gorbalsvampire

[gorbalsvampire]

I deleted some

but

Not All

BOOP

BOOP

#the wine is always talking with you

[gorbalsvampire]

Monster who eats your backstory.

It bites you and you've now sprang into being just now ex nihilo

#that's not a monster #that's a necessary course correction #every thing you put in your backstory is a thing you can't play through together #keep the prelude small

[gorbalsvampire]

BOOP

BOOP

[gorbalsvampire]

In the Gehenna War era, post-splinterification, what do you imagine it takes to be judged True Sabbat? (Please note: I'm way more interested in your creativity, interpretations, and what interests you than in strict canonicity.) Thank you!

So, about the Sabbat, post-interregnum...

In a surprising but welcome shift in approaches, antitribu doesn't mean "on the other side of the sect war from where your clan normally is" but a far more interesting "opposed to the idea of even identifying by your clan to begin with." Pack and Path identity are far, far more important than whose blood flows in your veins and, if we stop and think about it, this is both ideologically and practically on point.

Ideologically, the Sabbat makes war to hunt the Antediluvians and destabilise domains which protect or apologise for them and, of course, to recruit. Leave turf war for mundane practical reasons to the Anarchs! Given that end goal of annihilating the Third Generation, of course it makes sense that Sabbat reject the clan identities defined by which of your targets happens to be at the root of your own particular bullshit.

Practically, the Sabbat shares vitae (and consequently Disciplines) as a regular ritual practice, and during wartime, the mass Embraces aren't a tidy one-bites-one affair. It's a squirming pit of hungry angry vampires, in which the survivors are probably diablerising each other down there before the surface. And, of course, diablerie is going to have an impact too. Given these practices, the Sabbat must be breaking down the boundaries between clans all the time. Most of the buggers should, mechanically speaking, be Caitiff, with only the rare Lasombra or Tzimisce childe groomed personally for a position of apprenticeship or leadership really standing out. Even they, if they have any sense about it, will lean on the achievements of their ancestors within the sect, and push against the definitive limitations of their Blood.

(Defined "bloodlines" like the Volgirre may emerge, but - gosh, now that I think about it, Baron Philippe's brood make a lot more sense as not defining themselves as a bloodline until they're accepted by the Camarilla and start to Embrace more widely and spread. Likewise, the Harbingers joined the Sabbat as allies but kept to themselves and seldom-if-ever Embraced, until they returned to the nascent Hecata.)

Perhaps what is to be Cainite, and True Sabbat, is in truth to be descended from Caine and not his cursed grandchilder. A clanless potentiality, unburdened of the weaknesses of the bloodlines, and able to develop in the direction its chosen Path demands.

SO! Let's talk about the Paths. I've Posted before about the mechanical faults with "adopting a Path" and the impossibility of transhuman ascension under Vampire's transgression-based morality rules, let's take that as read for now. Second edition did it right with the insistence that all "playable" (read "viable, True") Sabbat are on a Path and have successfully internalised its ethics and mobilised them against the Beast.

I really like how the contemporary Sabbat has fractured into packs led by priests and sharing a Path in common. It Just Makes Sense that the philosophical commitments of given Sabbat are what holds them together. The Sabbat is, after all, a militant cult; an army. Units work better if they're pursuing common goals and adopting a common strategy, rather than being tugged every which way by the individual desires of its members.

And, again returning to my Touchstone of second edition, all Sabbat used to operate on a mechanically distinct and alien basis in which Conviction (belief in an ethic), Instinct (trust in the Beast) and collective Morale (faith in the strength of the pack) replaced personal Conscience and Self-Control, and individualistic Courage. They weren't like you, they didn't think like you, and whatever made them so unlike you happened before you ever met them.

The paradox at the heart of the Sabbat is that it preaches freedom (from mortal and Camarilla moral and ethical concerns, i.e. freedom to be an unapologetic vampire) at the cost of submission (to the sect and its goals, i.e. freedom without liberty, do what thou wilt so long as thou dost what th'art told). Adoption of a Path and inclusion into a Pack that shares that commitment is part of that act of submission: it signifies a sublimation of the self into the sect. One cannot be True Sabbat until one has accepted oneself as a vampire - playing, metaphorically and literally, by vampire rules that are proven to work.

Forsake your Clan. Choose your Path. And, above all, make war, on your own initiative, because there are no orders coming from Mexico. The Regent is dead (and, in unknown fact, has been for a decade). The elders who founded and led the sect threw their childer to the fires and answered the Beckoning call of the ancient horrors: fuck 'em, they'll die with the Antediluvians they protect and serve. The self-proclaimed Kindred are merely obstacles. Recruit them, or tear them down. Leave the turf war bullshit to the Anarchs. We have a higher goal.

It's funny how I always drift into character when I talk about the Sabbat. I started out running a Sabbat game, and cast myself as pack priestess when I started playing them. They've always been my favourite mistake, and now that they and the Anarchs are in distinct and very different kinds of conflict, they are more interesting than they've ever been.

#vtm #vampire the masquerade #sabbat #thanks for asking! #furthermore - 'canon' must be destroyed

[gorbalsvampire]

“May I please draw your OC?”

Reblog this message if you encourage anyone that wants to draw your OC to do so.  No need to ask for permission in advance.

Go for it.  Draw my OC.  If you want, I’ll even give you reference posts.  Go to town on it.

You are welcome to draw my OC and surprise me with the result.  Seriously.  In fact, I encourage it.  I will proudly display whatever it is you submit to me regarding my OC.  There is a chance that I will squeal about it for several days.

Even if you feel you aren’t good at whatever artistic adventure it is you do, please feel free to submit it to me.  I want to see what you have done.

[gorbalsvampire]

What We Do in the Shadows may not be my cup of tea, but I really appreciate finally being able to cite a piece of inspirational media for Vampire: The Masquerade that actually plays out the way Vampire: The Masquerade does.

#there is no way in hell that jermaine clements is not One Of Us #the LARP parodies are too spot on #wwdits #vtm

[gorbalsvampire]

redesign for lesbian visibility week 🩷🧸🫶

click for quality (my shop) (instagram) (tip me) (shirts)

[gorbalsvampire]

BOOP

BOOP

[gorbalsvampire]

can someone please be proud of me like fuck I’m trying

#always

[gorbalsvampire]

Today's aesthetic: cosmic horror tabletop RPGs from the 1980s whose creators wrote the "madness rules" by simply plagiarising a list of disorders and their descriptions from the DSM-II and turning it into a d100 lookup table, except the DSM-II still listed "homosexuality" as a mental disorder (it wasn't removed until the DSM-III), with the result that there are several published tabletop RPGs where there's a small but non-zero chance that seeing Cthulhu will make you gay.

[gorbalsvampire]

i am grabbing you by the shoulders. you must stop thinking of other people as "the cool kids" and "popular bloggers." you must destroy the divide between You and Them. we are all just idiots playing with dolls.

yes, to Get Interaction in the OC Interaction Fandom you have to interact with other people. you have to send them asks and reblog their posts with commentary and dm people and put yourself out there. if you want more interaction you have GOT to be the one to take the first step; you cannot rely on other people to do it for you.

"but my mental illness makes it hard for me to put myself out there!" me too!!! i get it!!! that's why i don't post on this blog and i barely speak in my own server!!! but that's the social part of social media; there is performance in every interaction. yes, it gets tiring. but it's always a good idea to take breaks!! you don't HAVE to post jack shit.

i don't have a good way to end this post i'm just. yelling into the void, like everybody else. i love you. please don't feel like you're lesser because of a note count.

[gorbalsvampire]

the feral quality of fettered, sadistic, homo desire, though

#this is vampires #but it's not

[gorbalsvampire]

if I forgot your favorite subgenre or misclassified a band feel free to argue in the replies 👍

#doom metal! #to the depths with you! #trad. like Sabbath a close second

[gorbalsvampire]

high council of vtm blogs who follow me: i need your help for Reasons i am cooking a new vampire in my brain, and now i have not one, but four ideas and i need help picking a guy.

any feedback or commentary is allowed, but if you have a fav, feel free to vote for them under the cut <3

1 - tzimisce. presumed to be a gangrel and thus fits into nightlife semi-normally, who's gonna notice they're slightly… off… right? runs an airbnb with a 'forbidden' basement, which also serves as their haven. idk, i've not gotten much further than 'haha tzimisce except everyone thinks it's a gangrel because bOY do i love vampires posing as a different clan u feel?

2 - hecata. this is very much built around the clan compulsion. they were a true crime youtuber before their embrace, and one day just stopped uploading videos. their fanbase is split - most think they just stopped enjoying youtube, but there are two camps who either A) think they were murdered or B) faked their own death. regardless, both these camps discuss the case on reddit and turn molehills into mountains - grasping at straws in an attempt to solve the case. the hecata themself is unsure of what happened to them, the memories are fuzzy, and sometimes they think they remember and actively get on the message boards under a fake account in an attempt to solve their own death also

3 - ministry. basically gossip girl. used to run a blog in high school where they'd spread creative rumours about people, and when they were embraced, they fell right back into that. their sire indicated that most vampires don't take too kindly to the internet, though, so instead they every so often go on rumour runs, where they deliver handwritten notes to high ranking vampires with either rumours about other vampires, or thinly veiled threats along the lines of 'i know what you did to [blank] a few nights back :D'

4 - caitiff. by all means, they should have been a nosferatu. they were embraced by a nosferatu after successfully hacking into personal records database to get around having to formally change their gender marker and name on their records. something went wrong, though, and the clan curse didn't fully take, which now leaves them without a home or a family to get back to. are police now after them for hacking the government? it's more likely than you think, but hey, it's not like they lived to tell the tale :3

#other people's ocs #vtm #mmm nice yes the Concepts

[gorbalsvampire]

#your hyper fixations bring delicious fic and art and also mary who deserves small treats

[gorbalsvampire]

normalise looking something up in the rulebook before you offer your godless half-formed nega-takes, i beg of you

#this post brought to you by reddit dot com the app and website

[gorbalsvampire]

[cheerful] ho! well met, traveler! say, I couldn't help but notice that succulent Scrag of Beast you're carrying. perchance, might I have a taste? no? I see... [suddenly very serious, a cruel glint in my eye] if you won't hand it over... I'll take it off your corpse!!

[BEGIN COMBAT]