Hello gorgeous friends - if we do the Hecata family portrait for Halloween... would we want them in costumes or would we want them in normal fancy portrait wear?
Hecata family portrait - costumes or no?
I want these necromancers in costume!
Keep it classy in regular clothes, this portrait is going in the foyer!
Center disk: Labrys for Minoan and Mycenaean Greece, ΗΕΛΛΑΔΑ for Archaic Greeece, plate design and laurel wreath for Ancient Greece, Vergina Sun for Macedonian and Hellenistic Greece, and Ρωμανία for Roman/Byzantine Greece
From the Top/Center: Urum (Crimean Tatar speaking Greeks), Ukrainian Greeks, Pontians, Asia Minor Greeks, Cappadocians, Smyrniot Greeks*, Antiochian Rum (Arabic speaking Greeks from the Antiochian Patriarchate), Jerusalemite Rum (Arabic speaking Greeks from the Jerusalem Patriarchate), Cypriots, Egyptiot Greeks*, Greeks, Italiot Greeks*, Greek Jews, Northern Epirotes, Sarakatsani, and Eastern Thracians
An analysis on Dove, her Nictuku traits, and how they ended up making her resembling the Cappadocians so strongly that her own sire thought she was one somehow.
I always assumed Dove and Modian were close because Dove was clearly distressed when she saw Modian in the condition he was in in the video.
But I was going through the VTMNR code to see the things she tells you about herself that I missed when I was playing that scene, and got to this bit:
"But when he saw my face, he thought he had been tricked," Dove says, her tone bleak. "He said I resembled one of the extinct clans, and treated me like a red-headed stepchild. Imagine that: too ugly to be a Nosferatu. I made my own way then, met up with Jasper Knowles, the Warlock, while he was digging through ruins for old magic, and through him ended up becoming a respectable member of the Camarilla. I didn't see Modian again for a century, when I came to the New World."
So this started out as an analysis on how Modian must have recognised Nictuku traits in Dove (they are descended from Nictuku, a bloodline of Nosferatu that are blood bound to Absimilliard, the Nosferatu Antediluvian, and sworn to destroy the Nosferatu. If you trace Reremouse’s family tree, the Methuselah they’re descended from was a known Nictuku defector). The Nictuku are said to be particularly hideous, like Dove --
Imagine that: too ugly to be a Nosferatu.
And a lot of people don’t believe they exist.
He said I resembled one of the extinct clans
So I thought that the Nictuku blood came out really strongly with Dove, Modian realised it, and freaked the fuck out.
But the “one of the extinct” clans didn’t quite fit (people either believe they exist or don’t, but they never talk about them being extinct), and there was a mention of the Giovanni wanting to put Dove down:
"Jasper was interested in another act of diablerie, the one that birthed Clan @{(clan = "Hecata") Giovanni. This was way before you all joined back up with the other necromancers|Giovanni—this was before the death clans all reunited to form Clan Hecata}. He was interested in me because he wondered if I wasn't a Nosferatu at all, but one of the now-extinct clans. Of course, I had been Embraced by Modian in the normal fashion, my dark arts were those of my clan, and Jasper's hypothesis came to nothing…but that wasn't before a bunch of Giovanni learned about me and tried to destroy me because they thought I was a harbinger of their destruction. To escape them, we jumped onto the Simplon-Orient-Express in Constantinople, and there we ran into this Polish Gangrel…anyway, that was all a long time ago."
So I thought. Huh. Maybe the Giovanni have links to the Nictuku?
Then I remembered what clan the Giovanni are descended from. Cappadocians. Whose bane were that they looked like corpses.
Boom. Turns out the Nictuku to the Giovanni’s Nosferatu are the Harbingers of Skulls, whose weakness --
The Harbingers of Skulls clan weakness is an extension of the Cappadocian clan's weakness. Regardless of the quantity of blood a Harbinger of Skulls consumes, their skin maintains a deathly pallor. Additionally, the Harbingers' skin shrinks to make these Cainites appear skeletal, with bony limbs and faces frozen into an immortal death's grin. Because of this decidedly unwholesome and morbid visage, Harbingers of Skulls have Appearance Traits of zero. All Social rolls involving the Appearance Trait automatically fail for Harbingers of Skulls.
-- are that they look skeletal. Just like Dove.
And like the Nictuku with the Nosferatu, they want to fuck Giovanni shit up. They’re pissed about what the Giovanni did to the Cappadocians.
So the Giovanni see this Nosferatu with a skull for a face, freak the fuck out, and try to murder her.
Modian Embraces a childe, the Nictuku genes come out strongly --
Additionally, age is difficult and transforming on the bloodline. For every hundred years since their Embrace, the Hungry become more monstrous in appearance. But their physical bodies also grow stronger, until they reach the peak of human (and vampiric) physical potential. They grow slowly but decidedly bent, twisted, and ever more deadly, slowly aging grotesques that blame the Nosferatu for their condition.
-- but to the extent that happens to resemble a Cappadocian. Modian freaks out, is like “what the fuck, you’re clearly not mine” even though he was there, so poor Dove gets basically orphaned.
The Nictuku weakness doesn’t quite fit Dove. Nictuku need Cainite blood to feed, not kine. Dove might have been feeding on Cainites this whole time and kept it secret, but a Nosferatu courier doesn’t make any mention of having to do that, so I think it’s safe to assume Dove doesn’t. Also, there’s no mention that Dove gets uglier each century in spite of being Embraced ~1830. But she’s definitely Nictuku because she’s descended from Melachoate, which we find out in the Reremouse chapter.
But who knows. Maybe that weakness gets weaker as your generation gets higher. Maybe Jasper was feeding her the vitae of his victims -- she knew he experimented on wights, there’s a flashback where she’s casually chatting to him while standing over an entire pit of them. But that still doesn’t explain why her childe doesn’t seem to have that weakness either.
So. Dove has Nictuku blood, it came out stronger in her than Modian (and presumably Reremouse), Modian freaked, and it basically caused a rift between them so she ended up raised by Jasper instead.
Which is... interesting. Because she is visibly upset at seeing what Jasper did to Modian, but not upset at seeing Jasper get destroyed.
But it might explain why Jasper chose to wight Modian. Dove never trusted him, and maybe he was far from magnamious when he wighted Modian.
But I dunno. Maybe he was pissed off that Modian basically rejected his own childe.
And it makes me wonder -- Dove often speaks about how restless she is and how trapped she feels. Another Nictuku weakness, beside the hideousness and the inability to take sustenance from kine blood, is what might be claustrophobia:
The Hungry will not haven where they cannot see the moon when they rise and leave each night. [...] They loathe the underground and will not haven there. Ever. This may be related to, or the cause of, the Nosferatu desire to dig.
Dove gets really edgy about not driving, about not getting to leave the city -- essentially about not getting to be in wide open space. We never see her underground, or see any mention of her ever being underground.
She also seems to have a very lowkey manifestation of the Nictuku hatred of the Nosferatu, in that she’s constantly at odds with them.
Firstly, she’s at odds with Modian. Sure, that’s because of his rejection of her -- but Modian is also at odds with her. He was present at her Embrace, there’s no reason for him to think she’s not his, but he does.
Secondly, the way she talks about the Nosferatu is nothing but critical.
"Back in the '80s, some of the younger Nosferatu discovered the internet, and found a new place to hide and hoard secrets. [..] They got online by the dozens, and then by the hundreds, establishing a shadow internet for the undead. I warned them not to do it."
The Nictuku despise the Nosferatu. Dove, who has their blood in her veins, although very diluted, doesn’t hate them. But she doesn’t respect them, either.
"But those Nosferatu, they'd look at themselves in the mirror and see the same ugly, unchanging face as when they were first Embraced. And they'd tell themselves, 'I still have the edge."
She’s like this even with her own childe. You can save her life when you last see her, but when you show up at Elysium she is all but obvious with her dislike of you. She sees another Nosferatu, even a Nictuku one, and seems to have this instinctive, lowkey revulsion of them that she attributes to other things. (She claims the Courier abandoned her, but made no effort to reach out to them despite knowing where they were, and the Courier being completely ignorant of where she was.)
And it’s just. fascinating. And so very sad. She’s this lost little chick who knows, deep down, that her bloodline isn’t the same as other Nosferatu, and it comes out in such subtle ways. And yet it comes out in one glaringly obvious respect -- her face.
The West End Underplex in the London Sourcebook for Shadowrun (1st Edition)
That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.
Still better than the Elf Mage.
For all the grandeur of cities visible from the surface, land is to too valuable to ignore what is happening underground. Chicago has the Pedway, a system of tunnels connecting major office buildings, hotels, museums, train stations, and parking garages.
Did I mention I’m from Chicago?
Las Vegas has a population of squatters who live in the sewer tunnels underneath the Strip.
Storm drain tunnels.
Not that this is a uniquely American or recent phenomenon: the Derinkuyu underground city in Cappadocia (Turkey) started out in the 7th c. BCE as caves and gradually expanded over the centuries to a subterranean metropolis that could comfortably fit 20,000 Cappadocians.
That is if they hadn’t been wiped out by the Giovanni.
The West End had always been London’s commercial epicenter – the Underplex began as an outgrowth of shops adjacent to the tube stations servicing Marble Arch, Charing Cross, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square and other landmarks. It has since expanded into a sprawling underground, multilevel shopping mall.
Nightclubs your runners might find themselves in
The jazz club, for those with good Etiquette skills.
I was recently talking with a friend who wants to learn more about church history and they asked for some top ten lists to get acquainted with important people and books from the history of Christianity. So I sent them the following list.
Now, a quick caveat here: these are Christians who specifically influenced theology, faith, and Biblical interpretation. Christians certainly can and have…
