Gangrel
Something dead approaches. It comes from way out, where The End eats the road. It is a brother to owls and a companion to scarecrows. No escape. You’ll try to kill it, but it will not die. You’ll try to outrun it, but it will lope after on four feet. You’ll try to escape, but it goes where other monsters fear to tread. You’ll lock yourself in a tower or a vault, but it will come on nighted wings or as ravenous smoke. You’ll plead to its human face, but it will only grin and say, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” You’ll die wondering whom the monster quoted.
The Gangrel are the ultimate survivors. Close to the Beast and close to the bone, they’re primal. No. Feral! They’re tough, shrugging off what should be terrible wounds as the weapons harmlessly thunk in their dead flesh. They’re out there, and you can’t do a damn thing about them. More than any other clan, they are a reminder that the greatest lie the Devil ever told was, “Congratulations, you escaped the food chain!”
Where do they come from? Fuck you! That’s where. Ask the sun where it comes from. Ask the moon. Ask Ekhidna, Baba Yaga, and Enkidu. Their history is the space between sharp teeth and your throat. They are the ripping, barking now-nownow! Still want the stories? Best get rambling. Hit the freeways, highways, rails, trails, and cornfields lovely, dark, and deep. Read the runic rhymes on ancient stone. Riddles written on the walls of moaning alleys. Fragments of epics scratched into condom machines in gas station bathrooms.
Seek out the oral traditions, echoed by the bleating herd. Ask the meth-head trucker about that black dog that harshed his buzz. Ask about the Unholy and her crows. The Gangrel make more bogeymen amongst their Kindred, per capita, and that’s a fact. They are the voice in the bog. They are the thirsty earth. They are the reason men discovered fire. They are all mouths on the devouring road.
See the storyteller. A strange bird migrating from town to town. She perches in pubs, forest preserves, parks, hospitals, and the cafetorium stages of grade schools. The best seat is reserved for the storyteller. A professional orator, she specializes in ghost stories. October’s when she’s in season. She travels, tells tales, and collects them. She publishes collections of folklore. But some urban legends, the ones that fit like jagged jigsaw pieces, she keeps. She brings them back to her roost, writes them on the walls and ceiling. Laying on the floor, she takes it all in, unfocusing her eyes. As she hatches and crosshatches the scrawl, patterns emerge. She licks her lips, hungry for the locations of certain slumbering ancients.
See the CEO. They say successful businessmen have personality traits in common with sociopaths and predators. He’s Shere Khan in a three-piece suit. The rules really didn’t change. Eat or be eaten. Greed is good. The skyscraper is just another jungle, and he claimed it, floor to floor, marking with his own blood. He knows everything that goes on in his jungle. Every jackal and leopard bows to him. How they yowl, growl, and howl. Sometimes the primal metaphors cut too literal. He messes up so many suits. But he just sloughs them off like a molting animal. In his penthouse apartment, there is a closet with rows of suits like rotating shark teeth.
See the drowned ones. The lake is a popular vacation spot, but there are stories. Rangers still don’t know why deer spontaneously leap into the water never to come out. When some folk look at their reflections on the mirror surface, they see pale faces that are not their own. Night-time swimmers sometimes spot their fellows going rigid in the water, eyes glassy, mouths gaping open, turning a shade more pale. Sometimes, during these spells, the swimmers get aroused and erect, but they’re always too embarrassed to tell their friends. They just dip their legs back in the lake, hoping for another bite.
Let the other clans wrestle and strain with esoteric riddles of what it is to be a monster. The Gangrel offer something more pure. Power without guilt. Lust without doubt. The other clans need. Always needing. They need havens, an audience, solitude, mortal institutions, or secrets. The Gangrel take what they want. All that they need is locked away in the endless potential of their horrific clay.
Why you want to be us
With the other clans, you’re all afraid of your Beast. Oh, it’ll get me into trouble. Oh, it’ll kill the people I care about. Woe is fucking you. No. As a Gangrel, you can’t be stopped and you don’t want to stop. The creatures of the wild run with you, and even better, you can strip away your disguise of human flesh and become one of them.
Why you should fear us
See that business about being unstoppable. We’re serious there. The beast comes at you, you unload your last three bullets into it, it doesn’t die, doesn’t stop, doesn’t flinch. And oh, yeah, it brought friends. The night has a thousand mouths. Say goodbye to your entrails.
Why we should fear ourselves
Self is a precious thing. Surrendering to, or even using, the Beast the way we do means sacrificing our sense of self to our inner hungers. Even our bodies are no longer our own, as we grow grotesque claws or transform into mist. It’s not only in our minds, but swimming under our skins. There is no escape from the Beast, not for our prey and certainly not for ourselves.
Nickname: Savages
Clan Bane: The Feral Curse
The Beast lethargically coils under the R-Complex of most Kindred. But you and the Beast are as thick as thieves. It rises and rips out of your skin to protect you from the bad, bad world. But it has a price. It’s harder to resist the Beast’s call, harder still to remember why you should even want to.
Favored Attributes: Composure or Stamina
Disciplines: Animalism, Protean, Resilience
Comments