I'm currently playing episode 1, but based on my limited knowledge in Vampire: The Masquerade lore, the MC seems to be tearing down the walls that make certain powers exclusive to certain clans.
Hi
Karnon,
I certainly do not expect you to read through dozens...hundreds..? of pages to get caught up on what is going on as theory crafted by our crack team of experts here on F-95. Some of us (myself included in this group) are actual paying supporters on Patreon, and some are good ol' pirates. There are several games I am in the second group and a couple I am in the first. This happens to be my favorite game and that includes games I have paid for like BaDIK and City of Broken Dreamers.
To catch you up super fast-
The game mechanics are loosely based on Vampire the Masquerade. Some of the inspiration of how clans are thematically represented are also used. After that it pretty much stops.
There is no Caine, no Lilith, no First City per se, no Jyhad, no Camarilla (though certain social forms are used) and thus far no real Sabbat.
The vast majority of the current vampires are young. There are elders in the city, but these elders are for the most part, far from Methuselah status.
The Princep, and his council of elder advisors are the most powerful group of vampires that most of the city vamps know about.
Sharon is a young Ancilla who has committed a few vampire naughty items in her past, as she clings to her humanity and tries to be genuinely good. For a while folks thought she might be various clans, but I think I can safely say that she, and Eloise, and the Princep at a minimum are in a clan similar to Ventrue.
Astrid is something else. I think a lot of folks think she is Toreador like, and for a long time I floated a theory that she was a Tzimisce using Vicissitude to bend her gender due to some text in the story. I have since bowed out of that thought at least for now out of respect to the great crowd of supporters for this game and
Ayhsel in particular as he was losing sleep over it.
Marcius and his brood of thugs are almost certainly Brujah like and show it by their behavior. (Troile style not Brujah style)
The Nos are fairly straight forward, and Markus is a powerful elder in the city, by the standards of the city vamps.
You will encounter a girl and an unfortunate guy at the time of investiture, which are direct minions of the Princeps. One (the girl) is probably a Ventrue type, and the guy who is malformed is almost certainly Gangrel like.
There are other elders and other vampires that float by, but most of them are not of any particular note or power. Lord Carius is interesting because even though he does not look human, he is not deformed enough to be a Nos. He could well be a Gangrel whose form is reptilian, or possibly a Setite type, or even one of the necromantic vampire lines.
All of these vampires operate at a certain level of understanding of who and what vampires are, and do not really know anything about truly ancient history, or ancient vampires.
The following are not in that group-
Vision Girl, Dream Girl, Girl in the Red Haze. We thought for a long while, due to hints dropped in the game that she could be anyone from Lilith to the Goddess Artemis. After some conversations with the authors, I can confirm that her origin is mythical to Calisto. By this I mean she was a myth, a rumor, a whisper in the darkness. Much more ancient than Calisto.
Calisto is from about 2500 BCE Greece and may well have a story similar to the Nymph High Priestess of Artemis, Aphrodite, or even Hera. All of those goddesses had blood sacrifices and were grouped as Cthonic deities. (not Cthulu, but Cthonic which are blood cults aka perfect set ups for Vampire Gods.) Calisto belongs to a group of vampires that are what we would call Methuselahs, bordering on Antediluvian (ie 4th or 5th gen multi thousand year old vampire)
Cindy is her major domo, and likely in her clan but further down, and we (me) have pretty much pieced together enough mythology that would support some of her clan disciplines (Calisto that is), and that she had one bad childe and Fabian who I will speak to in a moment, thought she would never breed again.
Calisto is the leader of a group of vampires that support the idea that all vampires are born from the ancient mythical gods of old. Thus there could be several first generation or second etc.
As far as Calisto is concerned, if she knows about our Vision Girl, she has not eluded to her yet, and Ptolemy and LikesBlondes both told me that as far removed the princep and his other 3-400 year old elders are from a 4-5000 year old vampire, and vision girl is mythically older than that, say Sumer, or Egypt or Davidians. At this point we are looking at a 6-as far back as 10k years ago potentially, with the understanding that they could always be on the younger edge of these eras of history. Calisto could have come from as late as 5-600 years BCE which still makes her nearly 3000 years old. The point is that Vision Girl is as much a jump in age and power to Calisto as Calisto is to the relatively young group of vampires running the city.
Fabian is related in a vampiric way to Calisto and the MC, perhaps by concurrent bloodlines which are staunch allies or even a common further back ancestor. Fabian is not Calisto's childe or he would have referred to the MC as his brother, at least that is the current thinking. So Fabian is almost certainly a Methuselah, probably dating back to the Crusades, or the Norman Invasion, or it could be earlier than that. He practices Tremere or Giovanni like magic, which thus far our MC has not demonstrated.
Virgil........ Virgil is almost certainly something from Game of Thrones, and works behind the scene to make things happen the way he wants. That way the target is not on his back. I also strongly suspect that he is the Him that the Vision Girl refers to while musing away in a red haze. I furthermore think that he is a shape shifted and mentally shielded ultra powerful vampire, which is Calisto's bad first childe. I think he is here in the city for round two with Calisto, and the Vision Girl manipulated Kassandra/Malia to have the MC placed in front of Calisto at the right time to have him embraced. I know we are not going to become an over powered monster, capable of killing everyone in sight, but we are probably created to give Calisto an edge. The Vision Girl knows about Virgil and is acting against him with the pushes she exerts for the MC.
Virgil, Fabian, (possibly Cindy and Kassandra), and Calisto and the MC are on an entirely different power level than the rest of the city. I think we will have our time to face off against some powerful vamps of the city, but they are powerful in a different game, a different level. I do not think that many in the city will be able to stand up to you if you are maxing out your abilities.
A common misperception is that vampires only have disciplines from within their clan. They can actually learn other disciplines within the source game VtM as well as here. So your comment about crossing boundaries of clan disciplines is understandable, but is really not an issue. The MC almost certainly has Celerity, Auspex, Potence if you are working on Prowess, Claws which are more than wolf claws, more like bear claws (greek mythic stuff) Whispers, Presence as he was able to get the busty red head to look his way without eye contact, obfuscation, and probably eventually domination, as Calisto used it to get him to follow her. That is quite an array of powers for a new vampire, but if he is her first childe in 2-3000 years and she is 4th generation making him 5th generation, it is pretty doable both in the rules of VtM and apparently in Rebirth.
I hope this helps out. As usual I got more long winded than intended, but at least
c3p0 will not yell at me for not breaking it up into paragraphs!
Peace