"By becoming a monster,
one learns what it is to be human."

We are monsters to thee, yet heroes as well. We are the incarnations of dark metaphors and suppressed desires, yet we are also the nobility of fairy tales, beloved of children. We are Vampires.

Like mortals, we have our own history and lore, by which we seek to explain our existence and understand our place in the world. Inconsistencies are rife, but the main body of the tale states that my kind is descended from Caine, whom some call The Third Mortal.

Outcast from mortal society for the killing of his brother, Caine was cursed with eternal life and a craving for blood. We, his children, are the heirs to that curse, condemned to repeat his crime endlessly.

On one level, the world of the vampire is the world of mortals. A vampire moves in the world of mortals much as a nobleman moves in the forest of beasts while hunting. Just as the noble has his castles and courts, however, so the vampire has a world of his own, where he may consort with his own kind.

Some vampires shun the society of their Kindred, but such society exists, paralleling mortal society in both function and form. Just as there are mortal rulers and mortal societies in the world’s great cities, so too there are vampire Clans and Princes.

In 1435, there was founded an organization, a caused, an obsession, a war. Call it what you will; history knows it as the Inquisition. For the first time, our kind stood in real danger of extinction. It was a terrifying time, as insane to us as the Holocaust which mortals visited on one another. Those Kindred who survived bear the mental scar of the Inquisition to this day.

The survivors quickly learned the wisdom of stealth and secrecy. This was the birth of what may be called a Vampiric society. The name Camarilla arose for this organization. The founders of the Camarilla made themselves its lawmakers. The first such law, and the most sacred, is that of the Masquerade...