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The relationships between ghouls and vampires can be simple or complex. Some ghouls live alongside their regnants for a few short passionate or brutish weeks. Other ghouls follow their regnants through the centuries. It’s not unheard of for whole families of ghouls to become linked to a vampire or a bloodline. Likewise, some ghoul families are as loyal to their master’s covenants as any Kindred of Quality. Thus, some ghoul families have become important parts of Society over the centuries.

All of the basic information on ghouls that any Vampire chronicle needs can be found in Vampire: The Requiem (see p. 166). The Ghouls supplement for Vampire dug deeper into the existence of these strange creatures and introduced the idea of ghoul families. A ghoul family is similar to a vampire bloodline in that the family represents a specific, specialized lineage of ghouls whose history with the Kindred has left the ghouls forever altered. Although ghoul families can become as complex and distinctive as any Kindred bloodline, the following ghoul families can be used in any Vampire chronicle without the benefit of Ghouls. Storytellers and

players need to be familiar with the basic mechanics of ghoul families, however.

Family History

A ghoul family can begin only in the very rare event that a mortal woman made into a ghoul when she is pregnant actually manages to carry her child to term. If her child is then born a thrall, a ghoul family has begun.

Unlike traditional ghouls, a thrall born of a ghoul family can only truly escape thralldom through death. Persons born into a ghoul family are predisposed to servility at the hands of vampires. Ghouls born of a thrall family do not have the same relationship with the blood as independent ghouls, either. If a familial thrall fails to receive the Vitae necessary to sustain his thralldom, he simply reverts to his regular state. Without Vitae, individuals born into a ghoul family find that their bodies age roughly two years for every three years they live — the years of thralldom never come rushing back to claim a familial ghoul’s body. Their minds, on the other hand, age at the same rate as a normal mortal’s, Vitae or not.

chapter four

featured. Valets are all slender-boned, with arms and legs like twigs tied together; when a Hostewick woman gets pregnant, her swollen belly seems almost grotesquely out of place on her waifish body. All Hostewicks have dark hair, and most have gray or green eyes. The small number of Hostewick generations over the years has yielded very little variation in their features as yet.

The Hostewicks dressed like all servants of their time up until the Edwardian era, when the eldest members developed an appreciation for modern servants’ uniforms. To this night, Hostewicks favor high-class, elaborate uniforms from yesteryears, especially the beginning of the 20th century. In domains and under circumstances when such formality is startlingly out of place — as is the case with many American domains — Valets tend toward outdated uniforms of a less severe vintage, such as the 1960s or 1970s.

Havens: Very little space is required to keep a Hostewick happy. Most keep small rooms, s o m e - times little more

and attics of large serve poorer or Quality might

a laundry room. Hostewick keeps seldom an issue.

Hostewicks

from their charges, rare Valet who

roof or on a Invictus master.

To this day, think of England as home, even if they were born in another country and never visited the

English countryside

— or still — owned that was promised as a gift for

few Hostewicks that promise ever been allowed to report its

Valets aren’t no manor house What’s clear is working, rather able lives in the

Strengths: All perceptiveness the behavior of alike that comes

all Hostewick servants, the appearance of a normal relationship is like the servant’s wardrobe: designed to impress or appease guests. Hostewicks, very often, fulfill the role of a regnant’s servant in addition to other, less common tasks.

Many Hostewicks serve their regnants as spies, messengers, protectors, informants, counselors or even lovers. Behind closed doors, a Hostewick enjoys the benefits her ancestors became ghouls for: a taste of finery, a bit of the wealthy life, a shred of inside gossip and a few private moments with her cherished master. Valets, as right-thinking and proper folk, seldom strike up outright affairs with their lords — such things have certainly happened, but the Hostewicks look down on

such behavior — but they do often have much closer relationships than they let on. A Hostewick may give her master a shoulder to cry on or an ear to bend or a vein to sip from, but that is the business of the Valet and her lord and no one else. Hostewicks do not, typically, hide such relationships because they are ashamed of them; these relationships stay hidden because they are the most precious part of the Valets’ existence. Such relationships are private treasures, like heirlooms kept locked away in the bedroom, not crass and gaudy jewelry to put on the benefit of the glitterati.

Concepts: Suspicious valet, loyal footman, scheming servant, well-hidden spy, doting toady, traitorous spy on the inside

chapter four

The Bull family is a flesh-and-blood manifestation of the rights the Invictus has awarded itself over ghouls and kine. The Bulls are the property of a handful of Invictus amateur breeders fascinated with the influence they can exert over mortal blood in just a few centuries. Though all Bulls are so-called working dogs, they are as much a hobby for armchair Society biologists and naturalists. Many Bulls are born and raised, used and sent to their deaths with words of their importance and value to their masters, but the truth is that most Bulls are an academic diversion, an experiment for self-important monsters tinkering with breeder texts and human lives.

The origin of the Bull “family” — or breed, in Society terms — begins with an ancestral ghoul family called the Bartons. The Bartons were a mortal family turned thrall in the 1700s who served several landed and titled Invictus members in France, Belgium and Germany. The Bartons were a rather small and unremarkable ghoul line.

In the 19th century, a coterie of Society quasi-intel- lectuals operating in Paris got the idea to create a “breed of kine to serve us as a hunting hound serves them.” Unfortunately for the poor Bartons, these Invictus members were their regnants and masters. From 1820 to 1890, these Society thinkers went about mating pairs of the Bartons, and some outside kine, to produce a desired collection of conformation traits, based mostly on size and endurance.

The early nights did not go well. The Bartons were not only being inbred at an alarming and dangerous rate, producing a sickening number of deformed and stillborn children, but the already small Barton line was dying out in the process, due to communicable illnesses and suicides brought on by awful “kenneling” conditions. To

BULLS

make matters worse, their breeders revised the list of desired traits time and again, so that any specimen might manifest traits that had been desirable to the fickle eyes of the breeders a few years ago but were not anymore.

Over time, many of the Kindred breeders became bored with their lack of progress and abandoned the work. A handful kept up their efforts, however, through the 1890s and into the 20th century. Though no Bulls survive from that era, it seems that one or two were sent or brought to the Americas, either with a migrating regnant or as gifts to distant and unknown lords as “show ghouls.” In those nights, however, the breed was tough but not at all uniform. The Barton family essentially died out in those nights, scattered and deformed out of any resemblance to itself.

The name “Bull” was given not to a family itself, but to any ghoul of the period that was bred for brawling or sport as a part of this gruesome pastime. In time, however, it seems that multiple, independent fads of “fight breeding” took new root among Kindred in cities in New England and the American South as well as Mexico and South America. These scattered fads led to a variety of rare, local breeds of Bulls, most in some way descended from the original Bartons. The key to successfully manifesting conformation points lay in the mating of Bartondescended ghouls with thralls from other families and, sometimes, a dose of mortal blood or mystically empowered Vitae.

Although most Bull-breeders of those nights kept studbooks or registries of the pairings they worked with, a good deal of the information in those books has proven to be erroneous, misleading or confused by modern readers. A great many of the domains in which Bull-breeders once

resided have since given up the fad. Thus, the breed characteristics of all the cousin families of Bulls have somewhat normalized as dominant characteristics go un-tam- pered with in new generations.

Bull populations have dwindled dramatically since the 1950s due to their violent and perilous work as guards and participants in pit fights. In many of the domains where the Bulls were once a common sight in Kindredcontrolled back rooms and underground fighting clubs, the Bulls have become nothing but fondly recalled tales or bizarre freaks in faded photographs. Most modern Kindred have probably never heard of the Bull families; few have ever seen a Bull in action.

BULL-BLOODING

Sometime early in the 20th century, the practice of pitting Bulls against one another in cage matches was stuck with the name “Bull-blooding,” and the name has never really been shaken. At the height of some domains’ Bull-blooding crazes, a single night might see a half-dozen matches between two, three or four Bulls. Some matches were fought to the death, some to submission or “defeat” (a term with many, often intentionally vague and crooked definitions). It was not uncommon for Kindred to wager breeding rights or even feeding rights in some domains.

Surely, in a few domains, Bull-blooding still goes on. Pairs of unarmed Strongbacks can sometimes be found fighting for tiny audiences in dry swimming pools or empty parking lots. Many more Bull-bloodings go on in large men’s rooms, seedy bathhouses and low-rent health clubs, where blood can be hosed away. Several Bull corpses, beaten into heaps of broken bone and meat, turned up in empty cargo containers from Philadelphia to Baltimore during the summer of 1987. Bull corpses are still sometimes found in spent quarries and abandoned industrial sites throughout the Americas.

Nickname: Working Dogs, Heavyweights or Strongbacks. Also, rarely, Bartons.

Clans: The first genuine Working Dogs were the result of careless, misinformed experimentations by a coterie of Daeva and Ventrue vampires fascinated by what was, at the time, the new theory of evolution. It was the clash of the Daeva fascination with mortals and the Ventrue need to sculpt and control those beneath them that defined the existence of the ghouls from this family. The facts of the family’s history show this to be true, but the nature of the Working Dogs doesn’t point so obviously to Vitae and Succubi and Lords. Bulls inherited supernatural capacities for strength and fortitude from their vampiric breeders, but seemingly little else. Bulls are blunt brutes and weak-minded followers, for the most part — the vampires who created them may be glad to have them, but Kindred certainly cannot truly respect them.