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youth, discovered that sect members of one generation became anachronisms the next.

At first, America lived up to its reputation as the land of plenty. Immigration into the US saw the arrival of over 450 million European refugees between 1845 and 1914, providing Cainites with a surfeit of vitae. Perhaps foolishly, we threw ourselves into the hedonism of the Roaring 20s and allowed our numbers to grow unchecked. The sect war with the Camarilla had quietened for the moment, and many Tzimisce pursued their private agendas or basked in the festive atmosphere of America’s Golden Age. The First World War saw thousands of jobs in northern industrial factories open up, resulting in a large population shift of black Americans from the south. Large communities developed in Chicago, Detroit and Buffalo, with Harlem itself becoming a mecca of prosperity for hundreds of blacks from around the US. Although the Toreador antitdm might proclaim themselves as the only patrons of art, the fact remained that a number ofTzimisce shared their interests. Harlem, styled the “New Negro Capital,’’ saw the birth ofAfro-centric art forms, including jazz. This in turn drew many soon-to-be-great musicians including Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway.

Ethnic Tzimisce went so far as to sponsor nightclubs or throw rent parties to promote the festive atmosphere and liberal stance toward sexuality (and, naturally, to draw their herds from). Of course, the local Tzimisce often clashed with Toreador over “proprietorship” of Harlem’s mortal talent, but the fighting rarely erupted in the open.

Instead, it manifested as nightclubs like Gumby’s Bookstore and the Daisy Chain quietly competed with one another for clientele or in the occasional “gangland” hit.

Unfortunately, the Great Depression saw to the demise of Harlem’s promise. The government’s so-called laissez faire policy gave rise to a disparity between the economic classes (with one percent of the populace wielding40 percent of the wealth) and upended the social standings of many Tzimisce. A fair number of elders who’d enjoyed nobility and unprecedented wealth in the Old World, suddenly found their assets nearly depleted or gone, while younger Fiends, savvy to the economy of the time, used their mortal influences to jockey into a position of financial security. Still, this didn’t help the Sabbat, which prided itself on its independence from mortal concerns. The Camarilla, taking advantage of the thoroughly corrupt administration of President Harding in the early 1920s to buy off key officials and politicians, used their new friends to harry the Sabbat. Police launched daytime raids against our communal or private havens under orders to clear out the squatters, while bankers foreclosed on our assets under the broken terms of forged loans. We fought back, but remainedonthe defensive well past W I I .

CLANBOOK: TZIMIXE The Sabbat-Camarilla conflict turned into a paper war, and many old-guard Tzimisce, affiliated with the sect or not, could not defend themselves in these forums.

Instead, they continually relied on Embracing newer generations of mortals to serve as their vanguard, inadvertently creating a vast generation gap between them and their progeny. The elders used the young Fiends as their contemporary proxies but not without staunch resistance. Young Tzimisce wanted to explore their own unlives and not be burdened by their anachronistic sires.

As a result, these neonate Tzimisce gravitated toward the independent-minded Sabbat and adopted its more violent precepts as a means of “threatening” their elders.

After all, the Tzimisce young did rebel once before in the name of freedom and could easily do so again. w w II’~AFTFRMATH Hitler’s rise to power brought a twofold invasion across Eastern Europe’s soil - the German advance, followed by the Russian pursuit. When the Nazis stormed the continent, Sabbat Tzimisce feared little. They took advantage of the reign of terror and used the chaos to strike at weakened Camarilla holdings. Their prime advantage lay in the fact that Hitler despised aristocracy, thus barring many elder Camarilla Kindred from influencing the regime. Conversely, the Old World Tzimisce fit the description of nobility to the letter. Rather than risk calling down the entire German Wehrmacht, they allowed the Nazis to plunder their keeps for trinkets while keeping their havens, true treasure and srlachta hidden.

If the Tzimisce suffered little from the Germans, then the Russians offered plenty of misery by comparison. The Red Army fought its battles by saturating their targets for days beneath a barrage of artillery. Then they advanced across the smoldering terrain, dispensing with the remaining opposition. The retreating German army fortified itself within the ancient keeps between Russia and Berlin.

The most powerful Tzimisce managed to obscure or hide their fortresses using arcane sorcery, but many met Final Death when the Russians shelled their occupied manses from a distance. The torpid Shaagra, one of the eldest of the Old WorldTzimisce, burned to ash along with Prague, sending shockwaves through fractured Tzimisce society.

The havens of many elder Tzimisce also fell under Communist rule. Old World Tzimisce had lost much during the war, and Stalin’s madness threatened to take away even more. Realizing their precarious positions, the elder Fiends sent envoys to their cousins trapped behind the USSR’s borders. Their efforts toward solidarity created the Oradea League, a mutual defense agreement and statement of purpose (autonomy from the Sabbat) among Old World Tzimisce. Ironically, the league flourished because of Communism; Stalin’s xenophobia protected them from the sect by way of restricted travel, and the Tzimisce were reunited with Russian Fiends like Darvag and Piotr Krezhinsky for the first time in decades. By the fall of the Soviet Union, the now stronger Oradea League resisted the Sabbat’s bullying without falling prey to its thirsty packs. In a show of solidarity, however, many of the wh wh CHAPTER ONE: A RABBLE OF FIENDS y9-- league’s members joined the sect as “diplomats,” advisors, honorary bishops and prisci in the modern nights.

RUSSIA’S FIENDS Piotr Krezhinsky, a survivor of Ivan the Terrible’s rule over Russia, played voivode, while Darvag, his sire, slipped in and out of torpor. The collapse of Czarist rule to the Bolshevik Revolution severed the lines of communication between the Russian Tzimisce and our European clanmatea Still, we survived, finding Stalin’s paranoid regime much better suited to our collective temperament.

While the Brujah focused on their grand designs and aspirations for Communism, Stalin destroyed churches and persecuted the religious. This, in turn, robbed the mortal populace of their faith and destroyed much of what was once holy ground, thus allowing many Damned to act with greater impunity. Meanwhile Piotr busied himself by ensconcing a few Fiends in the Cheka, or secret police, because it allowed us unprecedented intelligence on affairs both within and outside the Soviet Union’s borders.

By the time the Cheka finally became the OGPU (United State Political Directorate), we had a steady flow of hundreds of unaccounted-for prisoners and victims for our herds from the millions thought murdered and buried in unmarked pits. WWII proved that our clan remained as vulnerable as our weakest link: mortals. To prevent another vitae shortage because of the underfed and winnowed populace, many Fiends maintained private herds for feeding or vassalage should another war ever devastate Europe again. Ironically, many mortals entered these arrangements willingly, because we fed them well and even ensured them some measure of comfort compared to Russia’s abject poverty.

Additionally, some clever Tzimisce also arranged for a handful of small gulag concentration camps and KGB prisons out of the 2000 facilities across Arctic Russia to fall into the hands of their Bratovitch majordomos. By estimates, the early Russian regime incarcerated close to 10 percent of its population in the gulags. Vorkuta Camp alone killed more prisoners than Auschwitz, though admittedly over a longer period of time. These facilities became unrestricted havens for the Tzimisce to exist openly without fear of discovery. Unfortunately, as we’ve often discovered, when there are few restrictions, some of our brethren can take their proclivities to extremes.

Conversely, Russia possessed no state agencies to ensure the well-being of gulag prisoners. Thus, the Tzimisce still speak excitedly of Tmu Tarakan, the Kingdom of Cockroaches, where prisoners ate a diet of their fellow inmates, slept on beds of decaying corpses and drowned in a soup of their own entrails. If this had happened anywhere else in CLANBOOK: TZIMISCE the world, we would have suffered apocalyptic repercussions for drawing such attention to ourselves.

Not all Tzimisce took interest in the gulags, however.

Some young Tzimisce found interest with Bioprepmat, the Soviet Union’s biological warfare initiative. Many of us knew about the Eldest’s essence within our own bodies, and the study of bacteriological warfare spurred on arguments of whether we could isolate portions of the Antediluvian within ourselves. Piotr lead the camp of Fiends who sought a way to attack these cancerous invaders before the Antediluvian awoke. Many also feared that biological programs could devastate our feeding stock if they progressed unchecked. So, to better protect our interests, a number of our brightest members infiltrated the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Medical and Microbiological Industries, a quiet euphemism for their bioweapons program under the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU).

Called Biopregarat, the Russians worked to develop new strains and vectors for diseases ranging from typhus to Ebola. Some young Fiends even played at developing Cainite pathogens that targeted specific clans, blood viruses that could turn entire populations into our ghouls or even methods of turning viruses into microbial ghouls.

We insured that nearly three generations of Obertus revenants learned a dizzying array of the new sciences