Gangrel

*Those you can't kill.*

*"Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Rabbit, how do you do? I'm the Br'er Devil and I'm coming for you."*

Wasn’t the howling. Weren’t the claws or magnesium eyes or the lizard brain keening, “Run, run, run!” Was the change. Like them trashy drive-in horrors, only on rewind. Monstrous bulk shrinking — snout flattening — fangs dulling down to pearls — fur receding to a naked obscenity. The smiling little girl walking towards you on filthy feet. That’s what did it. Ten thousand beasts pressing out on her belly like it’s a theatre curtain on opening night. That’s what emptied your bowels and sanity. Something dead approaches. It comes from way out, where The End eats the road. It is a brother to owls and a companion to scarecrows. No escape. You’ll try to kill it, but it will not die. You’ll try to outrun it, but it will lope after on four feet. You’ll try to escape, but it goes where other monsters fear to tread. You’ll lock yourself in a tower or a vault, but it will come on nighted wings or as ravenous smoke. You’ll plead to its human face, but it will only grin and say, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” You’ll die wondering whom the monster quoted.

The Gangrel are the ultimate survivors. Close to the Beast and close to the bone, they’re primal. No. Feral! They’re tough, shrugging off what should be terrible wounds as the weapons harmlessly thunk in their dead flesh. They’re out there, and you can’t do a damn thing about them. More than any other clan, they are a reminder that the greatest lie the Devil ever told was, “Congratulations, you escaped the food chain!”

***Where do they come from?***

Fuck you! That’s where. Ask the sun where it comes from. Ask the moon. Ask Ekhidna, Baba Yaga, and Enkidu. Their history is the space between sharp teeth and your throat. They are the ripping, barking now-now-now! Still want the stories? Best get rambling. Hit the freeways, highways, rails, trails, and cornfields lovely, dark, and deep. Read the runic rhymes on ancient stone. Riddles written on the walls of moaning alleys. Fragments of epics scratched into condom machines in gas station bathrooms.

Seek out the oral traditions, echoed by the bleating herd. Ask the meth-head trucker about that black dog that harshed his buzz. Ask about the Unholy and her crows. The Gangrel make more bogeymen amongst their Kindred, per capita, and that’s a fact. They are the voice in the bog. They are the thirsty earth. They are the reason men discovered fire. They are all mouths on the devouring road.

See the storyteller. A strange bird migrating from town to town. She perches in pubs, forest

preserves, parks, hospitals, and the cafetorium stages of grade schools. The best seat is reserved for the storyteller. A professional orator, she specializes in ghost stories. October’s when she’s in season. She travels, tells tales, and collects them. She publishes collections of folklore. But some urban legends, the ones that fit like jagged jigsaw pieces, she keeps. She brings them back to her roost, writes them on the walls and ceiling. Laying on the floor, she takes it all in, unfocusing her eyes. As she hatches and crosshatches the scrawl, patterns emerge. She licks her lips, hungry for the locations of certain slumbering ancients.

See the CEO. They say successful businessmen have personality traits in common with sociopaths and predators. He’s Shere Khan in a three-piece suit. The rules really didn’t change. Eat or be eaten. Greed is good. The skyscraper is just another jungle, and he claimed it, floor to floor, marking with his own blood. He knows everything that goes on in his jungle.

Every jackal and leopard bows to him. How they yowl, growl, and howl. Sometimes the primal metaphors cut too literal. He messes up so many suits. But he just sloughs them off like a molting animal. In his penthouse apartment, there is a closet with rows of suits like rotating shark teeth.

See the drowned ones. The lake is a popular vacation spot, but there are stories. Rangers still don’t know why deer spontaneously leap into the water never to come out. When some folk look at their reflections on the mirror surface, they see pale faces that are not their own. Night-time swimmers sometimes spot their fellows going rigid in the water, eyes glassy, mouths gaping open, turning a shade more pale. Sometimes, during these spells, the swimmers get aroused and erect, but they’re always too embarrassed to tell their friends. They just dip their legs back in the lake, hoping for another bite.

Let the other clans wrestle and strain with esoteric riddles of what it is to be a monster. The Gangrel offer something more pure. Power without guilt. Lust without doubt. The other clans need. Always needing. They need havens, an audience, solitude, mortal institutions, or secrets. The Gangrel take what they want. All that they need is locked away in the endless potential of their horrific clay.

***Why you want to be us***

With the other clans, you’re all afraid of your Beast. Oh, it’ll get me into trouble. Oh, it’ll kill the people I care about. Woe is fucking you. No. As a Gangrel, you can’t be stopped and you don’t want to stop. The creatures of the wild run with you, and even better, you can strip away your disguise of human flesh and become one of them.

***Why you should fear us***

See that business about being unstoppable. We’re serious there. The beast comes at you, you unload your last three bullets into it, it doesn’t die, doesn’t stop, doesn’t flinch. And oh, yeah, it brought friends. The night has a thousand mouths. Say goodbye to your entrails.

***Why we should fear ourselves***

Self is a precious thing. Surrendering to, or even using, the Beast the way we do means sacrificing our sense of self to our inner hungers. Even our bodies are no longer our own, as we grow grotesque claws or transform into mist. It’s not only in our minds, but swimming under our skins. There is no escape from the Beast, not for our prey and certainly not for ourselves.

### Clan Origins

• Ekhidna! Mother of Monsters. Your children call upon your name! But not so loudly. All the world is your womb. All of your children are embryonic sand sharks, hunting and devouring one another in the utero dark. Whatever is left will grow into the next lifecycle.

• In the wastes outside the Roman Empire, barbarians fornicated with savage gods. The bestial offspring of these couplings craved blood, and one fed upon Gnaeus of Ventrue. The Lord’s blood debased the creature, and it became like him, a feral Kindred of a kind.

• Bogs have deep memories. A melting glacier shard forms a lake. Something prehistoric waits in the water — something that traveled thousands of miles in an ice sarcophagus — something that brewed the oxygen from the water with decay, choking the fish — something that urged ancient men to throw sacrifices into its mouth, then preserved those bodies with liquid necromancy, tanning flesh in water the color of strong tea. The first bog body tore through the placental layer of sphagnum moss and trembling earth. Only death can nourish it. It preserves some of the dead it swallows, pickling the corpses with the black bog water in its veins.

• Once upon a midnight darkly, a huntsman wept in the woods. He had failed his queen. In disgrace and despair, he resigned himself to lay exposed to the elements, as still as death. When the woodland creatures came to peck and gnaw upon his meat, he made no protest. The sun scoured away what flesh remained. The soil embraced his bones. Many and many a night later, the ground spat him up. When his descendants call, the woodland creatures answer, for each contains a tiny piece of the ancient in its belly, and all the world is a flapping, loping, crawling graveyard — savagely ever after.

### How to Make a Monster

All Gangrel are survivors. Those who are not quickly change, or litter the earth with their ash. But not all Gangrel are alphas. Some saunter down the streets as the dog with the biggest bite. Some creep and hide as scavengers. Some move about as shifting chameleons. Many Gangrel go through several phases in the unholy lifecycles of their Requiems.

A Savage is molded by her environment and situation. The stereotypical Gangrel allots primary slots to her Physical Attributes and Skills, with plenty of points of Stamina, Survival, and Brawl. But there is room for variation. A Savage who survives on all growl and bluster might take Social Attributes as primary, and load up on Intimidation. A clever coyote of a Gangrel might survive through sharp Mental Attributes and a lot of Stealth and Larceny. Perhaps he swims in political waters, latching on to more powerful monsters like a remora, flattering the fiends using high scores in Manipulation and Persuasion. Some Gangrel quickly abandon their Humanity, to become better predators. And some Gangrel practice human mimicry, down to an art, to become better predators.

If your character is going to make heavy use of Animalism, you’ll want Manipulation and Animal Ken to start, adding Presence and Intimidation as he matures. More than any other clan, the Gangrel’s Beast expresses itself. This expression, through Protean, is unique from Savage to Savage, and affords a player a spot of creativity.

What is your Beast like? Is it cold and reptilian? Is it an aquatic predator like a shark or leopard seal? Is it at home underground or in networks of alleys like a rat? Perhaps it is more akin to a bat or bird of prey, comfortable when looking down from great heights. It might rage like a wolf or bear. It might have a mad hyena cackle. It might be a chimera amalgam of creatures. Decide the flavor of your Beast, and work with the Storyteller on how to best manifest it through Protean. When not employing her shapeshifting powers, what behaviors does your character betray that subtly communicates this Beast?

Nickname: Savages

### Stereotypes

• Daeva: Watch the peacock eat its own wings to make itself tame.

• Mekhet: The shivering Shadows are always watching. So we just ramble to places they fear to go.

• Nosferatu: The abandoned, half-finished sculptures of a lazy Beast.

• Ventrue: Heya, little brother. Did you know that you’ll last only as long as their termite towers? That’d make me nervous, staring down the mouth of forever.

### Clan Bane

(The Feral Curse): The Beast lethargically coils under the R-Complex of most Kindred. But you and the Beast are as thick as thieves. It rises and rips out of your skin to protect you from the bad, bad world. But it has a price. It’s harder to resist the Beast’s call, harder still to remember why you should even want to.

All her dice pools to resist frenzy are limited by her Humanity dots. This weakness does not affect dice pools to ride the wave.

### In the Covenants

The Carthian Movement: Change is a savage enterprise. The dead don’t like new ideas, but the Gangrel are dynamic in a vicious sort of way. They are the roar of the revolution and the messengers of the movement, traveling city to city. Some began as souls too wild to domesticate. Others are former hounds of the First Estate, tired of their masters’ abuse. Their nature confounds the tactics of the establishment. How do you threaten the havens of those who sleep in the earth? How do you bring the heat down on those who can skip town at a moment’s notice?

The Circle of the Crone: Whole murders of Gangrel perch in the Mother’s Army. The clan’s oral tradition teems with fierce mother figures like Ekhidna. Young Savages are easy recruits. Primal blood sings in tune with primordial magic. Hierophants lead Wild Hunts in the form of howling wolves. Feral witches roar to the stars and tap the wisdom of the dark earth. Who better to explore what it is to be a monster, than those so intimate with the Beast?

The Invictus: For all of their cagey instincts, road lust, and hunger for freedom, some Gangrel respond well to strong alphas. And who is more alpha than the First Estate? These Gangrel find their niches as the knights and growling hounds of lords and ladies. But some rise higher. They learn to translate their predatory natures to politics. They attain savage nobility. For so too does the Invictus respond well to alphas, and who is more elementally alpha than the get of lion gods and demon wolves?

The Lancea et Sanctum: Some Gangrel get religious when they realize they can call all of God’s beasts to his vengeful purpose. The Savages make useful converts to the Chapel and the Spear. Who better to travel the world’s hidden places in the search of relics? Faith molds people, and monsters are made of even more malleable clay. Some Gangrel become bestial seraphs, the wings of bats and owls ripping from out their backs. Some angels have more cause than others to say, “Be not afraid.”

The Ordo Dracul: The Gangrel fascinate the Dragons. More often than not, it is the Order that approaches the Gangrel. Their protean bodies merit study. Endless variation that breaks the monotony of the eternally dead flesh. The Savages have more to offer the Dragons than just the physical. Creatures willing to leave behind their physical identities attain the sort of mindset needed to chase the elusive mysteries of the Ordo Dracul. Who better to evolve the Curse? Who else has that elemental audacity?