A vampire is a creature that is not dead, yet not fully alive either--it is undead. Vampires possess a never-ending hunger for blood, preferibly human blood. They must sleep during the daylight hours and are particularly vulnerable to sunlight. By piercing their heart with a wooden stake, a vampire may be paralyzed as long as the stake remains. Other superstitious
methods of detecting or dispatching a vampire may or may not work, depending on the individual vampire in question.
All vampires in White Wolf's game world are descendents of Caine, the first son of Adam and Eve who slaughtered his brother, Abel, out of jealousy. As punishment for his crimes, God cursed Caine to be forever outcast from the world of humans and spiritually branded him with the mark of the Vampire. Caine fled into the wilderness and had a new enemy in the Sun. He lived in darkness and roamed the night, feeding off of the blood of animals and humans; his earlier diet no longer sustained him, and he vomited any food that he tried to eat or water that he tried to drink. Caine was
cursed this way to wander the Earth until the end of time.
He returned to the world of humans, and they were awed by his otherworldy presence and powers. He built a city and
later populated it with children of his own kind--other vampires. He did this first to his beloved and beautiful Zillah by "embracing" her into eternal darkness. The embrace occurred by draining her of all of her blood and then feeding it back to her from Caine's own blood (also called vitae). Zillah longed for siblings, and Caine reluctantly created Enoch (whom he
named his city after) and Irad. These 3 vampires bred more of their kind, at which Caine grew displeased and left to wander again into the wilderness.
The childer of Zillah, Enoch, and Irad rose up against their sires and slew them. Caine later returned from his journey and saw his childer slain. In anger, he cursed each of the grandchilder with a weakness befitting their individual crimes. These grandchilder of Caine became known as the Antediluvians and it is from them that all vampires trace their heritage.
Each of the 13 Antediluvians organized their childer into clans under which they acted as both parent and ruler. Each clan has 3 disciplines (supernatural powers) that are uniquely theirs (to some degree).
Some of the clans later divided into "bloodlines" which evolved their parent clan's disciplines into more specialized disciplines of their own design. Some vampires (also known as Cainites or Kindred) live by a different set of ethics than their human cousins. These moral (usually immoral by human standards) paths are known as Roads and keep a vampire from being
overwhelmed by his bestial passions. A vampire who is lost from all Roads degenerates into a mindless beast and is removed from their player's control. As all vampires are damned by God, True Faith can keep them at bay or even outright destroy them. True Faith is a very rare passionate belief in one's religion that is so overwhelming it can actually affect those supernaturally opposed to the faithful's deity or deities. For more information about the character creation and clans, please refer to the Vampire Clans page.
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