I swear I’m gonna stop blogging so often, any day now. Try not to think I’m dead when that happens.
One of my all-time favorite ttrpg mechanics was “vinculum” in Vampire: The Masquerade. It was a variant on the Blood Bond™ by which sires would wield cruel power over their childer. Seems I gotta back this thing up and start over from the beginning. Lessee…
In that rpg, you create vampires not simply by biting a victim and leaving them alive. You create a vampire by draining all of somebody’s blood and giving them a little of yours at the end. I get the impression this was how it was done in Interview with the Vampire? Sexy. In this rpg, that set you on a path to a kind of mind control. Once you drink blood from the same vampire three times, you are blood bound to them. This is something like being hopelessly in love with them, but worse. It’s dramatic, but pretty heavy to RP.
The core rulebook is about the most populace political organization of vampires, The Camarilla, who have a quasi-feudal system that is sometimes enforced through blood bonds. The rival organization, The Sabbat, were formed by baby vampires in ancient times who wanted to escape from blood bondage, and did so by inventing the vaulderie.
I don’t know where the honcho at no-homo-styled gay vampire HQ was getting these names for things, but it was probably a badly abused thesaurus. The meanings of the names of the big seven vampire clans are fuckin’ embarrassing. Vaulderie itself sounds like nothing more than the chorus of Der fröhliche Wanderer, tho it probably takes its name from a comparatively peaceful christian sect that became associated with protestantism, the waldensians. This could have been cribbed from some moldy “list of heresies” that an ignorant modern goth was imagining as bad-ass and evil, even tho heresy against medieval catholicism was usually a brave and good thing at its outset, whatever it became (lutheranism por ejemplo quickly becoming quite vile). This reminds me of when my sixth grade teacher went on a fundie tirade claiming the peace symbol was a broken cross for pagans, and I mashed it up in my mind with the goat-head cultists in that ’80s Dragnet movie to imagine peace symbols were badass and cool. It’s laughable.
Anyway, ridiculous terminology accepted, the vaulderie is a magic ritual where the members of a pack of Sabbat vampires all pool their blood in a bowl and get their drank on, replacing tyrannical blood bonds to sires with a mutual bond of a weaker nature, shared between all of the pack members. This bond is called vinculum, a kind of “blood bond lite.”
Where this got interesting and fun was the random intrigue it could produce. Vinculum scores were randomly determined, meaning the first time you partake in the vaulderie, you could get a score anywhere from one to ten. One is a vague fondness, ten is not-quite-as-bad blood bondage. This was enforced with dice in some way, like, if you want to influence someone, you get more or less dice depending on your scores.
This could make characters with mutually high scores natural allies, characters with low scores giving each other a lot of side-eye, and characters with asymmetric scores having a tyrant/subject relationship. Since you don’t have an innate sense of what score someone has for you, this made for a lot of intrigue. What if you know you have a high vinculum to another pack member who is the kind of person to exploit it, and you need to keep it secret from them? Stuff like that.
For an example, let’s say all the active bloggers in the sidebar at the time I composed this were recruited into the Sabbat, and had to share our blood bondage through vaulderie. What scores would we have for each other? Top names show the power you have over the person in the side names. (built the chart to look good in preview, lotsa variables will make it into gibberish, don’t vex yourself trying to parse it)
__________Mano__William_.__PZ___Adam___Bébé___Charly__/_HJ_._Yemisi
Mano__+____X__/___10______1______3______.6______-.7_____.8_____5
William_++___8______X______10__..__2___.___7_______1_____..6_____6
PZ_______.__5______2_______X_____6__.____2_______.6_____.5_____5
Adam__._.___8______9_______6_____.X__.___.8_______.9_____10__.__6
Bébé___.____8______9_______4_____.1______X_______.6_____.2_____2
Charly___;___6______5_______5____._5_____.10___.___.X_____.4_____6
HJ________._6______6_______4_____.4______1_______.4______X____.3
Yemisi___.___5___/__10_____._2___.__2______5____.___1______1_____X
William would be a shoo-in for pack priest, with so many people so powerfully devoted to him. Makes sense, he actually wrote for the publishers of Vampire: The Masquerade briefly at some point in the past. Of the lot of us, PZ is the most resistant to his charms – and William is a powerless thrall to PZ, so he could be the secret power behind William’s font of supernatural charisma.
Aside from William, Yemmy doesn’t like most of us as much as we like her. I am also not very loyal, except to William and Mano. Conversely Adam is very fond of most of the pack, no scores lower than 6. Charly is my biggest fan and HJ has little love for me. You see how it works. Marcus escaped this orgy of soul bondage by getting embraced into The Camarilla.
I love random mechanics that produce results that are meaningful in game terms, and The Sabbat Sourcebook had another ace up its sleeve. Not every pack would do this, but a common way for nomadic Sabbat packs to recruit people was at random – meaning you didn’t get to choose your clan, if your gm enforced this! Your vampire clan influences your powers and weaknesses, possibly even your appearance.
The time I played this with some homies and self-insert characters, I ended up in the shadowy Lasombra clan. Feel my inky black tentacles. Muhahaha! Wait. Lemme hit these other guys up… Wild, I just rolled Lasombra for myself again. Guess it was meant to be. Nobody ended up rolling Ventrue, Brujah, Gangrel, or Caitiff. Keep in mind the Sabbat is the edgelord versions of the usual clans…
Our pack priest William is the dreaded homicidal artist Toreador clan, while his secret master PZ is of the sinister Serpents of Light. Mano has magical powers of the sorcerous Tremere, Adam is a horrific cenobite-like Tzimisce, and HJ is the hideous monstrosity of the Nosferatu. Charly is of the deeply ableist Malkavian clan, known for being twice as insane™ as their Camarilla counterparts, and having the power to infect others with MADNESSSSsss..™ Lastly, Yemmy is of the horribly racist Ravnos clan, which are stereotypes of Romani people, with illusion powers and inherent larceny. I cannot believe that shit was ever acceptable.
Just on the back of these two mechanics -random vinculum and random clan- the Sabbat sourcebooks were my fave ever. I also liked the paths of Dark Thaumaturgy and other corny edgelord shit. It was a very good time. If problematic as balls.
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Finally, some material to inspire my epic FTB fan fiction…
i wanna see prince of darkness pz scare christians with his forked tongue and snake eyes.
(1) looks good for table formatting ✔
(2) closest I ever got was V&V
(3) to have a chance, I’d’ve needed a coterie of geeks. hard enough with mere D&D & V&V
(4) “I don’t know where the honcho at no-homo-styled gay vampire HQ” is most informative.
how are those guys gonna be inspired by Anne rice so much but try to downplay the gay as much as they did? there was a bit of gay here and there, but far too little. i have heard rice’s first vampire book had some homophobic tropes going on, but by the second one she was more of an earnest fan of gayboy action.
I missed the party where we all drank each others blood. It sounds like some kind of fun potluck, so I regret missing it. Can we have a repeat?
I had to look it up: Vaulderie: A term indicating connection with Satanic powers, so called from Robinet de Vaulx, a hermit, one of the first persons accused of the crime.
Also, the group Camarilla is not only a scheming cabal, but also, the name Carmilla hearkens back to a lesbian vampire who used to rearrange the letters in her name to trick people into believing she was not the same person. Around 1978, I bought the book from Sears (yes, it sold books in addition to tools and bedding and clothes) thinking it would be another Dracula-type story and was surprised by the content.
pz – repeats of the vaulderie can increase the strength of the bond, which is good for pack cohesion. i’m sure william would be into it.
katyd – i wonder where u found it. the usual sources availed me little, not that i went very far. edit: not carmilla, i know that. i mean a definition / etymology for vaulderie.
@ Bebe: I typed definition vaulderie into DuckDuckGoose’s searchbar and that’s what came up in encyclopedia.com, referencing the 1400s, France, and the charge of witchcraft.
Different sources such as World Anvil and Gotham by Night have different definitions that seem to apply to werewolves, not vampires.
I love it.
Not sure if you knew, but I was a freelance writer for White Wolf Studios from 2000-2003. I worked on their Demon: The Fallen game line. Never played the game, but it was fun writing the flavor text and the novellas in their sourcebooks.
Also, the Ravnos clan wasn’t their only example of Romani stereotyping. They published the “G(slur*)” sourcebook, and that received enough pushback that they apologized for publishing it.
*censored by beeb
katyd – i really oughtter use these other search engines and such.
william – twas this i referred to above. sure is hard for us honkies to realize a romanticized idea about an ethnic group can still be dangerously racist. people are still using that slur on the regular.
oh hey ill just edit ur comment to be consistent with handling of my ableism policy…
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I can clickety-click too: https://www.lalanguefrancaise.com/dictionnaire/definition/vauderie
Good on yer, John!
@ William: hey, that’s pretty great!
No prob, Katydid.
i kept trying to post these pics, having it not work, then deleting them. one more try…
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yah they show
10) No problem. I didn’t like writing it, and now I have a new way to describe that sourcebook.
lol i didn’t know u did writing for it! oh dear. i’m sorry.
Oooo, that’s an interesting mechanic! Reminds me of some graph theory I’ve taught. William is a tyrant to Mano’s subject (10 vs. 8). PZ isn’t a tyrant over Mano (1 vs. 5), but since he’s a tyrant over William (10 vs. 2) he can become a tyrant over Mano by first tyrannizing William. Plug these relationships into a matrix, repeatedly multiply it by itself, and we learn that anyone could become a tyrant over every other player in no more than six turns… except poor Adam, who is doomed to always be a subject.
This would tend to kick off a mad dash for supremacy: for instance, if Mano spots PZ tyrannizing William, he can prevent PZ taking control over him by tyrannizing PZ first. PZ’s pretty likely to make that play, though; William’s an absolute powerhouse, able to tyrannize five different players while only PZ can tyrannize him. Of course, if either Charly or I wait until Mano tyrannized PZ then we in turn can tyrannize Mano and become “head tyrant” over Mano, PZ, and William.
There are two win conditions. Once William has indirect tyranny over PZ, or I have indirect tyranny over Yemi, neither of us can be tyrant’d and it’s only a matter of time until one of us is either “head tyrant” to everyone, or to a group of three to five players. Conversely, anyone who’s tyrant to PZ will also be tyrant to William and everyone both are tyrant of, creating a race by everyone to tyrant Yemi and PZ. Since the former can tyrant the latter but not vice-versa, Yemi’s the top priority. So William’s best first move is to tyrant Yemi, and then get them to tyrant PZ, getting to me later on; if Yemi’s already a subject, William should instead tyrant myself, to block Yemi or their tyrant from tyrant-ing me, and then get me to tyrant PZ; if that won’t work, then tyrant Mano or Charly and then PZ. Mine is to immediately tyrant William, thus protecting them from PZ or his tyrant, and get William to tyrant Yemi; if PZ has already tyrant’d William, then I tyrant PZ and go for Yemi; if PZ’s already someone else’s subject, then I tyrant Bébé then Yemi. If none of the above are an option, we’re doomed to be someone’s subject. After tyrant-ing PZ above, Mano’s best hope would be to tyrant everyone who could tyrant him, who at that point are only Charly and myself. Thus tyrant-ing Yemi and Bébé would be top priorities.
William’s got 39 different ways to tyrant PZ in five turns or less, while I only have 15 to tyrant Yemi, so William’s more likely to be crowned “head tyrant” than I in practice.
Ah, graph theory! I bet this table is only known in totality to the GM during the game, otherwise nerds like myself would fire up a Python console and quickly work out a path of tyranny.
the sabbat is supposed to be cool and edgy. you’re out, nerd!
@ Bébé Melange
Isn’t the Sabbat more like a bunch of Noddist religious extremists, who fight a hopeless war in the most irrational manner, taking an incredible number of people with them to their doom? I’ve felt for years that one of the closest equivalents in Real Life was actually the IS (though the Sabbat has much more internal diversity and is much friendlier to women and LGBT – People)
Noooo, let me at least correct a mistake first!
Uh, but didn’t I just say William can only be tyrant’d by PZ? My bad, I looked over who could tyrant Yemi but forgot to double-check who I could tyrant. Yemi can only by tyrant’d by William and Bébé, PZ by Mano/Charly/myself/Yemi. I can tyrant Mano/PZ/Adam/Bébé, William can tyrant Mano/Adam/Bébé/Charly/Yemi. So, with that in mind:
[scampers out the door, scrap paper fluttering behind in the wind]
So, I feel the coolness is debatable…
But maybe that’s me just growing old ^^
i get what you’re saying but still. edgy action cool.