Bending the Rules

Every good commander needs reinforcements. In the end, numbers do tell. This military truism holds as well for vampires as it does for mortals. Unfortunately, the Traditions forbid the most effective method of creating reinforcements, while the Sabbat is under no such restrictions. That means that every Camarilla field commander goes into the fight knowing she's at a disadvantage - and her enemies know it, too.

That's why, during wartime, the restrictions on the Embrace tend to get loosened just a little bit. Princes have been known to offer limited carte blanche to their sheriffs and other key allies to Embrace as many mortals as they need (so long as no one gets greedy) and to worry about the paperwork afterward. More often, the prince takes it on himself to create - and bond - the reinforcements. The Camarilla corridor in New York is a prime example of this tactic in operation; should the Sabbat abandon the city tomorrow, it would be awash in the Ventrue progeny of the prince, all of whom have been Embraced in the last three years as battlefield "promotions."

An additional benefit to this tactic is the fact that odds are, the "reinforcements" created thus have a fairly powerful Kindred of relatively low generation siring them. As a result, even if the fresh meat isn't particularly well-trained in the art of being a vampire, there's still a lot of innate power that the neonate can draw upon in the interests of self-preservation. In a tussle between an eighth-generation Ventrue neonate created by the local prince and a 13th-generation Brujah antitribu created as part of a mass Embrace by a street-level pack member, you'd do well to put your money on the Ventrue every time.

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whatnot present definite violations of the Masquerade, and as such are worthless to the Camarilla cause. A Ventrue primogen may have known Tacitus or Trajan in the flesh, but isn's in a position to use any of their suggestions.

In most cities, military or pseudo-military affairs are left to a city's sheriff and his childer, though as a matter of course the sheriff is granted leave to "deputize" other Kindred to help him in whatever matters are pressing. In reality, situations like that often emulate the recruitment practices of the golden age of the British Imperial Navy, with neonates plucked from the street and pressed into service.

It is only in extraordinary circumstances that the prince himself takes a hand in issuing orders; that's what he has a sheriff for, after all. When the prince himself has to start fighting in the streets, everything's already gone to hell. More commonly, the prince comes up with a general strategic overview of how he wants the city protected, what (and who) he considers most important and what's expendable, and then leaves the tactics to the sheriff.

Things don's always run smoothly in the heat of battle, and complicating factors like lingering conditionings from uses of Dominate and the power of the blood bond can make giving orders an exercise in frustration for even the most exceptional tactician. While defense of the city does take precedence over most personal rivalries, it's not always easy to get the impedimentia of peacetime out of the way so that war can be waged most efficiently.

Fronts

Camarilla tacticians know that they are beset on all sides. They also know that the Camarilla does not have the resources for a multiple-front war, even if that is the specter currently confronting them. With that in mind, the Camarilla makes a conscious effort to turn its enemies on one another, or at least to keep them off-balance to the point where the attacks come one at a time, rather than all at once.

To that end, the Camarilla's scions make more than occasional deals with the Devil. In a hundred cities, the dance goes on every night. Bargains are struck with incautious Lupines for swatches of territory that house Setite temples or Sabbat advance bases, or with a Sabbat pack far from home to "ally" against a marauding couple of kuei-jin (all the while attempting to maneuver the pack to the front lines to take the brunt of the enemy offensive, of course). Such short-term alliances are never carved in stone - treachery and the appearance of new threats means that these alliances are always short-term; the old ally is expendable to help deal with the new danger. The idea, in the end, is to preserve the Camarilla. Everything else is secondary - destruction of enemies is a method of safeguarding the Camarilla's security. There are even a fair number of important Camarilla figures (more than one might immediately suspect) who honestly would not care what the Sabbat did so long as it left the Camarilla alone. Alas, then, that vampiric population pressure, age-old rivalries and the manipulations of the masters of the Jyhad ensure that such a state can never come to pass.

Tactics

Дата добавления: 2015-12-08