Post by The Mouth on Jul 19, 2014 16:19:12 GMT -8
14th May, 2013
The Tremere are complete fucking bollocks.
Sixteen shades of bullshit, one for each ‘circle of mastery’ or the fuck ever they call it.
So, working theory: Kindred blood makes the body super plastic; I.E. changeable. The mind is still rather human and without a certain potency of Vitae it is unexpandable past human limits. Shut up, I know. But I’ve seen what memory training can do for normal folks and I’ve seen what Lord Casterly can rattle off - Plots and schemes going back centuries.
That is an informational structure beyond what average humans can do and something nearly every Elder does without effort.
So, clearly some neurological effects occur. I’ve heard whispers and seen on the rare occaison of the vaunted ‘Methuselah’ creatures. Mostly tales of Mithras at court; that being old and having the Vitae of a God-King in your veins makes changes; the man not much true as the creature.
Skills gained in youth never quite fade, physical development only goes in one direction with only the sleep of ages drastically affecting physical condition. As one ages there is a noted inability for the Elders to constantly hone skills; sword play hasn’t really evolved in the last 200 years, but gun play certainly has.
What I hate about Tremere is that they bypass all of this. Until a decade or so ago we had no concept really - An app for that.
Tremere have rituals and paths as far as they can imagine, research, and prove. The strength of their Vitae is variable, making Dominate suspect. They ignore Presence. They fucking gods-damned teleport. The problem is this: to fight Sorcery you must first have Sorcery.
I think that is greatest line of shit yet. Just living in Seattle makes people lazy with their secrets which means I can trade those secrets for different secrets.
Meet Katherine Herschvitz. She watched her siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, root and branch fed into the tempest of anti-Semitism brought about by fascist sympathizers. That she did so as a Neonate Tremere and realized her options were to tolerate the death squads or to face one is also a testament to her courage. Not that she went along. No, she swore she’d get the fuckers back for their machinations and deeply hidden political affiliations.
Her thought was that no one learned the important things from WWI; that the way of doing business was changing. War was changing. The machines had changed economies, cultures, marriages, the way of doing everything had changed.
Including wholesale murder.
This isn’t to say she is a ‘technomancer’ - She claimed that some of the Seattle Tremere qualified for such a name.
What is she? A revolutionary.
She realized that Kindred as a group were coasting; the rate of change for so long had been incremental that with the massive advancement of technology starting at the Renaissance was still slow enough that people were coping. Crossbows are a different kind of bow, cannons are more efficient means of throwing stones, different ships mean that things can move further and faster…
She was the one who caught the attention of her higher ups as a young student in Copenhagen when she formulated some proofs that population growth was going to be the driving factor. Population growth because germ theory, nuclear medicine, and the ability to accurately identify disease were going to make a huge dent in the death rate of children and productive adults. She further pointed out that calories per acre were shooting up as new fertilizers came onto the market and plant breeding left the fields and entered the laboratory.
She was called crazy.
Bullets and bombs are sexy, male dominated, and easy to acquire funding. The last war had shown what mechanized death machines could do to an army; the hostility generated by her German accent was a daily reminder. The 1918 flu had been devastating, so disease was probably winning the fight against mankind.
But a rogue Tremere read the paper and Embraced her as a hedge against the future.
Katherine watched as a new madness spread through Europe; fascism and communism supplanting the nationalism of her youth. The first war had been about which culture was going to remain or possibly dominate the other Great Powers. This war was about ideologies; two workers revolutions competing with the shaky democracies of the world. The Far East, ignored for a generation, saw a backwards feudal nation turn into a military dictatorship of industrialization.
She watched as the collapse of civil authority that went with war time created violence across ethnic and political lines unseen in centuries; whole communities turned into auxiliaries of the various war powers. In this too she had made accurate predictions; that ancient ethnic divides would flare into genocidal programs of neighbor against neighbor. Instead the powers that be nodded sagely and prepared to harvest the glut of blood and ‘research opportunities’.
The realization that her work had primed her sire and his allies to capitalize on suffering on that scale so they could get a leg up on their rivals was almost enough to drive her to walk into the sun. Almost.
She instead decided to effect change from within. I’ve promised her that I will carry a message to Pryce from her. She isn’t a Humanist to the extent that Pryce is, nor does she have that incredible sadness that Pryce has. But she believes that power comes with a price and one of those prices is ethics and responsibility; more of them not less. Shortcuts ultimately cost you more than you gain in her mind.
So, she is working to become the boss. I already knew the Tremere have some sort of internal hierarchy; visits from Tremere dignitaries and Pryce’s relative grip on the Tremere versus Luthias’ clearly indicated a power struggle and one frequently determined by outsiders; aka Management. Katherine was a little shocked at what my observations had uncovered.
Even more so when I hinted that the Clan probably worked on some sort strict resource pyramid.
“The Tremere are just too in synch, to well regulated. They have internal conflicts, yeah, but they stay that way. Pryce was so clearly without allies and so much in opposition to Luthias that it always showed. And the change was always after some big wig came to town. Pryce would be content or wouldn’t leave the Casino. Also, every time Luthias got some sort of promotion then the Luthias’ealots would crow a bit. Pretty easy to see a power struggle there.”
“How do you know it wasn’t just internal to Seattle?” We are sitting at a lovely sidewalk pub in Limerick. She is visiting for a few nights as an envoy from Queen Anne.
“The big wigs. Changes almost always occured after a big honcho Tremere dropped in. Suddenly people were deferential and using titles and… Well, there is a conditioned response in regards to a commander and a subordinate. Not a 100%, mind you, but pretty sure.”
“And the Presence?”
“Yeah… When someone drops down the more extreme edge of Presence in a crowd and the only ones not struck dumb with awe or fear are Tremere; in fact that they don’t care that those who command such abilities are using them on them… Also, it seems like it reflects the Presence abilities back at the user.”
She goes very smooth, smiling, drops a joke or two. That one, the Presence thing, is a bomb. I know how the Courts would take it if one of the primary weapons of the Toreador, Ventrue, and Brujah went useless against the Tremere. They are a small Clan, and comparatively young according to rumors.
“Seattle has an enormous bullshit filter on it; the stories are too outlandish to be believed. Demons? Sabbat attacks? Werewolves? Most kindred have never met a werewolf and lived to tell about it and the number who ‘have’ forget a few little details.
Seattle has 30, confirmed, real, honest to god leaches who had dealings with Werewolves. It’s been two months, so probably up to 50. Hell, I was one of them. I was there when the fucking treaty was signed.”
Her eyes get a little wide; we both know the roles we are playing. She’s got nearly a century as a lick but mostly as an intellectual radical trying to rally a camp of like minded Kindred to her cause.
“Yeah. Treaty. Even as you hears this I can sense your disbelief. Ask Casterly - He wrote it. Not that he will give you a straight answer; Seattle was a nightmare for him on many levels.”
“The scariest thing is that everything I can tell read from you says you are telling the God’s honest truth. How is it this is done?” Katherine is leaning forward, holding her chin in her hands.
“Oh, I haven’t even mentioned all the people getting their souls stolen by the Giovanni, or the Tremere who made prisons out of blocks of air…”
I take a deep breath out of habits gained in a century of hard living. “How? Seattle is isolated. Nearest big cities are Vancouver and Portland, both of those hours away by car. Beyond that… It’s a day’s drive to California which is risky. Plane travel is easy if you have the money. But the biggest thing?”
She leans forward slightly to tease the secret from, lips parted slightly, the action calling attention to her breasts, her hand reaching slightly across the table at me. If I was mortal this would be a powerful indicator of her interest in me as a man. As we are both vampires this is most likely a try to trigger my human reflexes.
“It’s conformity. You get to some other town and they will listen to your stories for so long before they call bullshit. And when Elders call bullshit… They have a lot of hard power to back up the soft influence of status. They don’t want to hear that the Justicariat is letting an abomination like Seattle live, that our Princes cycle faster than a Japanese Prime Minister… The whole thing makes them nervous as hell. They will crush these stories out so thoroughly that they will remain rumors.”
“Doesn’t sound like Seattle Kindred are in their own little microcosm.”
“Oh, yes. They struggle. Their status is never questioned because that would threaten the whole system. But… It is a huge risk. We get the motivated in Seattle; desperate or opportunistic. We had a crew from Barcelona come in from De Corazon himself.”
Katherine’s smirk tells me that my bullshite threshold just went past the mark. “De Corazon? Really? How many do you think have that claim over the centuries…”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. I saw the letters he wrote, inspected the seals… They were written on vellum using inks that I confirmed held traces of the right elements from other letters confirmed to be communications from De Corazon… The Ventrue that was with them checked on the genealogies. This was confirmed.”
She leans back, all pretense of seduction gone. “Really.”
I shrug, an effort calculated to state ‘just another day in Seattle’. “Really. Last I heard one of them was Prince, Dario.”
“But… Why?”
“Supposedly to foster better communication between the clans; mostly what they did was stir shit and introduce internal conflicts all around; except Dario. He was a smooth one. Got to be friends with Ileana; who by the way is old as fuck. Quit being the Prince so she could withdraw from the Jihad.”
“The stories you tell, Francis…” Katherine leans forward again, her hand reaching out and a long nail traces over my knuckles. Touch is taboo among Kindred; Tremere especially. It is my trust in her that attracts her; my stories are just a bonus. We are both revolutionaries; both seeking a future of our own beyond that of our sire’s and our blood lines. I lightly clasp her hand and lean in to kiss it, a slight nip with my fangs.
I’ve never taken a lover as a Kindred, unsure as to how this works; but I am sure that Katherine can show me.
Tremere
By Ben Vaughan
The Tremere are complete fucking bollocks.
Sixteen shades of bullshit, one for each ‘circle of mastery’ or the fuck ever they call it.
So, working theory: Kindred blood makes the body super plastic; I.E. changeable. The mind is still rather human and without a certain potency of Vitae it is unexpandable past human limits. Shut up, I know. But I’ve seen what memory training can do for normal folks and I’ve seen what Lord Casterly can rattle off - Plots and schemes going back centuries.
That is an informational structure beyond what average humans can do and something nearly every Elder does without effort.
So, clearly some neurological effects occur. I’ve heard whispers and seen on the rare occaison of the vaunted ‘Methuselah’ creatures. Mostly tales of Mithras at court; that being old and having the Vitae of a God-King in your veins makes changes; the man not much true as the creature.
Skills gained in youth never quite fade, physical development only goes in one direction with only the sleep of ages drastically affecting physical condition. As one ages there is a noted inability for the Elders to constantly hone skills; sword play hasn’t really evolved in the last 200 years, but gun play certainly has.
What I hate about Tremere is that they bypass all of this. Until a decade or so ago we had no concept really - An app for that.
Tremere have rituals and paths as far as they can imagine, research, and prove. The strength of their Vitae is variable, making Dominate suspect. They ignore Presence. They fucking gods-damned teleport. The problem is this: to fight Sorcery you must first have Sorcery.
I think that is greatest line of shit yet. Just living in Seattle makes people lazy with their secrets which means I can trade those secrets for different secrets.
Meet Katherine Herschvitz. She watched her siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, root and branch fed into the tempest of anti-Semitism brought about by fascist sympathizers. That she did so as a Neonate Tremere and realized her options were to tolerate the death squads or to face one is also a testament to her courage. Not that she went along. No, she swore she’d get the fuckers back for their machinations and deeply hidden political affiliations.
Her thought was that no one learned the important things from WWI; that the way of doing business was changing. War was changing. The machines had changed economies, cultures, marriages, the way of doing everything had changed.
Including wholesale murder.
This isn’t to say she is a ‘technomancer’ - She claimed that some of the Seattle Tremere qualified for such a name.
What is she? A revolutionary.
She realized that Kindred as a group were coasting; the rate of change for so long had been incremental that with the massive advancement of technology starting at the Renaissance was still slow enough that people were coping. Crossbows are a different kind of bow, cannons are more efficient means of throwing stones, different ships mean that things can move further and faster…
She was the one who caught the attention of her higher ups as a young student in Copenhagen when she formulated some proofs that population growth was going to be the driving factor. Population growth because germ theory, nuclear medicine, and the ability to accurately identify disease were going to make a huge dent in the death rate of children and productive adults. She further pointed out that calories per acre were shooting up as new fertilizers came onto the market and plant breeding left the fields and entered the laboratory.
She was called crazy.
Bullets and bombs are sexy, male dominated, and easy to acquire funding. The last war had shown what mechanized death machines could do to an army; the hostility generated by her German accent was a daily reminder. The 1918 flu had been devastating, so disease was probably winning the fight against mankind.
But a rogue Tremere read the paper and Embraced her as a hedge against the future.
Katherine watched as a new madness spread through Europe; fascism and communism supplanting the nationalism of her youth. The first war had been about which culture was going to remain or possibly dominate the other Great Powers. This war was about ideologies; two workers revolutions competing with the shaky democracies of the world. The Far East, ignored for a generation, saw a backwards feudal nation turn into a military dictatorship of industrialization.
She watched as the collapse of civil authority that went with war time created violence across ethnic and political lines unseen in centuries; whole communities turned into auxiliaries of the various war powers. In this too she had made accurate predictions; that ancient ethnic divides would flare into genocidal programs of neighbor against neighbor. Instead the powers that be nodded sagely and prepared to harvest the glut of blood and ‘research opportunities’.
The realization that her work had primed her sire and his allies to capitalize on suffering on that scale so they could get a leg up on their rivals was almost enough to drive her to walk into the sun. Almost.
She instead decided to effect change from within. I’ve promised her that I will carry a message to Pryce from her. She isn’t a Humanist to the extent that Pryce is, nor does she have that incredible sadness that Pryce has. But she believes that power comes with a price and one of those prices is ethics and responsibility; more of them not less. Shortcuts ultimately cost you more than you gain in her mind.
So, she is working to become the boss. I already knew the Tremere have some sort of internal hierarchy; visits from Tremere dignitaries and Pryce’s relative grip on the Tremere versus Luthias’ clearly indicated a power struggle and one frequently determined by outsiders; aka Management. Katherine was a little shocked at what my observations had uncovered.
Even more so when I hinted that the Clan probably worked on some sort strict resource pyramid.
“The Tremere are just too in synch, to well regulated. They have internal conflicts, yeah, but they stay that way. Pryce was so clearly without allies and so much in opposition to Luthias that it always showed. And the change was always after some big wig came to town. Pryce would be content or wouldn’t leave the Casino. Also, every time Luthias got some sort of promotion then the Luthias’ealots would crow a bit. Pretty easy to see a power struggle there.”
“How do you know it wasn’t just internal to Seattle?” We are sitting at a lovely sidewalk pub in Limerick. She is visiting for a few nights as an envoy from Queen Anne.
“The big wigs. Changes almost always occured after a big honcho Tremere dropped in. Suddenly people were deferential and using titles and… Well, there is a conditioned response in regards to a commander and a subordinate. Not a 100%, mind you, but pretty sure.”
“And the Presence?”
“Yeah… When someone drops down the more extreme edge of Presence in a crowd and the only ones not struck dumb with awe or fear are Tremere; in fact that they don’t care that those who command such abilities are using them on them… Also, it seems like it reflects the Presence abilities back at the user.”
She goes very smooth, smiling, drops a joke or two. That one, the Presence thing, is a bomb. I know how the Courts would take it if one of the primary weapons of the Toreador, Ventrue, and Brujah went useless against the Tremere. They are a small Clan, and comparatively young according to rumors.
“Seattle has an enormous bullshit filter on it; the stories are too outlandish to be believed. Demons? Sabbat attacks? Werewolves? Most kindred have never met a werewolf and lived to tell about it and the number who ‘have’ forget a few little details.
Seattle has 30, confirmed, real, honest to god leaches who had dealings with Werewolves. It’s been two months, so probably up to 50. Hell, I was one of them. I was there when the fucking treaty was signed.”
Her eyes get a little wide; we both know the roles we are playing. She’s got nearly a century as a lick but mostly as an intellectual radical trying to rally a camp of like minded Kindred to her cause.
“Yeah. Treaty. Even as you hears this I can sense your disbelief. Ask Casterly - He wrote it. Not that he will give you a straight answer; Seattle was a nightmare for him on many levels.”
“The scariest thing is that everything I can tell read from you says you are telling the God’s honest truth. How is it this is done?” Katherine is leaning forward, holding her chin in her hands.
“Oh, I haven’t even mentioned all the people getting their souls stolen by the Giovanni, or the Tremere who made prisons out of blocks of air…”
I take a deep breath out of habits gained in a century of hard living. “How? Seattle is isolated. Nearest big cities are Vancouver and Portland, both of those hours away by car. Beyond that… It’s a day’s drive to California which is risky. Plane travel is easy if you have the money. But the biggest thing?”
She leans forward slightly to tease the secret from, lips parted slightly, the action calling attention to her breasts, her hand reaching slightly across the table at me. If I was mortal this would be a powerful indicator of her interest in me as a man. As we are both vampires this is most likely a try to trigger my human reflexes.
“It’s conformity. You get to some other town and they will listen to your stories for so long before they call bullshit. And when Elders call bullshit… They have a lot of hard power to back up the soft influence of status. They don’t want to hear that the Justicariat is letting an abomination like Seattle live, that our Princes cycle faster than a Japanese Prime Minister… The whole thing makes them nervous as hell. They will crush these stories out so thoroughly that they will remain rumors.”
“Doesn’t sound like Seattle Kindred are in their own little microcosm.”
“Oh, yes. They struggle. Their status is never questioned because that would threaten the whole system. But… It is a huge risk. We get the motivated in Seattle; desperate or opportunistic. We had a crew from Barcelona come in from De Corazon himself.”
Katherine’s smirk tells me that my bullshite threshold just went past the mark. “De Corazon? Really? How many do you think have that claim over the centuries…”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. I saw the letters he wrote, inspected the seals… They were written on vellum using inks that I confirmed held traces of the right elements from other letters confirmed to be communications from De Corazon… The Ventrue that was with them checked on the genealogies. This was confirmed.”
She leans back, all pretense of seduction gone. “Really.”
I shrug, an effort calculated to state ‘just another day in Seattle’. “Really. Last I heard one of them was Prince, Dario.”
“But… Why?”
“Supposedly to foster better communication between the clans; mostly what they did was stir shit and introduce internal conflicts all around; except Dario. He was a smooth one. Got to be friends with Ileana; who by the way is old as fuck. Quit being the Prince so she could withdraw from the Jihad.”
“The stories you tell, Francis…” Katherine leans forward again, her hand reaching out and a long nail traces over my knuckles. Touch is taboo among Kindred; Tremere especially. It is my trust in her that attracts her; my stories are just a bonus. We are both revolutionaries; both seeking a future of our own beyond that of our sire’s and our blood lines. I lightly clasp her hand and lean in to kiss it, a slight nip with my fangs.
I’ve never taken a lover as a Kindred, unsure as to how this works; but I am sure that Katherine can show me.
Tremere
By Ben Vaughan