|
Tyrant
|
Aug 5 2016, 01:02 AM
Post #1
|
|
Administrator
- Posts:
- 45
- Group:
- Admins
- Member
- #1
- Joined:
- Aug 3, 2016
|


The usurpers of clan Cappadocian and the youngest clan of Caine, the Giovanni are both a clan and a family. They Embrace exclusively within their family (one of many things kept within the family), and are heavily focused on two goals: money and (necromantic) power.
The clan weakness of Giovanni dictate that when a Giovanni bites a living being, they deal more damage than normal making it difficult to keep people alive after feeding from them.
Organization The Giovanni are a highly organized clan, consisting of a network of interrelated families who share a common culture and fealty to the ancestral Giovanni family. As a result, despite popular conception, not all Giovanni are Italian.
The major families include:
- Ghiberti: Italian necromancers with an active interest in Africa.
- Della Pasaglia: Another Italian family focusing on the Middle East.
- Dunsirn: Scottish bankers and cannibals.
- Milliner: American financiers brought into the family in the 1950's
- Pisanob: South American necromancers.
Minor families are spread across the globe, and include:
- Beryn: Flemish traders with inroads into Africa.
- Hidalgo: Another Mexican branch rumored to be wiped out by the Sabbat.
- Li Weng: Chinese geomancers based out of San Francisco's Chinatown.
- Rosselini: Accomplished though forceful necromancers. Considered near equal to the main family.
- Putanesca: Sicilian thugs with a nasty temper.
- Santiago: Small vein of ambitious necromancers in Spain.
- St John: Cabal of English Masons.
- Rothstein: Jewish-American Kabbalists centered in Las Vegas.
The Giovanni are organized as something between a highly ruthless mafia dynasty and a highly ruthless corporation. Favors such as financial responsibilities (and rewards), ghouling, and the Embrace are dependent on performance; vicious backstabbing and cutthroat competition are the order of the day in a Giovanni household.
The Giovanni maintain their own internal Masquerade; a member of the family may be aware that his family is into some weird stuff, but beyond the relatively benign (in comparison) incest and high-finance backstabbing, be blissfully unaware that he's a catspaw for cannibalistic blood-drinking necromancers.
Decisions in the Giovanni are made by councils of elders knwon as the Anziani, with age, rank and competence all playing a role. Giovanni are highly family-oriented, even after the Embrace, and will spend centuries guiding their descendants for the greater good of the family (and themselves). |
Culture
In many ways, the Giovanni are a Ghoul Family with less visibly disgusting parts. This doesn't mean the Giovanni aren't as warped as the Bratovitch clan; the Giovanni are repulsive and degenerate in a more subtle manner. It is said that younger generations o the Giovanni were found to be very attractive. Some even say they put on the irresistible look of a succubi pre-change. Also, some are known to shape shifters.
Effective Giovanni are sadistic Giovanni. Controlling wraiths means acquiring fine control over a variety of psychological levers (understanding Passions and Fetters) and then ruthlessly manipulating these tools to make a spirit do what you want. The Giovanni have been sadistic, manipulative and vicious since before the diablerie of Cappadocius, and it bleeds out into everything else they do. The outer shell of the Giovanni clan, the public face is less visibly cruel and horrid, but only because these vampires are explicitly tasked to deal with the outside world.
The most notorious example of this bleed off is the Giovanni Proxy Kiss. Giovanni make an art out of ghouling, since ghouling is a rite of passage for the Giovanni - ghouling means that the Giovanni is now part of the people who make the family work. Not necessarily a mover and shaker, but something akin to a made man: the Masquerade is pulled back and the truth about vampires is revealed. Giovanni tend to make Proxy Kisses aesthetic efforts, and take a point in pride in producing especially memorable or mind-destroying ones - blood received via fellatio, blasphemous masses and the like are all popular choices.
The sadism and weirdness of Giovanni internal culture is enhanced by its incestuous nature. Giovanni can spend the majority of their lives interacting with nobody except other Giovanni, and the resulting insularity breeds additional problems. The Giovanni are, in particular, arrogant and prone to underestimating the world around them.
The Giovanni are, if anything, severely lapsed Catholics. Due to their practice of Necromancy, they have seen what "the other side" and "life beyond death" really mean, which tends to completely eradicate any faith in a benevolent deity. Giovanni, in a ways similar to the Lasombra Clan, often present the appearance of Catholicism in ritual and Family culture, but have twisted the vestments all around to better fit a vampiric frame. They may attend a certain kind of Mass, where the holy water is blood and the priest a Family elder, but these sorts of ceremonies tend to devolve into orgies, massacres, or other kinds of deviant practices behind closed doors.
The Giovanni relationship to the spirit world means that they have a very casual attitude towards such things as torture, dismemberment, and death. After all, if your victim dies in the chair, you can always yank his spirit back from Hell and get information out of him another way. What the Giovanni are really focused on is efficiency: bribery, seduction, and all other sorts of under-handed means are taught to new members of the Clan as a matter of course. If all other methods fail, then killing off the competition becomes a very viable alternative. |
Embraces
In 1444, Claudius Giovanni embraced a peasant girl named Marianna into the clan as a distraction. For 500 years Marianna was a constant for the clan. Marianna is also the only non-Giovanni to be embraced by the clan and to survive longer than about a month. The Giovanni do not embrace outside of the family; they do not embrace without permission. Not if they know what's good for them at least.
Like everything else in the family, the Embrace is a reward. Promotion for good service, and more than other clans, the Giovanni actively consider factors like generation in the embrace. Being embraced by a lower-generation clan member is considered a performance bonus.
While not uncommon, it is frowned upon to Embrace another of your own mortal family. This would encourage nepotism, and Giovanni much prefer to have the loyalty of their Neonates as divided as possible within the family. For example, while Agatha Milliner might put her own grandson forward for the Embrace, it is much more likely that Stefano Giovanni does the deed. Even better for the Clan if Agatha and Stefano are rivals - the neonate now has loyalty to his own grandmother and his own sire, which forces (somewhat) the two elders to avoid plotting against the other, lest the new childe betray either of them. |

Dominate
Dominate is a Discipline that overwhelms another person's mind with the vampire's will, forcing victims to think or act according to the vampire's decree. While undeniably powerful, its use almost always adheres to two important restrictions: the user must meet the eyes of the target and must speak in language that is clearly heard and understood by the target. Furthermore, this Discipline cannot be used upon Cainites of lower generation and cannot force someone to be self-destructive or defy their Nature. Using Dominate is often considered very heavy-handed, hardly appropriate within what passes for polite vampiric society, but it is also favored by those of age and status as a efficient means of asserting their authority.
Official Abilities
Standard Abilities
- Level One - Command: Give a simple one-word order that a target must obey
- Level Two - Mesmerize: By holding a target with your gaze you can implant false thoughts or hypnotic suggestions in a target's mind
- Level Three - The Forgetful Mind: Rewrite the memories of a target
- Level Four - Conditioning: Over time make a target a slave to your will alone
- Level Five - Possession: Transfer your mind into a mortal body and control their actions
If you wish to know more about Dominate, please click here to visit White Wolf Wikia. |
|
Potence
Potence is a Discipline that grants the vampires supernatural strength. Each dot grants an automatic success on any rolls involving Strength, and does not require activation.
Unofficial Abillities
Standard Abilities
- Level One - The vampire can lift approximately 1,000 lbs
- Level Two - The vampire can lift approximately 2,000 lbs
- Level Three - The vampire can lift approximately 3,000 lbs
- Level Four - The vampire can lift approximately 4,000 lbs
- Level Five - The vampire can lift approximately 5,000 lbs
If you wish to know more about Potence, please click here to visit White Wolf Wikia. |
|
Necromancy
Necromancy is a form of blood magic that deals exclusively with the world of the dead: wraiths and the Shadowlands.
Just as there are different styles of conventional blood sorcery, there are a variety of Necromancy practices. It is primarily practised by the Giovanni clan and the Samedi, Harbingers of Skulls and Nagaraja bloodlines. The blood magic style itself could be said to be an evolution and fusion of the Cappadocians' earlier discipline of Mortis (as written up in the revised Dark Ages: Vampire setting) and the Giovanni's trademark "Nigrimancy".
Standard Paths and Abilities
Necromancy paths, similar to their Thaumaturgy counterparts, are collections of reliable powers which revolve around a particular aspect of the dead. Among the Giovanni (and thus the majority of Kindred necromancers) the Sepulchre Path is the primary path that most practitioners learn. Subsequent releases in the Revised setting added various rituals and a handful of additional paths as well.
The Sepulchre Path: This path allows the necromancer to command, interact with and combat ghosts.
- Level One - Insight: see the last moment's of a corpses life.
- Level Two - Summon Soul: summons a wraith.
- Level Three - Compel Soul: force a wraith to do your bidding.
- Level Four - Haunting: binds a wraith to a location or object.
- Level Five - Torment: damages a spirit.
The Bone Path: This path allows the necromancer to animate and control the dead corpses of animals and people, letting him/her create zombies of a sort.
- Level One - Tremens: making the flesh of a corpse shift once
- Level Two - Apprentice's Brooms: allowing the dead to rise and perform simple functions like lifting a heavy box.
- Level Three - Shambling Hordes: allows the dead to rise and perform attacks.
- Level Four - Soul Stealing: remove one soul from its body, placing it into the nether, it remains there for 20 OOC minutes.
- Level Five - Daemonic Possession: place a soul in a fresh corpse, this is not permanent, the soul will leave the corpse within 30 OOC minutes.
The Ash Path: This path allows the necromancer to pierce the Shroud and enter the Shadowlands that the various ghosts and Wraiths dwell in.
- Level One - Shoudsight: allows you to see into the Shadowlands.
- Level Two - Lifeless Tongues: allows you to speak with the dead in any language.
- Level Three - Dead Hand: allows to you reach into the shadowlands and touch objects there.
- Level Four - Ex Nihilo: allows you to enter the Shadowlands.
- Level Five - Shroud Mastery: allows you to strengthen or weaken the shroud rating in an area.
The Cenotaph Path: A rare path mainly practised by the African Ghibberti family of the Giovanni which allows the necromancer control and even reassignment of a wraith's fetter.
- Level One - Touch of Death: Sense the recent presence of wraiths.
- Level Two - Reveal the Catene: Allows the Vampire to identify if an object is a fetter.
- Level Three - Tread Upon The Grave: Sense the strength of the local Shroud.
- Level Four - Death Knell: The necromancer can sense deaths that occur near him.
- Level Five - Ephemeral Binding: Create artificial fetters.
If you wish to know more about Necromancy, please click here to visit White Wolf Wikia. |
|
[ * Credit to Caine of Vampire: The Masquerade Roleplay on Habbo. * ]
|