Nosferatu

*Those you fear*

*"Everytime you dangled a foot over the bed, yoou made a promise. I'm collecting."*

“Shhh.” The voice behind you sounds like a squeezed handful of grave worms. It tells you that it will follow you home. It tells you that if you can make it to your front door, by the long path or the short, without turning around or nary a peep, it won’t kill you. When did you lose your shoes? The pavement turns to tongue meat, tasting your bleeding soles with every step.

Something dead approaches. You shouldn’t even know that it’s there. But you do! Imagine them all lurking, the sad monsters. Just hanging around unseen. Trying to feel like part of the surrounding humanity. They sit in cafes. They go to movies. They ride in cabs next to people on their way to the airport. Pretend they’re having conversations with the warm folk. Yet, their curse weeps like a cyst. People get the creeps. They don’t know why. You wake up with a horrid taste in your throat, thinking you swallowed a statistical spider. You don’t see the thing hanging above your face, drooling with longing. Oh, you would quiver to know what it would take to make a sad monster glad.

All vampires should be feared, but the Nosferatu control fear. They might look horrifying, or they might look like anyone else, but there’s something about them. Something of the grave, something of the deep places that writhe with too many eyes and limbs and fingers that are not fingers, something just…wrong.

The Haunts have always been there. Haven’t they? In the dark corners and crawly cracks of things. They haunted ancient Greece. Mothers prayed to them, even as their blackened babes ripened with plague. They called upon the name Nosophoros, “disease-bearing”; cursed by Artemis and Apollo to carry pestilent blessings. “O dread eater,” they prayed. “O glorious worm, O ruined mouth, O pale thing that is both ghost and flesh, please pass over my household tonight.” They haunted Rome, where the Brothers and Sisters Worm held court in the forever-dark of Necropolis. They haunted the hidden places of Romania when the empire fell. Through the dead rats, waste, and clotting gutters, they wriggled down the centuries, an undulant dread, lubricated on disgust.

Terror is a constant. Always, there is fear, always pouring, and the Nosferatu drink from a chipped cup. They wake to these strange nights, where grotesquery is chic. Always, they emulate not just the underground, but the Underworld. Look to the names of their modern Necropoli: Sheol in Los Angeles, Muspelheim in Hamburg, The Fields of Aaru in Detroit, and Mictlan in Mexico City. They answer the echo of something chthonic that wriggles in the ruins of their ribs. The elder Haunts tell stories of the Hidden Ones, the Gods Below, and even the most skeptical neonate can almost hum along to the song of the ancient and the sleeping. Whatever is in their Blood, it moves with a sickening plasticity of purpose. Every black drop is a carnival freak show. Horrid delights, grotesque wonders, endless putrid potential all stored in the family Vitae, expressed in endless variety through the petri dish of each living soul it slithers into.

See the street artist. For ten bucks, she’ll draw the most insightful caricature that you ever did see. They say for a little extra, she’ll draw something that’ll turn your hair white. You ask for the extra. Eels squeeze your lungs. Legs give out. You can’t take your eyes off your own warped face and what the impossible lines and angles reveal about yourself. She walks toward you, face like a rain-damaged charcoal drawing. She takes her payment. See the urban legend. Sometimes he is a hook-handed brute stalking lovers’ lanes, or a masked maniac with a corn knife.

Sometimes he appears as a bleeding woman when teenagers dare to say her name nine times before a darkened mirror. He writes spiraling limericks on bathroom stall walls, and if you read them backwards, you’ll die in three days. So they say. Sometimes he researches local legends. Sometimes he makes up his own. He creates living stories that evolve and mutate as they pass from lips to ears, fingers to keyboards. He infects minds, just as his Curse and fangs and Blood infect the neighborhood. The Kindred don’t know why he does this. Some say the circulating myths carry secret messages over the Cacophony. Some say it’s for his own vanity, an attempt at a more complete immortality. See the underground cinema club. Very exclusive. Hush hush. But you knew a cataphile who had an in with the urban subterranean exploration movement. “Do not fail to see this,” he said. How long have you been down here? One hundred seventy miles of catacombs beneath Paris. Roman-hewn stone.

Walls of skull and bone. Everyone walks silently. Tunnels full of glowing paint. Strange symbols. Melting-wax faces in the half light. An amphitheatre, terraces cut into the rock. Fullystocked concession stand and bar. Short horror films play on the full-sized screen. The things you see. The nervous laughter. The shrieks. Strobes interrupt the film, backlighting the silver screen, revealing the things writhing behind it. You’re so proud of yourself, the last one to keep from screaming, even when you cut your hand squeezing the Pepsi can. You join the chorus when pale salamanders, eyes sewn shut, lap up your blood. The Haunts are still here. They never left. They perch on the edge of your periphery. They swim with the floaters, contaminating your vitreous humor. Always behind you. The more you turn, the more tired you get. Hush now. There are no such things as monsters.
***Why you want to be us***

Never back down. Look the biggest, baddest guy you know in the eye and he’ll look away first. Even in the city’s most dangerous places, people give you a wide berth. Want to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers? Done and done. Want to scare the shit out of your asshole brother-in-law? Brother, it’s easy.
***Why you should fear us***

You don’t get a choice in the face of the Nosferatu. You can’t be brave. Your fear isn’t yours; it’s his, and he can mold it as he wishes. You will quake. You will cower. You will run. And you can’t do a damn thing about it. Terror, real  terror, is not sweaty palms, pounding hearts, and scre

ams — these are incidental. Terror is the stripping away of every construct of ego and society, all the things we like to think about ourselves. The Haunts have the power to tear that curtain down and force you to look at what’s hiding there. And nobody, but nobody, likes what they see.

***Why we should fear ourselves***
Better to be feared than loved? Maybe, but Machiavelli was presuming the prince had a choice. The Nosferatu don’t have that choice. They’ll always be outsiders among outsiders; and even if they can wield that as a weapon, it’s a weapon that can cut back. Isolation is their lot, and isolation feeds the Beast.

### Clan Origins

• In that year, the graves of every land vomited up a quota of their dead. Spontaneous Damnation given not to fresh, pliable cadavers, but the decayed and worm-kissed.

• They dug into the suffocating black of the hollow Earth, this coterie of Kindred, the Brothers Worm. They devoured the writhing god that lived there, tasted the immaculate slime. Divinity changed their souls and bodies. Embracing their new siblings and chthonic nobility, they spent an age in the darkness that is all tongues and fingers and shivering hairs, dancing to the churn of the Earth’s organs.

• In the coastal city, it was custom to cast deformed infants into the deep sea. They sank, wailing, never knowing the security of suckling upon a warm breast. Down in the crushing depths, the babes came to rest amongst the hideous creatures that hunt in the sunless eternity. Later, the castaway children returned with all they had learned, and they suckled upon that costal city.

• Once upon a midnight darkly, seven grotesques gathered around a glass coffin. The snowy skinned princess came to them in exile, saw the beauty that reposed beneath their deformities, and they hid her in their remote cabin. But poison and treachery had laid her low. The good-natured grotesques vowed to stand vigil over her lovely body, until a hero or wise person came to break the spell. But the nights grew long, and the winter was cruel, and no one came. In the throes of starvation and self-hate, they nibbled — only extremities — only what she would not miss. Tiny bites.

When the nightmare of winter broke into spring, they looked inside the glass coffin and saw naught but skin and bone. In horror, they fled in seven directions; and whether by the alchemy of the black apple or the curse of their act, their insides matched their outsides. And their children’s children’s children continue the feast — fearfully ever after.

### Nickname

Haunts

Stereotypes

• Daeva: The Serpents tempt with spoiled fruit. We worms hide inside, eating your apple to the core.

• Gangrel: For us, the worst has fallen that can befall. For them, it’s still crawling out of their skins.

• Mekhet: They are the silence. We are the stage whisper.

• Ventrue: There is a moment — after the meticulous  planning, the flawless execution, the perfect victory — a moment of triumphant respite. That is where we nest, in the shadow between seconds, waiting for you.

### Clan Bane

(The Lonely Curse): You are an avatar of disgust. Dread and discomfort oozes from you, scabbing everything over in the putrid film of your rotting soul’s exhaust. Your body is warped, or the world around you warps. This could manifest in ways grotesque or subtle. Fear and all its gibbering siblings come easy for you. Most other forms of social communion do not. Yours is a lonely Requiem.

When dealing with humans, treat the Nosferatu’s Humanity as two dots lower for the purpose of Social penalties, and treat any Presence and Manipulation failures as dramatic failures

### How to Make a Monster

A Nosferatu might begin play with any set of Attributes as primary. All the more tragic if they were strongly social in life. Most Haunts have high Composure ratings. They witness so much horror in their Requiems that it becomes difficult to unnerve them. More than a few Nosferatu develop high ratings in Resolve, over time, as the isolation of the curse often makes them self-reliant.

Members of this clan usually have an affinity for the Intimidation and Stealth Skills. This is a product of both their supernatural natures, and which abilities they have to hone to survive. As for Merits, Nosferatu often have ratings in Haven (underground lairs), and benefit from having Retainers to deal directly with the mortal world.

A young Nosferatu’s use of the Nightmare Discipline benefits most from Presence and Empathy, while the Discipline’s capstone power favors Intimidation. Strength dots benefit from the persistent effects of Vigor. Obfuscate suggests taking dots in Wits and Larceny, though most powers don’t require rolls. Perhaps the most important consideration when creating a Nosferatu character is the form his horrific curse takes. Players have more creative latitude here than with the other clans. Haunts are infected with a weirdness that warps their bodies or the world around them.

The curse can express itself as a series of physical deformities: bulging eyes, empty sockets that still yet see, corpselike skin, grotesquely long fingers, withered limbs that can somehow upend a car, hideously large mouth, mouths in places they should not be, vestigial limbs, skin that hangs like wet clay, scales, malformed skull, excreted fluids, a miasma of cloying dust, a stench. Players can find a treasure trove of inspiration by Googling images of subterranean or deep sea fauna.

The curse can express itself in ways stranger still: an animate shadow that moves when the Nosferatu is still; a shadow belonging to someone else (her last victim?); maggots manifesting in any place he lingers; objects (including her clothing) rotting away at her prolonged touch; strange twittering and giggles that manifest about him; her mouth never moving when she speaks; his voice always seeming to come from a few feet away from his head; lights flickering low in her presence. Perhaps the viewer’s eyes always slide off the Haunt’s features, and no one remembers what it was that was so wrong about him.

### In the Covenants

The Carthian Movement: Sometimes, the politics of change are the politics of fear. The people should not be afraid of their government. The government should be afraid of its dead. Underground networks and subterranean lairs are handy things when taking on the Man. Who better to wage guerrilla war on the entrenched establishment? Who better to initiate a reign of terror?

The Circle of the Crone: Some Haunts look at their own visages and see a reflection of the Crone. Divinity is terrible for mortals to look upon. These hags and hierophants preach that they are blessed with a divine beauty recognized by eyes ancient and deep that operate under different aesthetics. The Nosferatu murmur about the Gods Below. Why not worship the Hidden Ones more directly? Who better to become a perfect monster than one unfettered by a human face?

The Invictus: The First Estate knows the value of Haunt agents. Some Nosferatu creep to great heights. There are cities where rat lords and worm ladies hold nightmare court below. The Invictus of other clans are forced to descend, to speak courtesies on gritted teeth to the Haunt lackeys who guide them down, hoping the wretches do not abandon them in the dark. What was that Machiavelli said about fear?

The Lancea et Sanctum: Some Haunts look at their visages and see the faces of demons. Religion comes easy after that. In centuries past, Nosferatu serving the Spear carried sickness and pestilence as the wrath of Heaven upon humanity. Terrorizing sinners comes so easy to them. This gives their horrible curse a purpose. What wretch would not want to learn that her malady serves a divine plan? Who better to instill the fear of God? Who more fully embodies a divine plague on mankind?

The Ordo Dracul: Seclusion, and something to contemplate to fill that seclusion, suits the Nosferatu. The Haunts have strong stomachs and adjust quickly to performing grotesque surgeries and disturbing procedures. Underground sanctums make for ideal laboratories, and Dragons know the value of recruiting local Haunts. Some Nosferatu toil their nights away, subjecting themselves to all manner of esoteric experiments, trying to fix their twisted forms, or transcend them and enter the next stage of change. Who would be more driven to subvert his Curse?