When Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 comes out later this year, it’ll be set in a very different World of Darkness. A lot has changed in Vampire in the last 20 years, and much of the lore you might remember from the original Bloodlines no longer applies. Here’s a quick explanation of what’s been going on, so you’re up to speed before you start wrecking Seattle.
What's New in Bloodlines 2's World of Darkness
The first Bloodlines was based on the second and third editions of the Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop role-playing game, by White Wolf Publishing. Bloodlines did make a few mechanical changes due to being a video game (i.e. you gain experience much faster in Bloodlines) but was otherwise a faithful recreation of Vampire’s setting and mood. In V:TM, vampires (or "Kindred") have lived among and alongside humanity since Biblical times and rely on an elaborate system of control called the Masquerade to stay hidden. Otherwise, they reason, humans will rise up and kill them all.
V:TM was effectively canceled in 2004. A lot of the World of Darkness was built around turn-of-the-millennium apocalypse panic, and to its credit, White Wolf eventually paid off on that promise with a series of sourcebooks that detailed the end of everything. In Vampire's case, it wrapped up its story with Gehenna, which gave groups a choice between several ways to destroy the world and all the Kindred in it.
Masquerade eventually made a comeback in 2011 with a crowd-funded V:TM 20th Anniversary Edition. Four years after its release, White Wolf was acquired by the Swedish games publisher Paradox Interactive (Crusader Kings), primarily so it could farm the World of Darkness IP for video game production.
This also led to the publication, through Paradox, of a fifth edition of Vampire (“V5”) by a new group of writers. V5 made a series of dramatic changes to both the game’s overall storyline and its trademark mechanics, many of which are controversial to this day, as well as really learning into some of Vampire's horror aspects. In fact, the new writers notoriously went too dark, which resulted in Paradox pulling the plug on White Wolf as an independent company.
All the recent video games based on Vampire, such as 2020’s Shadows of New York and 2022’s Swansong, are based on Vampire 5e. They don’t typically explain a lot of what’s changed, or even much of the setting details that are unique to the World of Darkness. If you're like me and you fell off of Vampire after 2nd/3rd edition, or after Bloodlines, there's a lot about V5 that can be confusing.
Obviously, we’re months away from the game’s launch as I write this, so there’s no way of knowing which if any of these changes will end up being relevant. This is meant to be a decent, quick-and-dirty primer, without getting too lost in the associated weeds.
We’re the Monsters Now
Originally, Vampire: The Masquerade was billed as a game of “personal horror.” A standard character began the game with a stat called Humanity, which represented the grasp they had on how it felt to be mortal and alive. The lower it went, the more comfortable your character was with the endemic violence that goes hand-in-hand with the vampiric condition. If Humanity ever falls to 0, your vampire becomes a mindless killer and is removed from play.
That provided each character with a built-in level of conflict. Do you try to be a friendly neighborhood vampire who maintains a grasp on who you used to be, or are you eventually doomed to see everyone around you as either competition or food?
V5 tosses much of that in favor of a simplified approach. You can try to act in opposition to your nature, but being a vampire at all means you’re a monster at heart. Don’t expect to have as much moral wiggle room in Bloodlines 2 as existed in the original, as V5 is deliberately a game about being the villain of your own story.
The Beckoning and the Gehenna War
One of the funny things about the first few editions of V:TM was that you couldn’t kick over a rock in-setting without finding a thousand-year-old elder vampire. If you go back and read some of the older setting books like the 1991 or 1993 editions of Chicago by Night, it gives the impression that every city on Earth is being quietly run by some ancient Kindred who's older than Shakespeare.
That changed dramatically in V5 due to an event called the Beckoning, which affects the majority of vampires who reach or exceed a certain level of power. The Beckoning compels these Kindred to travel to the Middle East, where they end up taking sides in what’s become known as the Gehenna War.
In the World of Darkness, the closer you get to the original cradle of human civilization, the more likely it is that you’ll find ancient vampires sleeping deep below the earth. On one side of the Gehenna War, the Sabbat wants to dig up and kill as many of those elders as possible, on the assumption that they’ll destroy everything once they wake up. On the other, the Camarilla wants to stop the Sabbat, both to protect the Masquerade and to make sure those same vampires stay asleep.
In the rest of the world, many elders have abandoned everything they had due to the Beckoning, which has upended vampire society. Suddenly, all the bosses and clan leaders have vanished, which leaves a motley assortment of younger vampires to pick up the pieces. That’s likely to play directly into Bloodlines 2’s story, as the player’s character is explicitly both a 300-year-old elder and stepping into a local power vacuum in Seattle.
As a side effect of the Sabbat’s suicidal tactics in the Gehenna War, roughly half the Lasombra clan left the faction in favor of joining the Camarilla. This played indirectly into the story of Shadows of New York, as the player's character was a newly turned Lasombra.
The Clan of Death
There’s a general theme of consolidation that persists throughout most of V5’s changes, both mechanically and in the vampire clans. In V5, the more Gothy clans in the game – the Samedi, what’s left of the Cappadocians, the surviving Giovanni, the Harbingers of Skulls, and others – have gathered under the name of the Hecata, the Clan of Death. All the various vampire necromancers in the World of Darkness now hang out under the same roof, which probably smells really bad.
Our old pal Pisha, the cannibal vampire from the abandoned hospital in Bloodlines, was a Nagaraja, although she’s never identified as such in-game. Under the new rules, she and the Giovanni are now all members of Clan Hecata. Please update your records accordingly.
The Second Inquisition; or Enjoy This Drone Strike, Mr. Wizard
If you met Mitnick in Bloodlines, you might remember SchreckNet. This was a computer network owned and operated by the Nosferatu clan of information brokers, which they used to maintain their databases.
In V5, ShreckNet was penetrated by U.S. intelligence agencies, which gave them access to years of stored information about vampires, the Camarilla, and the Nosferatu. Despite having hard evidence of a millennia-old vampire conspiracy, those agents didn't go loud. Instead, they teamed up with the Vatican. The result is the Second Inquisition: a band of vampire hunters with equal parts unshakable faith and military budget.
It's possible for a powerful enough vampire to be more than a match for a black ops kill squad, but vampires that powerful are all off fighting the Gehenna War. As a result, the Second Inquisition has been racking up wins all over the world, including the outright destruction of the Tremere clan’s headquarters in Vienna. As a result, the Camarilla dismantled ShreckNet and has gone full Luddite about the Internet. They will actually kill you if they catch you sending an email.
If you played 2022’s Swansong and were wondering why every vampire in that game had an old-school pager instead of a smartphone, or why the latter half of the game pits you against what amounts to a hyper-Catholic SWAT team, that’s why.
The Faction Shuffle: Camarilla vs. Anarchs
The primary vampire-on-vampire conflict in second and third-edition Vampire was a struggle for land and resources between the Camarilla and Sabbat. You spend some time in Bloodlines working for the Camarilla while fighting the Sabbat, although there are player-created mods like Clan Quest that let you flip LaCroix off and switch teams.
In V5, the Sabbat has become a virtual non-factor, as much of the sect is off fighting the Gehenna War. Most of what’s left is easy prey for the Camarilla, the werewolves, the Second Inquisition, or whoever else has an issue with kill-crazy vampires in their area.
Without them, the Camarilla went looking for a scapegoat and found the independent Anarch Movement. The Anarchs caught the blame for the Second Inquisition’s attack on Vienna, and as such, have become enemies of the Camarilla.
As a trade-off, the Anarchs are currently stronger than ever, as the Camarilla’s decree led the Brujah to officially break ranks with the sect. The Anarch Movement now consists of a blend of all vampire clans, plus the Brujah and Gangrel, with Los Angeles as its unofficial center of power.
Meet the Banu Haqim
In Bloodlines 2, the Banu Haqim are one of 4 clans that are available to a player at the start of the game. This is the current name in V5 for the vampires formerly known as Assamites, which Bloodlines players might remember from the Final Nights mod.
First introduced all the way back in Vampire first edition, the Assamites changed dramatically between versions of the tabletop game. The short version is that they’re a clan of assassins with roots in the Middle East that, for a long time, were cursed to crave the blood of other vampires.
By the modern day, that curse has been lifted, and the clan was subsequently splintered by an event called the Assamite Schism. In its wake, a significant number of Banu Haqim opted to join the Camarilla in 2013. In Bloodlines 2, picking the Banu Haqim makes Phyre into a stealth-based character.
If you’re as curious about the official name change as I was, I did get the chance to ask the current World of Darkness team at Paradox about this. According to them, “The Banu Haqim has been a collective name for the clan in Vampire: The Masquerade lore since the 2nd Edition of the game. The Clan has always preferred it to the more colloquial ‘Assamites’ or any of their other half-dozen-plus nicknames.”
Kuei-Jin? Who’re They?
If you played Bloodlines, you probably remember Ming Xiao, the leader of Los Angeles’ Chinatown, who was a Kuei-jin. These were originally introduced in the Vampire sourcebook Kindred of the East and have nothing to do with Western vampires. Instead, they’re inspired by mythological monsters like jiangshi, and are essentially damned souls who’ve found their way back to Earth.
The Kuei-jin were one of several new types of supernatural creature that were introduced during White Wolf’s Year of the Lotus event in 1998, which promised details on the supernatural underground of Asia. However, like a lot of things about the World of Darkness, the book that introduced the Kuei-jin has aged really badly. Former White Wolf writer Holden Shearer has described the term Kuei-jin as “a racist and frankly embarrassing relic of the mid-1990s when Vampire didn’t know better yet” (Exalted Versus World of Darkness, pg. 267).
That may explain why the Kuei-jin have been thrown down a memory hole. In V5, they’re most notable by their absence, with no explicit mention of them in any official material to date. It's possible that the Kuei-jin are simply a problem that Paradox doesn’t want to deal with, considering the other issues that have arisen with the rest of V5.
It's likely that once we've gotten our hands on the full version of Bloodlines 2, there'll be more changes than just what we've seen. Seattle's vampire underground hasn't been explored much in the game's story, which gives The Chinese Room a clean slate going forward. We'll keep track of more revelations as Bloodlines 2 gets closer to launch.
