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Vampire: the Masquerade
State of Grace
Cursed by the Divine
Faith in the Final Nights sometimes tends to polarize people, and the Kindred are no exception. Despite the cynical lack of faith that all too often characterizes the modern nights, a rare few find strength in reverence of a higher power. For these Kindred, spirituality is often a harrowing road as they are forced to reconcile their undead natures with the tenets of a God they may well feel has abandoned them.
Yet Still Reverent
Portraying a character who held his faith close to his unbeating heart has always been a challenge. This book looks closely at those Kindred, determining how they exist in the face of their obvious damnation. State of Grace applies real-world faiths to the World of Darkness, making for a realistic point of character development. The next in the Year of the Damned series for 2002.
Faith in the Final Nights sometimes tends to polarize people, and the Kindred are no exception. Despite the cynical lack of faith that all too often characterizes the modern nights, a rare few find strength in reverence of a higher power. For these Kindred, spirituality is often a harrowing road as they are forced to reconcile their undead natures with the tenets of a God they may well feel has abandoned them.
Yet Still Reverent
Portraying a character who held his faith close to his unbeating heart has always been a challenge. This book looks closely at those Kindred, determining how they exist in the face of their obvious damnation. State of Grace applies real-world faiths to the World of Darkness, making for a realistic point of character development. The next in the Year of the Damned series for 2002.
120 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2002
1 person is currently reading
33 people want to read
About the author
Richard Dansky
110 books83 followersBy day, Richard Dansky works as a professional video game designer and writer for Red Storm/Ubisoft, with credits on games like Splinter Cell: Blacklist. By night, he writes fiction, with his most recent book being the short fiction collection SNOWBIRD GOTHIC. Richard lives in North Carolina with his wife and their inevitable cats, books, and collection of single malt whiskys.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 23, 2018
The supplement treadmill marches on.
I don't actually think that State of Grace was bad, I was just bored most of the time while I was reading it. Vampire demographics mean that only a fraction of vampires are religious, and only a fraction of those are devout, and only a fraction of those are anywhere near each other, so it's all well and good to talk about all-vampire churches that offer blood communion, but how common is that? Grand images of some hapless mortal walking into an abandoned church to find it full of worshippers who all turn and bare their fangs fail in the face of the fact that even in a major metropolitan area, such a church would have maybe three to five devotees. Anything less common than Christianity in the West is going to have a lot fewer than that.
Like, take Judaism. There was a lot of interesting aspects to vampire-influenced Jewish practice in the book, from the interpretation of kashrut when one requires blood to survive--is one allowed to consume blood under the principle of pikuach nefesh (as long as the vampire doesn't harm their victims, obviously), or does the mere act of existence as a vampire break dietary laws--to the attempt by some Jewish vampires to keep kosher by feeding only from mortals to keep kosher. And I loved the idea that at any given time, there's one or two Jewish 鬼人 running around drawn from the Jews of Kaifeng. But the only place observant Jewish vampires are going to be anything approaching common is in Israel. In America, Jews are 1.4% of the population and traditionally-observant Jews are a fraction of that, so realistically speaking, the number of Jewish vampires who exist and worry about these questions is probably in the double digits. Some of the weird vampire-only religions probably have more adherents.
There are some interesting examples of those. My favorite is Gaianism, a modern religion that believes that vampires are entirely nature and exist as population control for mortals. Also Antecaedism, the requisite Gnostic religion, though like most Gnostic religions it's enormously antisemitic; and Deimosianism, the belief that vampires spontaneously arose out of primal fears. The Ravnos are the fear of treachery or deceit, the Assamites are the fear of dying, the Gangrel are the fear of wild beasts, the Tzimisce are the fear of disease, and so on. That's fun.
The disadvantages are the aforementioned problem with numbers and also the fact that most vampire-only religions seem designed to let vampires do whatever they want with no restrictions. There's even notes in some that they're incompatible with Humanity and most Paths of Enlightenment, which seems odd in a storytelling game of personal horror. It goes against everything in other books about moral codes which don't actually constrain their bearers in any way, and makes even having members of these religions as antagonists difficult because the players are always going to be wondering why they haven't fallen into Wassail yet if they're murdering mortals left and right, diablerizing vampires--another common factor in most of the vampire-specific religions--and otherwise letting their instincts have full sway.
A much more niche book than I was expecting.
I don't actually think that State of Grace was bad, I was just bored most of the time while I was reading it. Vampire demographics mean that only a fraction of vampires are religious, and only a fraction of those are devout, and only a fraction of those are anywhere near each other, so it's all well and good to talk about all-vampire churches that offer blood communion, but how common is that? Grand images of some hapless mortal walking into an abandoned church to find it full of worshippers who all turn and bare their fangs fail in the face of the fact that even in a major metropolitan area, such a church would have maybe three to five devotees. Anything less common than Christianity in the West is going to have a lot fewer than that.
Like, take Judaism. There was a lot of interesting aspects to vampire-influenced Jewish practice in the book, from the interpretation of kashrut when one requires blood to survive--is one allowed to consume blood under the principle of pikuach nefesh (as long as the vampire doesn't harm their victims, obviously), or does the mere act of existence as a vampire break dietary laws--to the attempt by some Jewish vampires to keep kosher by feeding only from mortals to keep kosher. And I loved the idea that at any given time, there's one or two Jewish 鬼人 running around drawn from the Jews of Kaifeng. But the only place observant Jewish vampires are going to be anything approaching common is in Israel. In America, Jews are 1.4% of the population and traditionally-observant Jews are a fraction of that, so realistically speaking, the number of Jewish vampires who exist and worry about these questions is probably in the double digits. Some of the weird vampire-only religions probably have more adherents.
There are some interesting examples of those. My favorite is Gaianism, a modern religion that believes that vampires are entirely nature and exist as population control for mortals. Also Antecaedism, the requisite Gnostic religion, though like most Gnostic religions it's enormously antisemitic; and Deimosianism, the belief that vampires spontaneously arose out of primal fears. The Ravnos are the fear of treachery or deceit, the Assamites are the fear of dying, the Gangrel are the fear of wild beasts, the Tzimisce are the fear of disease, and so on. That's fun.
The disadvantages are the aforementioned problem with numbers and also the fact that most vampire-only religions seem designed to let vampires do whatever they want with no restrictions. There's even notes in some that they're incompatible with Humanity and most Paths of Enlightenment, which seems odd in a storytelling game of personal horror. It goes against everything in other books about moral codes which don't actually constrain their bearers in any way, and makes even having members of these religions as antagonists difficult because the players are always going to be wondering why they haven't fallen into Wassail yet if they're murdering mortals left and right, diablerizing vampires--another common factor in most of the vampire-specific religions--and otherwise letting their instincts have full sway.
A much more niche book than I was expecting.
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