The ones you can’t kill

Something dead approaches. It comes from way out, where The End eats the road. It is a brother to owls and a companion to scarecrows. No escape. You’ll try to kill it, but it will not die. You’ll try to outrun it, but it will lope after on four feet. You’ll try to escape, but it goes where other monsters fear to tread. You’ll lock yourself in a tower or a vault, but it will come on nighted wings or as ravenous smoke. You’ll plead to its human face, but it will only grin and say, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” You’ll die wondering whom the monster quoted.

The Gangrel are the ultimate survivors. Close to the Beast and close to the bone, they’re primal. They’re tough, shrugging off what should be terrible wounds as the weapons harmlessly thunk in their dead flesh. They’re out there, and you can’t do a damn thing about them. More than any other clan, they are a reminder that the greatest lie the Devil ever told was, “Congratulations, you escaped the food chain!”

Let the other clans wrestle and strain with esoteric riddles of what it is to be a monster. The Gangrel offer something more pure. Power without guilt. Lust without doubt. The other clans need. Always needing. They need havens, an audience, solitude, mortal institutions, or secrets. The Gangrel take what they want. All that they need is locked away in the endless potential of their horrific clay. They’re the travelling storytellers, the predatory CEO, king of the concrete jungle, and the monsters lurking under the water of the isolated lake.

The other clans are all afraid of their Beast, afraid it’ll get them into trouble or kill they people they care about. Not the Gangrel. They can’t be stopped and don’t want to stop. The creatures of the wild run with them, and even better, they can strip away their disguise of human flesh and become one of them.

But the self is a precious thing. Surrendering to, or even using, the Beast the way Gangrel do means sacrificing their sense of self to their inner hungers. Even their bodies are no longer their own, as they grow grotesque claws or transform into mist. It’s not just in their minds, but swimming under the skins. There is no escape from the Beast, for predator or prey.

Gangrel are:

• Direct
• Physical
• Close to the Beast
• Relentless
• Comfortable alone

Gangrel are not:

• Stupid
• Animalistic
• Lacking in self-control
• Without subtlety
• Automatically Anti-social

Clan Disciplines: Animalism, Protean, Resilience

(Text on this page taken from Vampire: the Requiem 2nd edition.)