A Sourcebook for VAMPIRE: The Masquerade™
Not to be confused with “Guide to the Sabbat” which is a different book that came out 4 years later because go fuck yourself.
Despite the scandalously similar title, this is a completely different book that is part of a two book box set that... never mind. Fuck it. We'll do it live!
Our musical accompaniment will be Anarchy in the U.K.. Because that's literally the first quote in the book.
Longes, your request for an OSSR was cowardly and unmanly, but I've been stalled on Space Madness! and Frank was down for a tag-team, so let's do this thing.
Before Clanbook Baali or Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, there was the Player's Guide to the Sabbat. I brought it up during the Guide to the Technocracy OSSR because this is pretty much where White Wolf...I won't say jumped the shark, but where they began to deliberately make their villains accessible as player character options. This has always been a bit tricky in any game, both mechanically (since villains often have unique powers and advantages to compete with PCs) and storywise (since you have to make these former NPCs playable they can't all be rapemonsters - at least, not until Exalted: the Lunars came out). Not to mention that as soon as you make the old villains "goodish," you now need new villains.
White Wolf had a tendency to reprint things whenever and wherever they felt like. Sometimes they gave them new item numbers or changed the covers or publication dates. This sort of behavior made it especially annoying when they also printed wholly different books with virtually identical names, like the various books called Mummy, or in this case “Player's Guide to the Sabbat” and “Guide to the Sabbat.” And that's not even counting books which were changed radically between editions or the fact that edition numbering was always pretty dubious. To make things even more exciting, in 1997 they reprinted the Player's Guide to the Sabbat and the Storyteller's Guide to the Sabbat with the titles and covers switched. Like, you can get a book that is word for word the Storyteller's Guide to the Sabbat but says “Player's Guide to the Sabbat” on all the chapter headers. I think this happened because they wanted to reprint some books from a few years back and couldn't be fucked to read all the way through the printing proofs before sending that shit off to the printer. You'd think the opening line “Welcome to the Storyteller's Guide to the Sabbat.” would be a fucking clue that the printing proofs you were holding were not the Storyteller's Guide to the Sabbat, but whatever.
So the bottom line is that White Wolf reprinted the same book with different identification numbers, but sometimes also printed completely different books with the same name. And also they sometimes just printed off entire printings of books that were fucked up in incredibly amateurish ways. So if you were trying to collect White Wolf books in the 90s, it could be a very confusing time for you. There were straight up rumors of secret White Wolf books that had limited distributions and I'm not even sure those are all false. There are multiple competing White Wolf wikis, and none of them are actually complete. So if you told me that various books that were on release schedules never actually existed or conversely that there were books that got printed and never got an official release, I would totally believe you.
When Vampire: the Masquerade came out, the Sabbat were the bad guys of the setting. I mean yeah, there were the Van Helsing types that wanted to end your unnatural existence, and the werewolves would tear you a new asshole if you left the city limit, and eventually there was weird shit like faeries and mages and whatnot to deal with, but the main competition came in the form of other vampires. Which meant internal politics, and external politics, and old blood feuds and shit... and then you had the Sabbat. And these were supposed to be the guys that scared the rest. I mean yeah, the Giovanni were Mafia-style necromancers fucking their own grandmother's corpses, but the Sabbat were scary.
Welcome to Team Sabbat.
This book came out originally in 1992 and promises to provide you with the information you need to roleplay a member of the Sabbat. Right here in paragraph one we run headlong into the core problem this book is attempting to address: Why the fucking hell would you roleplay as a member of the Sabbat? How the fuck would that even work?
1992 was just a year after the original Vampire: the Masquerade™ came out, and before that the Sabbat were presented basically as just generic vampiric baddies. Originally they were presented with no particular ideology other than that they hated Camarilla vampires. They were an endless source of antagonists and owned most of the important cities in North America. Possibly to excuse White Wolf's desire to focus on cities like Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans and to completely ignore New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In any case, the line expanded very quickly, and while the original seven clans were all thematically rich and reasonably well thought out (though mechanically unbalanced), the additional clans were issued in a first-come-first-served manner. All of them are one-note ethnic stereotypes that are offensive and boring, but all six of them were named and written up within a year.
And let's be honest: in the original books the 7 clans got expanded with: Giovanni, Salubri, Ravnos, Settites, Assassmites, Lasombra, Samedi, Daughters of Cacophony, Children of Osiris, and Baali. Which is itself enough to cover 17 of the 13 clans. Retconning a bunch of those into being various bloodline offshoots of each other so that there would be 13 original clans was the work of years of tedious author and fan conflicts. It's important to remember that there really wasn't any editorial control at any level, so various authors and promoted fanboys and shit were just doing stuff, and presenting their various fan theories as canon. And not to put too fine a point on it, but most fan theories are shit. Like that bullshit theory that Jar Jar is a master Sith Lord or some shit.
Basically shit like this.
Going into this book the Lasombra and Tzimisce had been named, but not described, giving this book full license to write in whatever crazy shit they wanted. And they did! And by “they” I most just mean a guy named Steve, because this book only has one credited writer. But it does give special thanks to seventeen people other than family members for help on the project. So like... I dunno.
Teeuwyn Woodruff is of course the person who wrote World of Darkness: Gypsies, a book so racist and insensitive that it is frequently nominated for most uncomfortably racist RPG book in history. It doesn't win, but only because it turns out that the RaHoWa RPG happened. But it's certainly the most uncomfortably racist RPG book put out by a major game company. And that's including all the weird ass shit TSR and Games Workshop said about Pygmies. Getting her advice about how to handle the gratuitously racist Gypsy Vampires is like asking Dick Cheney how to handle state secrets.Teeuwyn “Con Games” Woodruff, for her help on the Ravnos and her sordid suite at Sci-Con.
I made a point in the GURPS: Vampire: the Masquerade that one of the important but least-discussed aspects of Vampire is that a large part of the entire game centered around catering to Christian taboos. The whole thing about being a vampire to begin with is that vampires are monsters, and the game goes on to emphasize that they are unholy, bloodsucking, cursed, blasphemous violations of the natural order. They dabble in sorcery, they're violent, they're possessed of monstrous appetites and toy with minds and sexual assault. The fact that some people started treating them as superheroes with fangs is a later development, the selling point of the game was basically "Hey...what if, like, it's D&D, but you're the monster?"
And it was sexy and cool and stylized and it worked. That's important to remember because even the basic concept of the game is already about flipping "evil" NPCs into "playable evil" PCs. So that means that they have to constantly set up new ways to be evil, new taboos for players to become aware of...and then breach. And the deeper and weirder it gets, the more acclimated they get to it, the less impact the original thrill gives. So at some point, just being a vampire wasn't enough; they needed something worse than regular vampires...and they came up with the Sabbat. Which is a lot like the Matrix sequels, in that involves more sex and leather and not much more thought.
Trick or...treat?
You have to remember, most RPGs don't go into complex philosophies about what constitutes evil. Frank touched on that in Book of Exalted Deeds OSSR, but Vampire didn't even do the Law/Chaos/Good/Evil moral axis thing...they wrote up a fucking hierarchy of sins using the Seven Deadly as the main guidelines. Keep that in mind: being human in a vampire context is not about being virtuous, and to make the Sabbat work as something scarier than the key players of the Camarilla, Steve would have to get...freaky.
The book opens with a disclaimer that anything and everything in the book may not be true. This may seem to somewhat violate the point of having a setting book in the first place. I mean, players are supposed to roleplay characters in the world, unreliable narrators are not helpful to shared world storytelling. If you roll the dice at the table, you do not get to say “I may have rolled six successes” and leave it at that. So it's kind of weird and insulting that the authors of these books felt that they could get away with this shit. This was sort of a White Wolf gimmick, and essentially started as their way of explaining why different books contradicted each other all the time. The actual reason being that they had seventeen plus fucking people writing away in various parts of the country and sending their drafts around in manilla envelopes and no central editorial oversight at all. So people were just writing whatever they felt like and could only incorporate ideas written up in books they'd already read, which wouldn't be out for months after they had been written. So when different books presented radically different versions of events or descriptions of characters and groups, White Wolf's policy was to say that they were various points of view. All this came to a head with Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, a book whose proposed storyline was so convoluted and out there that White Wolf eventually just fucking redacted the whole thing.
The Sabbat presented in this book does not resemble the Sabbat described in other books previously very much. And this book's explanation for that is that there are like different points of view, man. You gotta find your own truth!
This makes the book superficially not very useful for cooperative storytelling, and for a while it really wasn't. As time went on, the Sabbat descriptions in other books became more congruent with this one, and it became more of a valid reference as time went on. Simply put: other writers read this book and then incorporated elements from it into their own Sabbat writings and the result was that the gestalt Sabbat descriptions became more similar to this book as time went on. Which is not to say that everything in this book stayed canon. Good god no.
The How to Use This Book section basically just tells you that you aren't supposed to read it if your character isn't a member of the Sabbat. Which is the kind of thing that was extremely tone deaf even in the 80s, but it's not like shit like that isn't still getting written by pretentious douches, so whatever.
We need to dissect some of the text itself.
So, let's run down the list: they have fun. They upset the status quo. They do stuff your parents elders tell you not to do. They literally seduce and corrupt the youth. They're described as "callous brutes" (not at all like the Brujah, no sir). They are "entrenched in the occult" (which is weird, when you remember the Tremere are on Team Good Vamps), and do stuff in secret (nothing at all like the Masquerade!) They question authority and the sacred truths handed down.The Sabbat appears to the outside world as a sect with no purpose other than diablerie and the spread of dissension among the youth of vampire society. Its members are seen as callous brutes who place no value on human or Kindred existence, and seem to love releasing the Beast during
frenzy. They are entrenched in the occult, carrying on bizarre and unspeakable rituals unseen by outsiders. They speak as if they were the true sons and daughters of Caine and continually try to convert Camarilla Kindred to their own wild ways.
This is, basically, a PSA to try and get kids to do drugs. If this were written today it would probably start with six pages of introductory fiction where young vampire Mike ends up raped and staked and left out to be burnt by the sun, with his friends finding his ashes when night falls. The Christian/1950s Americana rhetoric has all the subtlety of a Chick tract.
They were still pushing the War of Ages at this point. The idea that your all-powerful Elders might be lying and manipulating you generally goes down well with a teenage audience. Hell, it goes down well with Millennials, and most of them are in their fucking 30s.The mystery of the Sabbat has long fascinated younger Kindred of the Camarilla; indeed, some even join the Sabbat's ranks, never to be heard from a gain by their comrades in the Camarilla. The young Camarilla Kindred seem to be the focus of Sabbat attention and most rumors about the Sabbat begin among the anarchs.
The core non-Vampire groups the introduction believes you care about are the Lupines, the Society of Leopold, the Arcanum psychics, and the Rosicrucian and Alli Allahis Mages. The World of Darkness was in a lot of flux back then, and most of those factions were sidelined as new books came out with new. Mage the Ascension hadn't actually been written yet, and the Mages described in this book don't look a fucking thing like the Mages from that fucking game.
They actually give a laundry list of rumors:
These are basically written in the same voice of adventure seeds, the kind of shit you'd hear in the tavern at the start of the game. Many of them are deliberately contradictory (or just a disturbing laundry list that was ticked off while writing Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand), and highlights one of the issues that Vampire - and other games - has with big bads: trying to keep them Big and Bad and Mysterious. If they had done a better job of laying the groundwork, they could have built them up a bit better, like, say, Aztechnology/Aztlan in Shadowrun, or the Sith in Star Wars. Here...eh.* The Sabbat is controlled by Brujah elders. The Brujah clan is also believed to have deposed the Ventrue leader of the Camarilla. This allows the clan to pit the two opposing sects against one another while advancing its own secret schemes.
* The anarchs are in league with the Sabbat, acting as spies for them and as recruiters from within the enemy.
* The Sabbat has infiltrated both the Brujah and Toreador clans. The spies are gather ing information for a major assault on the Camarilla.
* The Sabbat has a pact of alliance with an order of wizards. This could be the reason the Tremere and Sabbat hate each other so much.
* The Sabbat is a tool of the Antediluvians, to be used as their great army at the time of Gehenna.
* The Sabbat was founded by Caine himself. It is the Camarilla that is controlled by the Antediluvians.
* Diablerie is the true goal of the Sabbat. The sect intends to eat its way through all the bloodlines of the Camarilla.
* Certain Sabbat vampires know a ritual that allows them to move freely in daylight for short periods of time.
* No member of the Sabbat can be Blood Bound. The sect uses special rituals to prevent the creation of Blood Bonds and to break existing Blood Bonds.
* The Sabbat is organized in a manner similar to the Tremere. There is a small group of elders to which all Sabbat must be Blood Bound.
* The Giovanni clan controls the Sabbat of Europe. While it does not control the Sabbat of North America, it is beginning to establish control within certain cities in the United States.
* The Black Hand is actually only a small group within the sect. Its members are the really vicious Sabbat vampires.
* Clans within the Sabbat are not recognized as distinct and do not hold clan gatherings. Sabbat vampires consider the sect first and their clans second.
* Sabbat rituals involve fire walking and other uses of fire. Some Sabbat vampires have even developed immunity to flames.
* There are Assamites within the Sabbat who are free from the curse of the Tremere. They are the assassins of elders, practicing their beliefs in diablerie for the benefit of the Sabbat.
* The Sabbat vampires have a secret language known by a few within the Camarilla.
* The Minions of Set secretly control the Sabbat.
Six chapters and two appendices, but this is a short book from the early 90s, so we should mostly be able to do more than one chapter per post. Next stop: Inside the Sabbat.
I'm in ur base...
Keep in mind, the monster is always the person in the mirror. The thing about the Sabbat is that if the person writing/presenting this didn't think what what the Sabbat did was bad, then they wouldn't be the bad guys; and if what the Sabbat did wasn't desirable, no one would want to play them. So like Vampire itself, the pitch for the Sabbat has to make them both bad enough to be distinct from the Camarilla, and yet that badness to be something the players want to play. To a large extant, the pitch so far is: you became an immortal bloodsucking monster and escaped from your old life, forever damned by your family and religion...only to find yourself under the bootheels of a new group of Elders and a new mythology (which is a rider on your previous Southern Baptist upbringing). So maybe it's time to join a new gang...