Mabry

We switched the signs. Got the music going. Neon's bright. Soon, the blood will fill our cups.

Savage and Macabre - Gangrel

You’re lost. At midnight, the roads all seem to tangle. The street signs are hard to read —did that one have mud on it? Doesn’t it contradict the other one you saw, about five miles back? No gas stations out this way that aren’t closed up husks, just silhouettes against the dark night. But then you see it: a roadhouse, just down the way. All lit up like a beer-advertising Christmas tree. You think that, well, maybe it’s time to ask directions. Maybe grab a road beer, too; the wife won’t mind, she’s asleep next to you. You go in. But you won’t come out. Your wife, maybe she’ll live. Maybe they’ll let her live. Then again… maybe not.
See, some Gangrel don’t like to go out and hunt. Why should they, when they can make the prey come to them? The world is home to countless pockets of isolation: lost highways, ghost towns, depressed economies. Places where people go astray, usually on accident, sometimes on purpose. Those of the Mabry blood, well, they just set up shop and wait for the blood to start trickling in.

Culture

Culture and cultural heritage

It started in the late 1800s way up in Alaska and the Yukon. A Savage by the name of Carlton Clyde Mabry lived out in the whipping snow and howling winds with his “boys,” the childer he’d chosen from the leagues of mushers and miners. Mabry started to get a bit greedy, though: the blood they were able to get most nights was wan, thin, rare. He wanted more. Liked the hot feeling throughout his body. So they set up a roadhouse along the Klondike Highway, set back just a ways from the snowed-over road that so often saw dog- and horse-sleds traverse its length. They let the torches flicker in the cold night, those fires doing all the advertising for them. Travelers would have a chance to disembark from the trail. They’d think they were getting a bowl of porridge and maybe some hot cider, but what they really got was a face full of teeth as Mabry and his boys fed. When the time’d come, they’d tear down that roadhouse and set up another one further up or down the trail or on another road altogether.
The tradition has since continued. Mabry’s boys (which now include quite a few girls, because damn if that doesn’t bring in the marks) now set up shop all over the place. Bars, strip clubs, mountain diners… one coterie was even said to have set up a whole carnival to draw in the wayward masses.
Some coteries are more brutal than others, needing to hide bodies more often than not. Others are unusually humane: bring in a lost family or a vanload of college students, get them drunk or otherwise fucked up, take enough blood to leave them passed out on the floor, then drive them far enough out of the way so they’ll never find their way back. (That there is a “win-win situation”).

Major organizations

Reputation: Amongst other Gangrel, those of the Mabry blood are lazy, like rock snakes hiding in the dark waiting for food to pass on by. Amongst the Damned in general, well, most don’t know shit about the Mabry, and even when they do they don’t figure them for a bloodline (which is, of course, a relatively new one compared to more ancient lineages).

Nickname: Trapdoor Spiders, Rock Snakes

Parent ethnicities

• Gangrel

Bloodline Disciplines: Animalism, Protean, Resilience, Vigor
Weakness: Those of the Mabry blood often feel alone in this world; the isolation gets to them, and others of the bloodline are the only common company they keep. As such, being apart is hampering: when one Mabry is away from his brothers and sisters, at least by a mile, he suffers a -1 to all rolls, and -2 to all Discipline-related rolls.