Storyellers: Hunting Anathema

A group of neonates going to hunt an Anathema is roughly equivalent to a bunch of kindergarteners toddling off into the woods to hunt a grizzly. If they're very, very lucky, they won's find anything. Otherwise, they may suffer the extreme bad luck to locate exactly what they were looking for. The consequences of such are not pleasant, but they are usually brief.

Anathema make it onto the Red List for a reason. They are powerful, vicious and murderous. The average generation of an Anathema is sixth, and all have mastered a truly awe-inspiring spectrum of Disciplines. Then throw in their homicidal manias, their perversions and their general nastiness, and the full horror of the scenario becomes apparent.

In other words, a bunch of 12th-generation neonates stand a snowball's chance in Hell against one. While it is certainly possible to include younger characters in a "hunting the Anathema" plotline, even to the point of allowing a character to admister the coup de grace, be sensible in how you handle things. Players' characters are much more likely to get involved in the events peripheral to the hunt for an Anathema (say, drawing an alastor's suspicion of aiding a Red List vampire) than they are to be part of the hunting expedition itself. In the end, remember: The Anathema are dangerous, to both your characters and your storyline, and should be treated as such.

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Alastors

If the archons and justicars are the law enforcement agencies of the Camarilla, the alastors are the secret police. Moving unseen and unnoticed through the Camarilla, they serve a variety of purposes at the Inner Circle's command. Mostly, however, the alastors hunt the Anathema relentlessly. While the anonymous existence of the alastors can be a difficult one, it does have its rewards, specifically a more-or-less universal immunity to prosecution from local princes. This immunity is occasionally honored in the breach instead of the observance, and there have been any number of trials of princes who uncovered and executed alastors for crimes committed while on the job. The balance is gradually shifting toward giving these roving investigators more leeway, however, as the importance of tracking down the sect's foes increases in urgency.

Alastors are usually archons of exceptional talent, who are secretly recruited by the Inner Circle for promotion into the secret service. As most archons are blood bound to their justicars, the mechanisms of such elevation would be grounds for all sorts of speculation - if anyone besides the Inner Circle and a few others actually knew the alastors existed.

Even among the elite alastors, there are degrees of eliteness. The best of the best (those who have taken down an Anathema from one of the top five positions on the Red List) are known as the Red Alastors, and they apparently exercise greater authority and powers than their fellows.

The Trophy

Every alastor who destroys an Anathema (and any vampire who nails a member of the Red List gets recruited to be an alastor, willy-nilly) receives the Trophy (sometimes called the Mark of the Beast by the cynical), a tattoo of ink and blood on the right palm. Alastors with the Trophy always wear gloves to hide this fact, as unlike normal tattoos, the Trophy never leaves a vampire's flesh. The mark made by the Trophy is recognizable to high-ranking archons and other sufficiently trained Kindred (even through gloves); apparently this flaw was built into the Trophy so that someone could watch the Camarilla's watchmen. If an alastor is easily identifiable to an archon, an alastor who defects can easily be found and destroyed.

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Дата добавления: 2015-12-08