Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough: Awakening: Diablerie Mexico

Previously in our Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough:

• Vampire: the Masquerade first edition core
• Blood Nativity and Alien Hunger
• Ashes to Ashes
• Blood at Dawn and Blood Bond
• Chicago by Night (first edition)
• The Succubus Club
• The Player’s Guide

Having suffered through the dullness of The Player’s Guide, this time we’re going to look at a shorter but considerably more colourful supplements: Awakening: Diablerie Mexico. Like Milwaukee by Night (which we’ll get to soon!) it’s considered to be kinda-sorta part of “the Chicago chronicle” despite neither of them actually focusing on the Windy City – they both just sort of hang nervously in its orbit, making brief little forays into the big, wild world outside, bless them. Let’s see we can bring back from there.

Awakening: Diablerie Mexico starts out by delving into the subject of, well, diablerie, the act of one vampire feeding on another and a major no-no in Kindred circles. High-generation vampires do it to low-generation ones because it lets them decrease their own generation and thus raise their power cap, and ancient vampires do it to younger ones because they can no longer survive off of mortal blood but only vampire blood will do. Also, some vampires do it because they’re just sick bastards – when it comes to vampires, I think we’ve learned by now that “because he’s a sick bastard” is a perfectly plausible reason why one does something…

There’s a mention of the theory that the Kindred as a species exist solely because the Antediluvians know that when they’ll wake up at the end of their current torpor, they’ll wake up thirsty, and only the blood of thousands upon thousands of lesser vampires will be able to sate them. Gehenna will thus be an orgy of diablerie, as all of Kindred kind is extinguished – presumably except for a few Fourth Generation vampires who can replenish their numbers for the next time the Antediluvians need to feed. That’s kind of creepy-awesome.

We also get a number of ways that you can be found out to have committed diablerie, one of which is having an Auspex-trained vampire check your aura. I don’t really like this at all, because that’s entirely too easy and ruins the paranoia of wondering whether some other vampire might be going off and doing the unspeakable on the sly. I mean, aura reading isn’t even that hard, it’s the second-dot Auspex power. Every other Toreador, Malkavian and Tremere can do it. That means that diabolists simply can’t be part of vampire society, or someone will find them out. Okay, the aura taint does fade after half a year or so, but still, that’s a lot of time to be off the radar.

Also, we’re introduced to the Ritual of the Bitter Rose, which is something the Tremere cooked up that allows more than one vampire to take part in diablerising the same victim and all get a generation bump. It’s almost useless, though, because if you use it on any vampire above the Third Generation it only works if the vampire is really tremendously old or powerful, and even then it has to be at least Fourth or Fifth Generation. Okay, this adventure is about happening to discover both the Ritual and the location of an ancient Fourth Generation vampire at the same time, but I don’t like how neurotic White Wolf is already getting about putting up guard rails and making sure that nothing can be used without their expressed blessing.

I mean, I can only assume that at this point they had gotten a bunch of playtest results and were panicking over the fact that a lot of players (being players) had gotten the idea in their heads that you “won the game” by working your way up the generations and finally diablerising Caine himself, so this was them putting in multiple stop gaps. But honestly now… the thing that should stop players from going crazy with diablerie is that really old vampires can defend themselves, and even if you somehow take them down they’ll have childer and Blood Bonded servants and allies who will all raise a fuss. It shouldn’t be a problem.

Also, one thing that the book doesn’t even bother to discuss is that it’s kind of useless for some 13th-generation schmoe to diablerise a really old vampire, since you only gain one generation at the time anyway. He’d need to work his way down the list, starting with vampires as young and dumb as himself, and only hitting a major wall and having to quest around for sleeping ancients once he got to the Eighth Generation or so. Before that, you don’t even need the Ritual of the Bitter Rose to show that sharing is caring, you just need to take turns hunting down the most recently embraced childer of some Seventh Generation Elder; there is no real lack of those. Hell, just go to a Sabbat city and dig up a few graves, they’re not going to miss one of their “failed shovelheads”…

Oh well. We also get some alternative uses for Elder blood, like how it can be used to heal aggravated damage. Nothing about it giving you temporary Discipline dots, like Menele’s blood did in Ashes to Ashes, because the rules are getting more boring already. Shame.

Then we get the life story of Mictlantecuhtli, who’s an ancient Gangrel embraced by a mysterious stranger that might have been the Gangrel Antediluvian. He wandered America in the years long before Columbus, eventually finding his way down to the Mayas and setting himself up as a god of a city called Tzental. After a few centuries of ruling supreme and snacking on his childer, he started feeling sleepy, though, so he had himself intombed beneath a pyramid along with a whole bunch of magical traps. He also had a bunch of his childer join him, after raising their generation to the 13th with magic (supposedly so they’d have an easier time waking up if the tomb was invaded, but actually so that the players won’t have a whole slew of Fifth Generation vampires to diablerise in the bargain!).

So Mictlantecuhtli snoozed, and Tzental was eventually abandoned, fell into ruin and was forgotten. Meanwhile, some of the research notes he’d made in his self-studies of blood magic got stolen and eventually found their way to the Tremere, who used it to create the Ritual of the Bitter Rose. I don’t know, I guess it’s meant to be ironic or something?

Anyway, to start the adventure the GM is to have the players (who are assumed to already be diablerie-enthusiasts) first hear the legend of Mictlantecuhtli and suggestions that he might have been a vampire, then find that the mortal scholar they tried to contact about it suddenly got killed (offed by another vampire who was keeping tabs on him to keep him from telling the wrong people about this very thing), then get contacted by the world’s geekiest Malkavian, a guy named Shaeffer who suffers from the single-minded compulsion to keep adding to his stores of esoteric knowledge. He’s been researching Mictlantecuhtli too, and he wants to compare notes.

This is all assumed to take place in Chicago, by the way, with some of the minor NPCs from there mentioned as bit players. That’s what I meant about it being still kinda-sorta connected to the default setting – it can be started from anywhere, but we still have this assumption of Chicago as being where vampire PCs hang out.

Anyway, before they can meet, Shaeffer gets killed by another vampire named Pietr, who is a stereotypical cackling villain whose internal monologue (as seen in an introductionary fiction piece) has a lot of gloating about how stone-cold baaaaaad he is. He’s actually already found Tzental, but he got sent packing by the tomb’s guardians with a set of gnarly scars all across his face to show for it, and he thinks he can learn the Ritual of the Bitter Rose from Shaeffer’s research and use it to gain enough power to go back. This is noted by the text itself to not make much sense – the Ritual is mostly just useful for groups of Kindred wanting to share a kill – but it’s shrugged off with Pietr just being that nuts.

A few days later, the players get a package containing Shaeffer’s research, which he mailed to them for safekeeping before being offed. It contains both the Ritual of the Bitter Rose and his best guess for Mectlantecuhtli’s resting place in Mexico. Time for a messed-up cannibalistic road trip! Yay?

Getting to Tzental is of course an endevour in its own right, and the players have to grapple with both regular wilderness-traveling logistics and the unique challenges posed by vampiredom – for one thing, it’s noted that Kindred can’t regulate their body heat, so they’re actually more sensitive to extreme heat than puny humans are (albeit less in danger of actually dying from it… unless they pass out under the open sky with no one to pull them into cover before dawn, of course).

The area around Tzental is also guarded by a “mated pair” of elderly werewolves (this being before that whole Garou Shall Not Mate With Garou thing was canon, I guess) whose ancestors swore eternal oaths of friendship with Mectlantecuhtli and who now stubbornly keep watch even though they’re all that’s left of the tribe. Also, they might be faithful to the memory of one particular Kindred, but they still really freaking hate every other filthy vampire in the world, so that’s bound to be interesting.

Then they get into the tomb, and… well, it’s a dungeon, is what it is. Vampire: the Masquerade officially has dungeons. The hobby keeps trying to escape them, but it can’t seem to stay away from them – the whole thing just grew up around them and now you’d have to redesign it practically from the ground up to keep dungeons from being the perfect fit for the play experience. Of course, the “monsters” are a little more gothic than your regular kobolds and gelatinous cubes, being things like the mad ghosts of sacrificed priests, an insane ghoul (one of Pietr’s, abandoned and trapped inside when his master fled) and of course the childer of Mectlantecuhtli, who wake up as soon as the tomb is breached and start preparing to defend it. Likewise, while there are some “normal” traps like spike pits and pressure plates, there are also more psychological ones like waking dreams where you need to display Conscience, Courage or Self-Control to pass and a mirror that forces you see your Beast instead of your reflection. And of course, instead of healing potions, there are magically preserved pools of blood and free-roaming rats.

In the end, the players can find Mectlantecuhtli, but of course by then one of his childer is in the process of feeding him blood to make him awake up, and there’s a nice big boss fight. Not sure that this is quite the system I’d choose for having nice big boss fights since the game usually tries to focus on things other than direct combat, but, well, it’s a dungeon, it needs to have a boss at the end. If they bring him down, they can use the Ritual of the Bitter Rose to share the level-up three ways. Then, when they head back out, Pietr turns up and ambushes them for their kill-stealing ways, just as an extra nasty surprise.

All in all, this is a pretty entertaining adventure, and it’s certainly lush with flavour and backstory. It’s only really possible to run for a group of players who are willing to be monstrous even by the exceedingly low standards of vampires, and as I said, I have certain doubts about how well the format even works for this game and this system. But it’s certainly fun to see a very traditional adventure structure decked out in Vampire‘s aesthetics.

Next up we’re continuing to stay close to Chicago – in particular, we’re going to neighbouring Milwaukee for our second city book, Milwaukee by Night. Stay tuned.