Diablerie
One of the greatest sins that a vampire can commit is to perform the foul and heinous act known as diablerie, once known also as Amaranth. This practice requires one vampire to drink from another, exsanguinating all of the victim’s blood and continuing past that point to feast upon a vampire’s very soul. To do so imbues the diablerist with new potency, permanently concentrating her blood. This act terrifies elders, who fear that a time may come when young, thin-blooded vampires will rise up and attempt to steal the elders’ power, consuming their souls in the process. Vampires known to have practiced such an act are typically hunted down and destroyed.
There are many spiritual beliefs concerning diablerie. Some clans believe it is a spiritual act, one that forever merges the soul of the diablerist with her victim. Others claim that it is a vampire’s way of delivering God’s greatest punishment, removing a particularly evil soul from the cycle forever. Many vampire faiths have doctrines explaining the nature of diablerie within their belief systems, and even outside of these religious beliefs, vampires are highly superstitious and fearful of the act.
Undead legend tells many dark tales of murderous childer betraying and cannibalizing their sires, and it is for this reason more than any other that elder vampires harbor a great distrust for weaker vampires. Further, diablerie is addictive, and those who commit this sin even once find that their Beasts rage forever with a powerful, almost unconquerable desire to do so again. Even centuries later, they can still remember the taste of the heart’s blood, and they occasionally awaken from dreams wherein they were experiencing the blissful moment of gluttony over and over again.
Those who commit diablerie experience the spiritual merging of the consumed soul into their bodies. Memories, along with the power of that individual’s blood, surge through the practitioner at the time of the act, and those memories will linger for the rest of the vampire’s eternal existence. In ancient days, clans such as the Salubri and the Assamites claimed to know secrets that allowed diablerists to access their victims’ memories freely and live in peace with those they had consumed. Few modern vampires have this capacity or knowledge. A diablerist finds herself forever changed, her personality affected by the resonance of the person she diablerized. Unlike the Beast, the victim’s spirit is not sentient within the diablerist, but rather exists as a subtle influence, like old habits or unquestioned beliefs. A diablerist will find herself remembering half-understood moments of her victim’s life as if they were her own, and she will discover that her perspective on the world has forever been colored by the personality of the individual whose spirit she has consumed.
Committing Diablerie
To commit diablerie, you must torpor a vampire and drain all of her blood. Once she is torpored and out of blood, you must use five standard actions devouring her soul. These actions must be used in consecutive turns. If a turn goes by where you do not continue the process of diablerie, you fail, and the target turns to ash.
A successful diablerie of a character of better Generation thickens your blood and improves your generation by one step towards Caine. If this occurs, you should make the following changes to your character sheet:
1. The date of your diablerie should be clearly marked on your character sheet for record keeping. This will help your Storyteller track your XP expenditures in the future.
2. If your character gains a Generation that makes it impossible for you to learn techniques, you lose access to all previously purchased techniques and the XP spent on those powers is refunded.
3. You retain all of the skills and backgrounds that you purchased at a less-potent Generation at the previous cost. Future purchases are made at the cost of your current Generation.
The Effects of Diablerie
Once you have committed diablerie, you suffer from the following effects:
• You automatically lose 1 dot of Humanity. If your character is on an alternate Path of Enlightenment, you instead gain 4 Beast traits.
• The mark of diablerie can be detected by Aura Perception for up to one year after the diablerie occurred.
• Shards of the consumed soul remain active in your soul for the next year. Should you elect to diablerize while these soul shards are still active, your spirit surrenders to the Beast, entering wassail. The character becomes an NPC wight.
