Archived-Sydney Requiem
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The 63 Sydney pages are to provide information for potential, new and current members in regards to the the games and running of the Sydney Domain of Beyond the Sunset.
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order.
Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
—Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Vampire: the Requiem
Vampires: blood-drinking creatures of the night. Horrors born of darkness, whose sole purpose in life — unlife, actually — is to slake their unholy thirst on the blood of the living. Without doubt, vampires are monsters. Monsters, though, need not always be unthinking, unfeeling terrors empty of remorse, or even compassion or other human traits. Indeed, vampires can exceed their deathless curse, themselves becoming antiheroes or even heroes. Then again, some vampires truly remain monsters.
In Vampire, you “play the monster,” and what you do as that monster both makes for an interesting story and might even teach you a little about your own values and those of your fellows. The setting of Vampire borrows greatly from gothic literature, not the smallest amount of which comes from the “set dressing” of the movement. Key to the literary gothic tradition are the ideas of barbarism, corruption and medieval imagery. This World of Darkness can be said to be our own seen through the looking glass darkly.
Most vampires believe that their kind didn’t just pop into existence one night to scare a cowering mortal populace. Most of the Kindred, as vampires call themselves, believe, at least metaphorically if not literally, that vampires have existed for as long as they have had men upon whom to prey, and that they have followed mortal civilizations since humankind first formed them. Others believe in a vampiric genesis not unlike that of Adam in the Bible, and that the Kindred have been chosen by whatever power makes the decision to let them stalk the night. Still others believe that vampires are part of the natural but hidden order of the world, attaching vampiric origins to pagan beliefs and ancient mythologies. Many vampires don’t care at all, believing the mystery to be as demonstrably unknowable as the question of mortal life’s origin.
Whatever the case, whatever the truth, it is known that vampires have preyed upon the world since ancient times. Kindred society’s admittedly fallible memory marks the undead as active during the height of the Rome, if not before. Even those unreliable stories suggest that Kindred activity might have existed further back in time.