I swear I’m gonna stop blogging so often, any day now.  Try not to think I’m dead when that happens.

One of my all-time favorite ttrpg mechanics was “vinculum” in Vampire: The Masquerade.  It was a variant on the Blood Bond™ by which sires would wield cruel power over their childer.  Seems I gotta back this thing up and start over from the beginning.  Lessee…

In that rpg, you create vampires not simply by biting a victim and leaving them alive.  You create a vampire by draining all of somebody’s blood and giving them a little of yours at the end.  I get the impression this was how it was done in Interview with the Vampire?  Sexy.  In this rpg, that set you on a path to a kind of mind control.  Once you drink blood from the same vampire three times, you are blood bound to them.  This is something like being hopelessly in love with them, but worse.  It’s dramatic, but pretty heavy to RP.

The core rulebook is about the most populace political organization of vampires, The Camarilla, who have a quasi-feudal system that is sometimes enforced through blood bonds.  The rival organization, The Sabbat, were formed by baby vampires in ancient times who wanted to escape from blood bondage, and did so by inventing the vaulderie.

I don’t know where the honcho at no-homo-styled gay vampire HQ was getting these names for things, but it was probably a badly abused thesaurus.  The meanings of the names of the big seven vampire clans are fuckin’ embarrassing.  Vaulderie itself sounds like nothing more than the chorus of Der fröhliche Wanderer, tho it probably takes its name from a comparatively peaceful christian sect that became associated with protestantism, the waldensians.  This could have been cribbed from some moldy “list of heresies” that an ignorant modern goth was imagining as bad-ass and evil, even tho heresy against medieval catholicism was usually a brave and good thing at its outset, whatever it became (lutheranism por ejemplo quickly becoming quite vile).  This reminds me of when my sixth grade teacher went on a fundie tirade claiming the peace symbol was a broken cross for pagans, and I mashed it up in my mind with the goat-head cultists in that ’80s Dragnet movie to imagine peace symbols were badass and cool.  It’s laughable.

Anyway, ridiculous terminology accepted, the vaulderie is a magic ritual where the members of a pack of Sabbat vampires all pool their blood in a bowl and get their drank on, replacing tyrannical blood bonds to sires with a mutual bond of a weaker nature, shared between all of the pack members.  This bond is called vinculum, a kind of “blood bond lite.”

Where this got interesting and fun was the random intrigue it could produce.  Vinculum scores were randomly determined, meaning the first time you partake in the vaulderie, you could get a score anywhere from one to ten.  One is a vague fondness, ten is not-quite-as-bad blood bondage.  This was enforced with dice in some way, like, if you want to influence someone, you get more or less dice depending on your scores.

This could make characters with mutually high scores natural allies, characters with low scores giving each other a lot of side-eye, and characters with asymmetric scores having a tyrant/subject relationship.  Since you don’t have an innate sense of what score someone has for you, this made for a lot of intrigue.  What if you know you have a high vinculum to another pack member who is the kind of person to exploit it, and you need to keep it secret from them?  Stuff like that.

For an example, let’s say all the active bloggers in the sidebar at the time I composed this were recruited into the Sabbat, and had to share our blood bondage through vaulderie.  What scores would we have for each other?  Top names show the power you have over the person in the side names.  (built the chart to look good in preview, lotsa variables will make it into gibberish, don’t vex yourself trying to parse it)

__________Mano__William_.__PZ___Adam___Bébé___Charly__/_HJ_._Yemisi
Mano__+____X__/___10______1______3______.6______-.7_____.8_____5
William_++___8______X______10__..__2___.___7_______1_____..6_____6
PZ_______.__5______2_______X_____6__.____2_______.6_____.5_____5
Adam__._.___8______9_______6_____.X__.___.8_______.9_____10__.__6
Bébé___.____8______9_______4_____.1______X_______.6_____.2_____2
Charly___;___6______5_______5____._5_____.10___.___.X_____.4_____6
HJ________._6______6_______4_____.4______1_______.4______X____.3
Yemisi___.___5___/__10_____._2___.__2______5____.___1______1_____X

William would be a shoo-in for pack priest, with so many people so powerfully devoted to him.  Makes sense, he actually wrote for the publishers of Vampire: The Masquerade briefly at some point in the past.  Of the lot of us, PZ is the most resistant to his charms – and William is a powerless thrall to PZ, so he could be the secret power behind William’s font of supernatural charisma.

Aside from William, Yemmy doesn’t like most of us as much as we like her.  I am also not very loyal, except to William and Mano.  Conversely Adam is very fond of most of the pack, no scores lower than 6.  Charly is my biggest fan and HJ has little love for me.  You see how it works.  Marcus escaped this orgy of soul bondage by getting embraced into The Camarilla.

I love random mechanics that produce results that are meaningful in game terms, and The Sabbat Sourcebook had another ace up its sleeve.  Not every pack would do this, but a common way for nomadic Sabbat packs to recruit people was at random – meaning you didn’t get to choose your clan, if your gm enforced this!  Your vampire clan influences your powers and weaknesses, possibly even your appearance.

The time I played this with some homies and self-insert characters, I ended up in the shadowy Lasombra clan.  Feel my inky black tentacles.  Muhahaha!  Wait.  Lemme hit these other guys up…  Wild, I just rolled Lasombra for myself again.  Guess it was meant to be.  Nobody ended up rolling Ventrue, Brujah, Gangrel, or Caitiff.  Keep in mind the Sabbat is the edgelord versions of the usual clans…

Our pack priest William is the dreaded homicidal artist Toreador clan, while his secret master PZ is of the sinister Serpents of Light.  Mano has magical powers of the sorcerous Tremere, Adam is a horrific cenobite-like Tzimisce, and HJ is the hideous monstrosity of the Nosferatu.  Charly is of the deeply ableist Malkavian clan, known for being twice as insane™ as their Camarilla counterparts, and having the power to infect others with MADNESSSSsss..™  Lastly, Yemmy is of the horribly racist Ravnos clan, which are stereotypes of Romani people, with illusion powers and inherent larceny.  I cannot believe that shit was ever acceptable.

Just on the back of these two mechanics -random vinculum and random clan- the Sabbat sourcebooks were my fave ever.  I also liked the paths of Dark Thaumaturgy and other corny edgelord shit.  It was a very good time.  If problematic as balls.

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