Shadow Cults

The Mekhet, unlike the other four great clans, have no innate powers of control over animals or people, over reason or emotion. But it’s the way of the hungry dead to subjugate the living. Through the Vinculum, the vampire steals a heart, but it’s not enough, and there’s only so much blood a vampire can give, when his deepest urge is to take.
The Shadows, from the very beginning, solved their existence through the creation of conspiracies. One man can do little. One dead man can do some things better, other things not at all. But a conspiracy can change a society. A hidden cult can garner devotion and push an agenda without anyone knowing.
The Mekhet seem drawn to make cults around their philosophies. Uniquely among the factions of the undead, the majority of the initiates in the Shadow Cults are ordinary humans, who join for any number of reasons: power, knowledge, companionship, or just to get laid. It really depends upon the cult. Humans can’t gain access into the higher echelons of the cult, however, and never really know the full story behind the cult’s true praxis. The leaders of these cults know they need the humans, and can depend upon them as muscle. Many become bound to the vampiric masters through Vinculi without even realizing it, as cult rituals often involve all sorts of eating and drinking.
However, cult groups control their followers through means far more subtle than draughts of addictive blood or the mindcrushing powers of the vampire. They lead their followers on with carrot-on-a-stick promises of occult knowledge and supernatural power. They keep wayward followers in control by a firm command of the bonds of affection: join and you’re made terribly welcome, but fall out of line and you’re persona non grata until you come back into the fold.

A Mekhet character can start a Shadow Cult if he so wishes. He needs three things, though: a Purpose, a Praxis, and some members.
There are some game systems involved, too, but they’re not quite so important.

The Purpose is what the vampire wants to achieve through the cult. Actually, a Shadow Cult has two goals: the purpose that the lower-level mortal members (the ones with only one or two dots in the Initiation Merit) believe that the cult is dedicated to, and the real, higher purpose, which is only open to the vampires who join the cult, may have no idea of the cult’s true purpose (for example, Frances Black has no idea what the Moulding Room is really about). Those who ascend to its leadership, however, invariably learn these secrets.
The human members of the Moulding Room are told that they are the secret masters of society, and that through surveillance and the collection of private information they can mold society into their own image, an image of order and control. But really, the whole enterprise is an exercise in subversion. The Moulding Room is a deadly serious quasi-Situationist prank, designed to subvert and transform society through fear of Big Brother and the erosion of taboos, just because Vincent Moon and his dead chums are interested in seeing what will happen.
Meanwhile, the human followers of the Moirai have joined the cult to gain esoteric knowledge for its own sake. The vampires have a further goal: to use that esoteric knowledge as a means of controlling the future.
The two purposes don’t necessarily need to be different, although the vampiric leaders of a Shadow Cult always know more than the mortals. The Followers of Seth are dedicated to promoting chaos in the name of Typhon Seth, as a means to working various magical rites. Pretty much everyone who is part of the cult knows that. But the humans don’t know about the ghosts, and of course don’t know that at least one of their leaders was there in Ancient Egypt when the cult began. Not that she can remember it all that well, but that’s beside the point.

Once you know what a cult wants, and what it tells its members, it’s vital to work out how the cult achieves its goals. The followers of Seth promote chaos, and its human members cause traffic jams, make trains late, hold up taxis, cut wires, put thumbtacks in tires, and all sorts of small things that have large, knock-on effects as part of the occult plan they believe in. Meanwhile, the vampires look to protect the metaphysical side of their desires by hunting and destroying ghosts, spirits and demons. The human members of the Moulding Room collect and archive data, place bugs and record everything. The vampires use the material their minions gather to subvert social structures from the top to the bottom, and they use their powers to subvert individual human bodies.
Remember: you can define Bloodlines by who they are and where they have come from, but cults survive depending on what the members do.

Much of what follows makes the assumption that a Mekhet vampire is setting up a Shadow Cult because she wants the power, or wants to use it as a tool for some further purpose. And a Shadow Cult can be that cynical. But the Mekhet are creatures of revelation. They dream dreams. They see visions. The Requiem does strange things to their minds. They don’t go mad like the Ventrue, or become feral demons like the Gangrel. They go... strange. They start looking at the world in an odd, inhuman sort of way. Patterns reveal themselves in the night-to-night business of survival. The world develops meanings. And meanings make a man or woman, especially a dead one, look at everything in a wildly different way.
The upshot of this is that sometimes the Mekhet who start Shadow Cults are completely sincere. They believe that what they are doing is right. If they hide the truth from the mortals and the neonates who join them, it’s because it needs to be hidden, or because it’s too dangerous to be trusted with anyone, or because God told the cult leader directly that the faithful should only learn the secrets of existence in time.