torture cellars. I do think at times those actually undermine the whole inhumanity point, when characters focus on very human points of view about their victims (Andrei from VTMB comes to mind). There are a lot of ways to focus on being non-human without relying on shock horror. There is also the fact that each person sees their end goal differently, even among the Fiends.

Third, there are other ways to Fleshcraft besides what Vykos is doing. My character Qui fleshcrafts more to study how nature works, rather than to better it or for the art of it. Again, screaming walls and furniture don't need to be involved for the fleshcrafting to be used or to be creepy.

[Nazfool]

One of my main characters with my group’s Pack was (/is) a Fiend that fancied herself a would-be Inquisitor who followed the Path of Nocturnal Redemption (Montreal By Night). She would hunt mortal sinners (usually sexual predators) and fleshcraft them into blood-bound szlatcha, which she called her “cenobites.”

As a player I took the term straight from Hellraiser. The character, however, took it from the word for a member of a religious order. It’s nice when things work out like that.

She would keep a few on hand, usually chained up in her “redeeming room” [read: dungeon]. It wasn’t uncommon for her to neglect her menagerie to the point of starvation (both for vitae and actual food). There were times, during more militant excursions, that she would bring the entire “congregation” and set them loose in enemy territory.

Aside from cannon fodder, collecting cenobite candidates was a fun mini-game the pack would play. If we were between stories but still wanted to do something, everyone in the pack would lend a claw.

Taking inspiration from Freak Legion, I ran a one-shot where everyone played one of her cenobites. Think Blade meets Tokyo Gore Police.

Such fond (and gloriously horrific splatterpunk) memories…

[Nyrufa]

So, specific scenes? Okay.

That's more like it!

But yeah, I was curious to hear more detailed instances of how the Fiends go around being fiendish. Whether their activities were darkly humorous or graphically terrifying, either one is interesting.

[Nosimplehiway]

SO, obviously, we all know that the Tzimisce are pretty fucked up due to their whole flesh crafting thing and wanting to achieve their own twisted version of perfection. They make great antagonists, but what about protagonists?

Basically, I want to hear some stories from people who've used the Tzimisce either as PC's or NPC's. What kind of fun / twisted scenes were you or your friends subjected to during their run?

So, specific scenes? Okay.

There was a new player at the table who took over an npc, a City Gangrel who had fled the Sabbat and fell under the influence of the coterie of Setite pcs. He had converted to the Path of Ecstasy, and was acting all "I'm a sexy beast and I'm the ultimate pimp and drug dealer! Look at all the beauty and pleasure I'm spreading!"

My Tzimisce npc, Tavi, called him on his bs, pointing out that he might be creating immediate debauchery for individual humans, but that those humans would be destroyed in the process, and thereby be useless to him in the future. She went so far as to secretly flesh-craft his favorite sex-workers¹ into looking more haggard and ill than they were, aging them all about fifteen years over a period of weeks... just to make her point clearer. (I don't think he ever figured this out.)

Plus, by trying to change the neighborhood into his own personal fantasy-land, he was actually making it less pleasurable in the long run. If he was going to claim the right to rule over a domain, he was responsible for husbanding it's resources. He could either allow it to grow naturally, only stepping in when necessary to guide those silly humans as they lost their way, like a rancher shooing cattle away from eating a poisonous weed; or he could take responsibility for every detail of their existence and treat the humans as personal wards. But, laissez faire policies coupled with unfettered consumption by the ruler would ruin the land in short order.

I think I had her make an argument about the Tragedy of the Commons, as well. (Something I've always thought should be a larger part of Sabbat pack culture.) In short, if you allow overgrazing on common land, you will exhaust the land itself and everyone will lose, even if it feels like a personal gain at first.

Note, she wasn't at all morally repulsed by his behavior, so much as disdainful of his sloppy rulership and immature short-sightedness.

Oh, and she made it clear that if he so much as looked at anyone in her domain, or anywhere near Tompkins Square Park, he would have to frenzy as often as possible just hoping that he would get an animal feature that could again function as limbs.



¹(or... umm... sex slaves? I wouldn't call it consensual, because of blood bonds, etc. ... Though technically they probably could have fled. ... Though without economic alternatives... Too complex a discussion for here.)

[Nyrufa]

Now of course that campaign had some pretty mature themes to it so i'm not really sure how much people actually want to hear about his experiences.

I don't think people grasp what I was looking for when I made this topic in the first place.

[Nosimplehiway]

In my New York chronicle, I had an npc (Avital "Tavi" Baleboste) who was the matron, ruler, defender, developer, and warden of a single block facing on Tompkins Square Park, and largely concerned with only one building.

She was embraced in the 1860's when it was a tenement, housing Jewish immigrants from Polish Galicia. Tavi was a fourteen year old recent orphan (daddy was killed in Tennessee, mama died of typhus) who had just been evicted. Her first kill was the landlord.

She continued to haven there, defending and protecting her former neighbors with ruthless efficiency. Unfortunately, she found the more she assisted them, the more likely they were to get some money together and move out to a nicer place. So, she developed a pattern. Every few years she sticks her finger up in the air (oh, and uses auspex, animal spies and raw street smarts) to sense which way the neighborhood is going and jumps on the latest band-wagon. She uses Vicissitude to look the part as a representative of the neighborhood's arrivistes. (She has also become adept at Dominate, and knows a bissel Obfuscate.)

First, she devoted the first floor into the offices of a German-language Socialist Newspaper, the "Amerikanische Volkischer Arbeiterzeitung". When she grew bored with fomenting revolution, she dabbled in spirituality and converted the building into a radical-feminist-zionist yeshiva. Then a settlement house for Greek emigres. Then an Italian restaurant which hosted gangland summits, a contraception clinic, a speakeasy, a soup kitchen, a swing music dance school, a beatnik coffeehouse, an electronics/television store, a gardening and macrame shop, a hippie medical collective, a black nationalist bookstore, a gay bar, a womyn's music space, a punk rock club, an especially seedy strip joint, a crack-house, an avant-garde art gallery/performance space, a meeting space for ACT-UP, a hip-hop club, a vegetarian macrobiotic Indian diner, a techno club, a homeless rights organization, a tattoo shop, and, as of the chronicle... which took place around 2004 or so... the first floor had become a Banana Republic, with very expensive apartments upstairs.

She was only marginally connected with the Sabbat, hovering somewhere between main clan and old. She was of strong blood, and served the sect by embracing new packmates every few years, who would spin off into an independent pack representative of her neighborhood's current flavor. She had little status to speak of, but was protected by powerful and genuinely loyal childer. She also gained some small recognition when she wrote her experiences as an autobiography, which became popular (albeit light and comedic) reading among followers of the Path of Metamorphosis. Tavi herself followed Honorable Accord.

She survived the Camarilla reconquista by doing what she had always done, just laying low, blending in, and waiting for the wind to change.

As a narrative device, I created her to give the PCs (all Setites) a point of contact with the Sabbat. Tavi provided context for the Sabbat's side of the story. She wasn't self-consciously eeeee-vil, though she clearly no longer sees herself as human... she's more a genius loci than a person. So, though the Sabbat performed evil acts at times, this could be shown to be the natural result of having a longer term view of things. Tavi desperately loved her neighborhood, yet treated the individual humans who inhabited it as merely the material from which it was constructed, not valuable in their own right. She was more concerned with where the block was headed in twenty or a hundred years, than whether a single human died or got rich.

This provided a contrast to the pc's Camarilla contacts, who tended to romanticize (fetishize?) the idea of individual humans, while taking actions which drove the over-all environment deeper into decay.

[Cadmiumcadamium]

I once played a 6th gen Dark Ages Tzimisce on the Road of Sin (Path of Pleasure). His combined mastery of Auspex and Vicissitude as well as his experimentation on himself and others to share pleasurable experiences was something of the most frightening i've ever played and that my co players have seen in a game. Looking back, it's definetly one of my favorite characters.

Now of course that campaign had some pretty mature themes to it so i'm not really sure how much people actually want to hear about his experiences.