Bruja

*Shit, the guy’s still back there after a mile and a half! Now that’s some quality barbwire!*

The bloodline known as the Filhos des Bruja (or Bruja’s Sons, or simply the Bruja) seems like something out a nightmare or drug trip from the ’60s. It’s a motorcycle gang of vampires, ghouls and a few handfuls of blood dolls — all dirty, mean-as-hell, leather-wearing monsters tearing up the American Southwest on roaring black American motorcycles when the sun goes down. It might almost be funny to those who’ve never seen the Bruja in action, but this isn’t some bullshit Sunday-afternoon club for impotent middle-aged men, or another over-commercialized Big Red Machine. These guys are locusts who hate you and who have no respect for notions of domain or the Kindred Traditions.

The gang first formed in the late ’40s around a charismatic punk bastard named Carlos Saavedra. Growing up a lazy, no-account orphan during the Depression, Saavedra kept himself amused with petty crime, animal cruelty and a burgeoning love of violence. Yet, no matter how many of his friends got roughed up or hauled down to juvenile detention for going along with his illicit whims, Carlos was never caught, arrested or even so much as charged for anything he did wrong. His uncanny luck earned him the nickname Hijo de Bruja (“witch’s boy”), which later became just Bruja. His knack for staying out of trouble couldn’t last forever, though, and shortly after he was drafted into the army to fight in the war, he was drummed right back out for drunkenness and incompetence. He was sent back home in disgrace, where he fell in with the Booze Fighters motorcycle gang.

It was some years later when Carlos caught the attention of an iconoclastic Gangrel who became obsessed with transforming Carlos “Bruja” Saavedra into a compliant but violent weapon who could threaten the established Prince in the Gangrel’s home domain. He Embraced Carlos and tried to urge him toward the Carthian cause, only to learn that his childe would have none of it. Bruja saw his cursed condition as a newfound power, and immediately went back to his gang to “gift” his six closest friends and accomplices with more of that same power. The seven of them then broke off from the Booze Fighters to form their own gang, the Filhos des Bruja. When Carlos’ sire tracked his errant progeny down and tried to correct his mistake, the entire gang jumped him and Carlos diablerized him on the spot.

Since then, the gang’s been growing slowly and getting worse

. Where it once comprised just seven troublemakers whose nastiest crimes included vandalism, assault and disturbing the peace, it’s now become a fairly widespread criminal organization. It makes money in drug-trafficking, prostitution, illegal arms dealing, extortion, smuggling, murder for hire and transporting illegal immigrants across the border, just to give a handful of examples. These activities draw customers and potential victims to them, but they also risk drawing Masquerade-shattering attention from local and federal authorities.

What’s worse, Bruja himself has disappeared in the last five years, which hasn’t helped to calm the gang down one bit. Before he left, Carlos demanded at least a modicum of restraint when the gang pulled in somewhere to feed — he even advocated keeping the gang’s Blood Potencies low in order to maintain the option of feeding on animal blood to take the edge off the Hunger. Without him, though, that restraint is dust in the wind, and it’s only a matter of time before the Bruja start descending on isolated Southwestern towns like modern-day Vikings, murdering everyone in sight and razing everything to the ground. It’s possible that a more mature Carlos Saavedra saw this potential arising in the gang and rode away from it all in disgust, but it’s just as likely that one or two of his treacherous cronies took that option out of his hands. Regardless, the bloodline remains, and even the youngest, meanest, most ignorant members proudly uphold the values of greed, willfulness and sloth that Carlos espoused before he disappeared. In his name, they do what they can to make his gang a symbol of fearsome power and hell-bound eternal freedom.

Parent Clan: Gangrel

Nickname: Scorpions

### Covenant

This bloodline is really too small and too young to include members representing all the covenants. In fact, most members’ only loyalty (half-hearted and cloudy though it might be) is to the gang and to the ideals of the founder. While that technically makes the entire bloodline unaligned — or unbound, which is the term Bruja preferred — the odd member drifts away and winds up with one of the established covenants. Some members of the gang have gotten it into their heads somehow that Bruja hooked up with the Ordo Dracul and won’t come back until he’s become something else altogether.

Their conviction inspires some jaded or gullible deserters to follow in his supposed footsteps. Others try to hook up with the Circle of the Crone, convinced that Bruja’s nickname means something, man. More rational Bruja make contacts with the Carthians when members of that covenant work hard to unseat power players and are willing to turn a blind eye to what the gang is up to in exchange for help. Sometimes said Carthians’ passion turns into revolutionary fervor, and a particularly charismatic movement leader can lure away young, excitable Bruja. No Bruja has ever hooked up with the Invictus or the Lancea Sanctum, though, except as a result of brainwashing, blackmail or forced conversion and acceptance of the sacraments. For the most part, the Bruja try to stay the hell away from those two covenants, lest powerful elders of either (or both) crack down on the gang’s whole operation. Not even Bruja himself pushed his infamous luck that much.

### Appearance

Most Bruja are black, white, Hispanic or of mixed heritage, anywhere on the spectrum among those three. They’re generally big, loud, hairy, tattooed, unkempt, bristling with body pierci

ngs and covered in road dirt (if not blood from a sloppy feeding). The

way they dress comes across as an homage to every outlaw biker movie that’s ever been made since the ’50s. They wear heavy leather or denim jackets, hobnail boots, metal helmets (if any), torn-up jeans and T-shirts, with “accessories” like aviator goggles, studded fingerless leather gloves, chain epaulets and bandanas to ward off flying dust. None of them wears any insignia to indicate what gang they belong to, but the bloodline is still small enough that most Kindred members recognize each other on sight. No self-respecting Bruja would ride anything but a burly, growling American bike — no rice rockets — or keep it in anything less than prime running condition. They might be rabble and scum, but they still have standards.

### Haven

The Bruja own and/or subsidize several out-of-the-way roadhouses and all-but-abandoned motels out there across the wastelands of the Southwest. They paid for the places with drug money or took them over as a result of too-successful protection rackets, and they’ve converted them into serviceable, sunlight-proof flophouses. These places aren’t much to look at and they have a fair market value of zero dollars, but they aren’t on any maps, and they’re within easy riding distance of (if not each other, at least) some great places to hang out, to have a drink or to get into a fight.

Background: At its current size, the Bruja gang has adopted a fairly strict rule about not Embracing anyone else unless existing vampires drop out. It happens, though, and when it does, it usually happens to people who are already like the rest of the gang. That is to say, big, tough, hard-riding sons of bitches (or just actual bitches) who want to drink blood and kick ass for the rest of eternity.

They’re not above occasionally Embracing (or at least creating Vinculums for) criminal contacts for the sake of expediency, and a handful of the really tough hangers-on were random hitchhikers, family men or police officers who got picked up and turned on some cruel whim.

The Bruja are somewhat lax about taking Gangrel they’ve never met before into the gang, since it hardly ever happens anyway. All a prospective Bruja has to do is earn the local head man’s respect (likely by surviving a surprise Bruja beatdown), prove he’s connected by blood to Bruja himself, then pony up a bike and get ready to ride out and meet the other boys and girls. Sounds easy, but if the rest of the gang doesn’t like him, the Bruja-wannabe starts back over at step beatdown.

### Character Creation

Bruja vampires don’t tend to be intellectual powerhouses, but neither are they entirely thuggish, apelike brutes. Granted, the bloodline does boast a high percentage of that ilk, but its nominal leaders are just as charismatic and commanding as they are powerful and tough (if not more so). As such, Physical and Social Attributes run a tight race with each other, with Mental ones lagging behind. Most Bruja rely on Physical Skills above all others, followed by Social and Mental as the individual sees fit. Various Social Merits help represent the breadth of the Bruja’s criminal operations and the influence and impact they have on the communities they terrorize. It also makes sense to buy at least a second dot of Blood Potency since a character’s just a punk Gangrel without it.

### Weakness

Founded in indolence and caring little for anything other than their own well-being, the Bruja are given to the same feral urges that infect and overtake their Gangrel forebears. Their predatory laziness has a more serious effect on them, however, when it comes to feeding. Like many predators in the animal kingdom, the Bruja would rather stuff themselves as soon as the opportunity to feed presents itself than hunt carefully every night to maintain a baseline satiation. As a result, a player suffers a -3 penalty on rolls to resist the Wassail (hunger frenzy).

### Organization

The extended pack mentality of the gang is the extent to which the Bruja adhere to any form of organization. The founder’s closest companions are nominally in charge for now, but only until Bruja deigns to come back and start tearing up the road with his boys again. Said companions constantly vie for dominance among one another, and their bickering polarizes the followers around them, but the gang as a whole puts up a pretty unified front.

They’re practically of one mind against outsiders who try to give a Bruja any shit, and even the occasional knockdown, drag-out between Bruja rarely results in more than somebody getting a baseball bat across the teeth or a switchblade under his collar bone.

### Concepts

Bar brawler, blood-doll pimp, coyote (in the illegal-border-crossing sense), dealer in drugged blood, drag racer, drug dealer, loan shark, motorcycle mechanic, Sons of Anarchy