Diablerie

Diablerie, or the Amaranth, is the act of feeding on another Vampire to the point of their death and beyond, consuming their very essence and gaining power from it. Some murmur that in doing so they consume their victim’s very soul, denying them any type of afterlife.

Either way it is universally considered to be a risk to both body and soul, due to the difficulty in performing it successfully and getting away with it.

Committing Diablerie

To attempt Diablerie your character must drain all of the blood from another Cainite and then continue to feed. At this point, something else replaces the blood, and is sucked from the body until all that remains is ash.

Once the victim’s body is empty of blood, the character committing Diablerie must spend five consecutive rounds focused on doing so. If you are interrupted you fail and the target simply dies. If successful, the date of the Diablerie will be marked on the character sheet. 

Effects of Diablerie

Diablerie causes your character to immediately lose one Road Rating, no matter the Road. This action fills the needs and desires of the Beast, and sundering such control to it always carries a cost. This loss will be in addition to any loss caused through your character violating the Tenets of their Road.

If your character has successfully diablerised someone of a lower generation, they will decrease in generation as their blood grows in strength. It improves your character’s generation by one step.

The mark of Diablerie is clear to those who know to look for it. It can be detected by certain applications of powers such as Auspex for up to several years afterwards.

Gaining Disciplines

Your character will gain one dot in a Discipline that their victim knew, and may gain an additional dot for each Generation that the victim was lower than the Diablerist.

Stealing Secrets

To reflect glimpses of the victim’s memory lodging in the Diablerist’s mind, the Diablerist may provide the ST Team with one question, plus an extra question for each step the victim was lower in generation than the Diablerist. These questions may be written. 

The STs will provide an answer in the form of a fragmentary thought of the same detail as the question 

For example, if a Diablerist asks “how many havens did my victim have?” the ST team might answer “you get a memory of shipping three coffins but don’t recall the destinations”; whereas, if a Diablerist asks “where is my victim’s mine located?” the ST team might answer “you get a memory of passing north through the town of Fugasberg and being glad you will be there within the hour”. 

As glimpses of memories can be misinterpreted based on the Diablerist’s desires or beliefs, any questions that have no true answer will receive a false one. 

For example, if the Diablerist asks “Why was my victim pretending to be Brujah?” when the victim really was Brujah, the Ref’s might answer “you remember handing a document to a Toreador Elder”, without mentioning the conversation ending with the Toreador being grateful for inter-clan co-operation.

If Diablerie is committed during a session, the player must provide their questions no later than 3 days after the session. Any questions not provided by this point are lost as the memories have faded. The ST team will strive to provide answers with clear time before the downtime deadline; however, to ensure information the character hopes to use immediately is received in good time, players should indicate a rough priority when submitting questions, especially where the number of questions is high due to a significant gap between generations.

If the Diablerie occurs during downtime, the ST Team will inform the player how many questions their character gets and provide the answers as part of the downtime return.

Flashes of Insight

In place of asking one or more questions, the player may request “Flashes of Insight” to represent something triggering a brief memory that provides some slight advantage. Each question surrendered in this way will apply a one-off benefit of the ST team’s choice to a downtime action.

Learning Disciplines

Your character may also be allowed to learn certain out-of-clan Disciplines that were Clan Disciplines for their victim without a teacher. This is at the ST team’s discretion.

Risks of Diablerie

Cainites whisper often of the dangers of Diablerie. The experience is euphoric and can become increasingly addictive. Indulging the Beast only weakens the mind, and often a Cainite addicted to Diablerie rapidly becomes a Wassail, losing themselves entirely to the Beast. 

Pushing oneself to the Spiritual and Physical limit to perform this act also means Diablerie often pushes the Diablerist into Torpor, as the act can require time to rest and recuperate properly. Some even say of such Kindred that they often awaken changed and not as they were - or who they were - before.