Bekaak
The corpse is tiring to look at. Not in the warm-and-fuzzy way you feel when head hits pillow, but rather in the insomniac realization that, all things being equal, you have a non-zero chance of dying in your sleep one night. The body plots to betray us the moment we rip it from the womb’s warm oblivion, and the dead thing wears that treachery in the cracks that line its face. See your future in the fissures — did your hand just shake? Perhaps it’s a tremble. A tremor! Better sit down. Better sleep. We so rarely value our youth while it lasts, and Father Time has come to reap your ingratitude.
The Bekaak are entropy’s ragged maw, and in that they’re among the few honest vampires. Time never breaks its promise, and the Bekaak are its Prophets, with a touch that starves the flesh of vigor and a bite that rips youth from the marrow. Yet they say they’re unjustly damned for this honesty, denied the ageless perfection of their Kindred for a crime they’ve long since paid off in time served.
Time Immemorial
The Prophets weren’t always this way. In the lost time of Turtle Island, the Bekaak were warriors and hunters, cowing the living for their hubris in walking the woods at night. They ruled their lesser Kindred, or anything else unfortunate enough to challenge their might, and they claim their dead confederacy spread from the Great Lakes to the reaches of the Saint Lawrence. Had the Camarilla somehow found their way across the Atlantic, they might’ve found like minds and rivals in the New World.
The Bekaak agree on their storied past but not their downfall. Each version of their apocalypse follows a similar structure, but the details vary. The Prophets can’t help but be truthful, but their perceptions of that truth have bent over millennia.
Tonight
In the handful of cities where the Prophets thrive, the Lancea et Sanctum is ascendant. It’s likely the covenant gave them that nickname in the first place, and since the colonization of North America, the Church and the Bekaak have enjoyed a special relationship. The Sanctified see the Prophets as undead proof of God’s cruelty, and encourage them to use their entropic Discipline, Vitiate, to punish pride in the faithful, teaching harsh lessons on the inevitability of God’s final judgment. Some hide for weeks in Obfuscate, laying enervating hands on wicked mortals until they repent their sins. Given this purpose, the Bekaak say the Sanctified saved their last members from Final Death, although some elders of First Nations descent see Longinus and his followers as invaders, who robbed the clan of its chance to rise again.
That said, even Bekaak who reject the church fall into similar roles. Prophets of the Mother’s Army delight in punishing vain mortals and exult in taking on the Crone’s true visage. Dragon Prophets conduct research into stasis and torpor, and those among the Invictus use their curse as a tool of the Masquerade, serving as CEOs long after eternally youthful Kindred would’ve caused suspicion. Carthian Bekaak are among the strangest, but some of the most fervent. And dangerous. Between their clan bane and their aging curse, these Prophets try to live openly among mortal radicals, to comprehend the purity of revolutions.
The Bekaak say their aging helps them hide among the kine, but the Kindred are doubtful. The only safe way for a Prophet to revert before he reaches skeleton levels of decay is torpor, making it difficult to thicken his Blood and hold on to power. That alone means most Prophets linger past their expiration dates, but if it were just a matter of hiding their deathly pallor, it wouldn’t really be a problem. In their dotage, Bekaak minds slip. An honest, senile vampire is a dangerous thing, especially one who can rip life from flesh. New Mexican Kindred recall an incident in the early 1800s, when an elder Prophet annihilated an entire pueblo having forgotten how not to use its Disciplines.
More insidious, the Bekaak can steal youth to regain their own. With effort, Vitae restores their forms, but the victim takes on their decrepitude. Kindred are the best sources, but humans do in a pinch, at least if no one’s keeping too close an eye on the Masquerade. Outside the Sanctified, this does little to endear the already-strange clan to other Kindred, but the Bekaak are long past caring what others think. Only God can judge, and he already did. Let the other clans preen, they say. The Bekaak will bide their time.
Nickname: Prophets
Clan Bane: The Righteous Curse
Bekaak can only speak truth to those they deem worthy, whether they want to or not. Unless a Prophet spends a Willpower, her base dice pool on rolls to deceive mortals with higher Integrity is limited by her Humanity dots. Spent Willpower does not add +3 to the roll. This bane does not apply to rolls against ghouls or Kindred.
Favored Attributes: Composure or Presence
Disciplines: Animalism, Obfuscate, Vitiate
New Mechanics
Bekaak age like humans. This doesn’t affect their physicality, but eventually their mental faculties degrade. If a Bekaak’s apparent age remains above 100 years (give or take), she gains the Geriatric Condition (p. 87). At about 200 she stops aging, as she’s little more than bone by that point. A Prophet can fully reset her aging by falling to torpor and reducing her Blood Potency by a dot.
Alternatively, she can prey on others to restore her youth. As she feeds from a victim, she can sacrifice a Willpower dot and immediately spend any stolen Vitae to revert: Mortals victims bestow five years per Vitae spent; vampires can yield 15 but must be of equal or greater Blood Potency. The Bekaak is limited in that she cannot revert past her age at time of Embrace.
Meanwhile, the victim gains an inverse amount of age. The transformation is ultimately only cosmetic (i.e., the victim remains his own physical age despite appearances), but it is permanent, short of cosmetic surgery or mystical healing. Vampires can remove each decade as a point of aggravated damage, but aging does not automatically fade in daysleep. Bekaak can regress their victims as well, taking on age rather than removing it.
Taking the Unnatural Affinity Merit might allow a Bekaak to regress using the blood of other supernatural creatures instead of Vitae, but preying on werewolves, mages, changelings, and the like presents its own challenges
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