A Requiem for Atlanta

Muslim Preacher

Brother Cassius is a rigid, morally superior monster who was Embraced into undeath in the 1950s and found religion in the 1960s. Though he is a prominent member in the typically Catholic-slanted vampire church called the Lancea Sanctum, Cassius is an outspoken Muslim. Always dapper in his pressed suits and bow ties, always ready with a well formed opinion, Cassius is one of the most respected preachers and missionaries within Atlanta’s vampire society.

His views on mortal morality differ from his Christian peers — who are predominantly Baptist or Catholic — but his view on Kindred morality is very much that of the local Sanctified mainstream: Vampires are holy beasts, damned into eternal service to make the consequences of mortal sin manifest on Earth. Vampires must be impeccable monsters so that the darkness at the edges of civilization stays as fearsome as children are told it is. Vampires must be wicked, not to punish the sinful per se, but to make it clear that the world is vicious and that passage through this world to Heaven is not guaranteed.

“Do not cry. Do not be sorry. You have had your chance for those things. You are above the flock now as the wolf is above the sheep. And if Hell is what you get after this, then that choice was made for you already. You are not still walking, not still drinking, dead man, because you have another chance at their salvation. What is expected of you now is to hunt the flock. That is your glory now, child.”

Elysium. Eric brings Archie and Walsh before a local meeting of the Court of Atlanta to formally introduce them to Kindred society. At the same time, he brings Regent Daniel of the Carthians, who was involved in an attempt to intimidate Eric and burn down Archie’s haven, whom Eric has enchanted through his powers as a Succubus. Under Eric’s mystic influence, Daniel will be compelled to testify on Eric’s behalf, revealing the Carthian plot to terrorize Eric’s domain and, presumably, run Eric off his land.

At the same time, Eric brings a proposal to his old Sanctified mentor, Father Stenholm, who will inform Eric of his agreement to participate in a city-wide scheme to keep the Carthians in check by delivering a coded sermon to the vampires in attendance at this Elysium.

Meanwhile, Dr. Walsh seeks out Mr. Never, to whom he is supposed to deliver the marker given to him by Victor. If Never accepts it, Walsh will become an initiate in the Ordo Dracul — the Order of the Dragon.

Eric’s interrogation of Daniel, however, reveals that Lukhas and his fellow Carthians are planning some major initiative at the handful of small courts being help throughout the city that night. But Daniel isn’t important enough to have been told just what Lukhas’s announcement will be, so Eric and his coterie have to wait and see.
In Play

This chapter is being withheld until the truth about what happened in this story can be shared with all players.

“The dead, they get around.”
– Eric, Regent of Old Boulevard

The club called Prohibition is now at the center of three vampires’ Requiems. Eric, lord of the local vampire turf, owns Prohibition and resides secretly inside — it’s the castle and capitol of his Kindred fief. Archie, the waifish former drug-dealer put into Eric’s foster care by Brother Cassius on behalf of the vampire church called the Lancea Sanctum, now works as the club’s special bouncer — it’s Archie’s job to deal with the club’s vampire customers. Dr. Jarod Walsh, a recently deceased surgeon, is now a resident of Eric’s domain, and earns his keep by using his mystic sight to keep watch over the club — and otherwise upholding Eric’s will in the domain.

These three vampires all spend their nights around Prohibition, but their three nights are not so similar. Three similar threads do run through their Requiems, though. From Thursday through Friday to Saturday, those threads are revealed.

ERIC: What did I do to deserve this kind of trouble?
ROMEO: Has it been your experience that you ever have to do anything? Don’t this shit just go around? Aren’t we always stepping on somebody?

At the Table:
For the PlayersIn play, here’s how this works: This story spans three nights, with each night seen through the eyes of a different character. On your character’s night, he’ll appear in every scene. When it’s not your character’s night, you’ll have to be patient because you’ll be allowed to take actions only when you’re in a scene with that night’s “starring” character. You won’t be allowed to do any but the most basic things “behind the scenes” on those nights. (To get all three nights into a single night’s game session, we’re going to have to haul ass, so don’t worry about being bored.)

Note that, as this story unfolds, each of you will be exposed to information that your character doesn’t have. Don’t abuse that privilege.

The mortal lives of new neonates must make way for the Requiems that come in their wake. If Dr. Walsh and Archie are going to begin new existences in the same city where they used to live, they have to make sure no one’s looking for their old, daytime selves. In the case of Archie, this might be as simple as making sure his wife doesn’t go looking for her drug-dealing husband. For Walsh, things get more complicated. He has living patients, co-workers and friends who might go poking their noses into vampire society if they follow the trail of the missing surgeon. It’s not enough for Walsh to disappear — he has to die.

“There’s a whole host of fiends and monsters in this city — of which I am one — that’ll do anything to get what it wants.”
– Eric

Eric has a history with the vampires of Atlanta. To the church of the Lancea Sanctum, he’s a parishoner growing more respectable with each passing favor he does for the priesthood, a respectable whelp with more appreciation for the church than his peers. To the Kindred court and the Invictus, he’s a small-time player who can appreciate the purpose (and the cost) of maintaining stability among the society of the Damned. Eric is respected, even trusted to a point, by the powers that maintain the law among Atlanta’s bloodsuckers. The Prince gave him his domain in Old Boulevard, the church gave him the freedom to dwell among the living without persecution. He has contacts throughout Kindred society and this gets him into trouble.

For more than a year, newly Embraced vampires have been turning up in the Big Peach — wandering the cracked alleys downtown, locked naked in chain-link pens, abandoned in the bloody beds of their Midtown condos, ditched on the busted tiles of low-rise projects. It’s been happening long enough that the Kindred of Atlanta are almost taking it for granted, a problem unsolved to the point that it’s become accepted through apathy. The Invictus blame unchecked Carthians, Embracing carelessly like their young kine counterparts screw, much to the detriment of their souls. The Carthians blame the Invictus, whose feckless investigations are rumored to have snaked back on themselves, revealing old white vampires with stables of slave Kindred to milk for blood.

But the Sanctified — the pious followers of the Church of the Spear — preach that the sin of the Embrace is carried out despite covenant. It’s a sin of indiscretion, of ignorant passion — a sin of youth. Everybody else here has some other motive but you. That makes you the only one I can trust.” — Archie The Sanctified believe the Curse is being passed onto to kine by Kindred of every covenant, and that it is the duty of every pious vampire to prevent further violations of the holy law, to stop mortals from being Damned to vampirism. This is what the priests of the Lancea Sanctum sermonize at Midnight Mass. Meanwhile, ministers of the vampire church strive to shepherd the Damned orphans they find on the street. Orphans like Archie.

Archie was found selling drugs on an unlit street corner near the heart of Atlanta. He was spotted by a Sanctified Muslim preacher who goes by the name Brother Cassius, who tells it like the Testament says: that Kindred shall not lay down with kine. Archie was doing business with the sheep, but not as a shepherd. As Cassius suspected, Archie had not heard the Word of Longinus. (This was just a short introduction session we played after character creation to get everybody up to speed. We got a great sense of the characters now, though, and a lot of goals surfaced that previous stories can build on.) Cassius brought Archie off the street, into a house of the Spear. Until a parishoner could be found to show Archie the nightly ways of the Damned, Cassius sat that skinny white dealer on his ass and preached at him, Testament in hand, in his stiff tea-colored suit. If Archie is to see eternity, he’ll have to renounce the shreds of his mortal life — his drug money, his contacts, his wife — and accept his fate as a blessed beast.

Thinking he should be weened off the world of mortals, but cut clean free of his own mortal associates, Cassius brought Archie to Prohibition, Eric’s club, where Kindred and kine interact in an environment secretly designed by wolves to lure sheep. Giving Eric the new title of Deacon, the Sanctified church tasked him with guiding Archie into his Requiem — and into the Danse Macabre.

But Archie wasn’t the only new vampire in Prohibition that night. Hunting on the streets by himself, lured by the scent of mortal blood and the nerve-wracking stink of other Kindred nearby, undead surgeon Dr. Jarod Walsh stepped into the sweating throngs of kine and almost succumbed to his Beast. But Eric has experience with young vampires. Looking down on the mortal crowd in his club, he can spot bloodsuckers in his crowd by the way they move. The way they smell. With a call to his club manager, Nicole, Eric has a lovely black-haired blood-whore, Rachel, walk Dr. Walsh off the main floor of the club into Prohibition’s VIP room, marked by a stylized capital I on the door.

For the first time, Dr. Walsh feeds from a willing victim, pressing her up against the metal wall of a posh feeding room — a locked metal cell, one of a handful Eric keeps hidden in Prohibition. Archie and Eric watch his blurred body push against his prey, watch him nick her neck with a razor blade, on the small CCTV monitor in Eric’s office. While Walsh feeds, Eric lays it on the table for Archie: damnation, eternity, blood.

Things will be different now. Archie and Walsh will learn what it is to dwell forever in the dark, slipping through the cracks of the mortal city like blood in a concrete floor, to survive each night for the reward of one more chance to die… again.

ARCHIE: So keep your eyes open for anything out of the ordinary.

JAROD: It’s all gonna be out of the ordinary.

The past is prologue, as they say. This was one of a handful of stories played out in this same setting with an almost entirely different cast of characters a few months ago. It’s included here as background to the current chronicle.

The investigation into the vampire “blood farm” down near the Old Corners neighborhood leads Lou and Luther onto the trail of the territory’s Regent, an Invictus Ventrue named Locke.

Instead of being the bland Society socialite he appeared to be at court, it turns out that Locke had been keeping anywhere from nine to fifteen illegally Embraced Kindred in pens beneath a burnt-out factory buildings. The purpose of these vampires? To feed elders like himself.

Somehow, Locke had kept these undead vessels broken and sedate, apparently through repeated and brutal attacks on their minds using the powers of his Blood, but also by weakening their spirits by coercing them to Embrace other feeding vessels. Locke even brought visitors, like Cobb, by to show off his work.

Was Locke working with the Carthians against the Invictus? Is he just a sick and errant monster with no fear of violating the Prince’s decrees? To find out, Lou and Luther set out in the name of the Prince and Primogen to find Locke and root him out from his hiding place within the city.

To do it, they pursue two unusual leads: night after night of mystic, psychological therapy with one of Locke’s captured and tormented victims, and a meeting with the Carthian spokesman, Haden.

The past is prologue, as they say. This was one of a handful of stories played out in this same setting with an almost entirely different cast of characters a few months ago. It’s included here as background to the current chronicle.

After following the trail of bodies to the Old Corners clubs near downtown Atlanta, Lou, Eric and Luther discovered their fledgling killer is also a diablerist — a discovery that’s driven Lou to flee into the night, alone and on foot. Tonight the agents of the court find there’s more than one new vampire in the crumbling warehouses south of the city — a discovery that leads them to a more sinister secret kept in the heart of the court.

The past is prologue, as they say. This was one of a handful of stories played out in this same setting with an almost entirely different cast of characters a few months ago. It’s included here as background to the current chronicle.

While the Primogen vet Louis, Eric and Luther for new roles as agents of the Prince, the Atlanta police investigate a series of brutal murders in the city’s downtown. The Primogen report the Prince’s theory that the suspect is a rogue neonate — possibly one of the many illegitimate Kindred coming out of the city in recent nights — and assign the three prospective envoys to locate the young vampire, find out what he knows, teach him about the Requiem and neutralize the police investigation. Meanwhile, Mr. Never — the elder who recruited Louis and Eric into the Prince’s service — demands his first payment of Vitae from Louis.

The past is prologue, as they say. This was one of a handful of stories played out in this same setting with an almost entirely different cast of characters a few months ago. It’s included here as background to the current chronicle.

For the first time in thirty years, the Prince of Atlanta has called a Blood Hunt. You’re caught in the middle. Is this demonstration of strength from the normally soft-handed leader a sign that he’s taking the threat of vocal subversives seriously, or is something else going on behind the scenes? Opponents of the Prince are after you; they want what you’ve got. Allies of the Prince offer to help you, if you’ll seek out the truth for them. This is the last night of your old Requiem. Tonight, you take sides or they take you.

By chance, three largely neutral Kindred happen upon the last of the vampires targeted by the Prince’s Blood Hunt. After a short chase and a car accident, these three Kindred find themselves with the torpid corpse of a wanted monster in the trunk of their car. If they give the body to the powers that be — the Prince and his agents — they’ll have new allies in high places but make enemies of the fugitive’s brutal compatriots. If they give the body to the civil revolution that’s gathering strength among the city’s youngest Damned, they risk becoming fugitives themselves. So, the trio devises a cunning plan: In a staged act of subterfuge, they appear to turn on one another. One of them, a former detective named Louis Parker, takes the body to the Prince’s people, while the others, club-owner Eric and conspiracy-theorist Calvin, attempt to appease the fugitive’s allies among the insurgents.

Still smoldering with the fire of the Blood, Eric strides back into the coffeeshop and puts Cobb down with a bullet to the brain. Shutting his torpid enemy into the trunk of his car, Eric drives out into the night. Is he looking for justice or revenge?