Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom

Vampire: the Masquerade

by Justin Achilli, Voronica Whitney-Robinson, Will Hindmarch

Domains Long Hidden

Africa has long been a bastion of mystery in the World of Darkness. Finally, the domains south of the Sahara are revealed - and the laws of Western Kindred hold no water here. Out of the Kingdom of the secretive Laibon come the monstrous Guruhi,the atavistic Naglopers and the wise Akunanse - and untold other horrors.

Still Children of Caine?

Created in the tradition of Kindred of the East, Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom offers an all-new take on the race of Caine. Although presumably still descended from the FirstVampire, the Kindred of Africa have evolved a very different society - one completely alien to Western Kindred. Many mysteries of the Cainite race play out here in the Ebony Kingdom, and just as many rise to take their place.

Genres: Role Playing Games, World Of Darkness, Vampires, Fiction, Africa, Gaming, Horror

205 pages, Hardcover

First published April 28, 2003

Reviews

[Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say?
I really liked this book. It was easy to read and entertaining. The artwork is good and the style, well styles to be precise, very appealing.

Now maybe some people would call… whatever on this book especially when they do not know the game line this plays in, but I learned that you will always find someone complaining about anything even if there is no need for it. I guess there are some elements of this book that can be considered weird, I get to them later, but all in all I think this is definitely one of the better books in this line and it’s a shame that the line ended so soon after this was published.
Now, before anyone gets any ideas, the authors made clear that this is not a representation of real Africa but simply an extension of the World of Darkness into that geographical area direction and in my experience this is a good sign, since the authors for this game line are usually at their best when they make stuff up from scratch.
The Africa you see here fits very neatly into the wider World of Darkness and definitely looks like such a place would look in this dark world. Now as the title suggests, this book is about the vampires, or "Laibon" as they call themselves, of Sub-Saharan Africa and so does not concern itself with the sections of northern Africa that are mostly inhabited by white people.
And don't worry, it doesn't treat that part of Africa as one giant homogenous mass, quite the contrary, it simply can't go into the detail of all these different cultures and therefore has to work with some generalization. They stated outright: Even restricting this setting to sub-Saharan Africa, the region is vast and diverse. Although the continent is commonly talked about as a whole, its parts are often fiercely independent and topically unrelated. It is a large and complicated subject to learn. Actually it was surprising not only how much they actually highlight this diversity (by e.g. having a Laibon travel through several countries) but unlike their Kindred counterparts, these Laibon seem way less rigid in their very nature. Many of the game rules regarding them actually seem like a pretty good idea to keep them hidden since when you see a guy with e.g. goat eyes you probably won't think vampire first. And on a continent so entrenched in the believes of spirits, shapeshifters and all sorts of monsters, a vampire could easily be mistaken for something else. Actually one part of this book, written by a mortal that time, unlike the other two personal accounts who were Laibon of the Akunanse legacy (with fitting animal characteristics, snake and spider), deals with exactly that. An informed observer might spot the Laibon in question but many others will think they are thieves, thugs or sorcerers, or who knows what local folklore has to offer. Trust me the game systems regarding morality here, albeit possibly difficult to follow sometimes, have a very obvious effect on not only how powerful a Laibon is but also on how they look. The ones with the highest ratings can appear angelic, while the lowest ones like feral humanoid beasts. But again, more on that later.

Now before I write an essay on this, I will go into what I liked best:
1) The Legacies; these "clans" of the African vampires are an interesting take on African mythology and the major vampire clans they spawn from
Akunanse – unlike their bestial Gangrel brethren these guys are rather the wise animal people and storytellers of the Ebony Kingdom, and while Gangrel acquire animal traits when losing themselves to their inner beast, these people acquire physical animal traits (running pretty much the gamut of the animal kingdom) the more they learn. Which is an interesting concept if you ask me.
Followers of Set – well these lore keepers and scheemers are philosophically not much different than their non-Laibon brethren, except that they believe their god rests somewhere in equatorial Africa, they do not value red hair and some of them develop rainbow-colored scales when using their special power.
Guruhi – this legacy are the kings of the Ebony Kingdom, being the old crowd in charge of everything, so much some don't know how deep their influence goes. Interestingly it is suggested that they descend from the hideous Nosferatu vampires, but while these vampires are the monstrous looking lower classes of the Kindred who carve out a niche for themselves via using information as a market, the Guruhi look monstrous only when their soul matches that and they are the people in charge.
Ishtarri – these hedonistic Laibon seem to be descended from the equally hedonistic Toreador, but while Toreador are basically upper class snubs, the Ishtarri are often (not always due to their vices) tough travellers and competent fighters. As their name suggest they claim descend from the goddess Ishtar and the majority of their elder members look like white people from the Near and Middle East. The funny thing is also that the look of the Ishtarri changes based on their vices, so a vampire who feeds too often can become fat or a drug addict, well, may look wasted and thin, while others look to be suffering from disease.
Kinyonyi – this offshot of the Ravnos are not directly outsiders, albeit rumoured to be from the outside of the Kingdom, and while their clan weakness keeps them from settling anywhere (they can't help themselves to cause trouble) they are important messagers and hired workers. Actually they appear to be much more powerful since the other Laibon do not know that the special power of these Laibon are just illusions, they think its real.
Mla Watu – these necromantic Laibon are the last descendents of the Cappadocian vampire clan and look the like (aka pale corpses) and they prefer to remain alone, the fact that they can control ghosts ensures that most Laibon give them a wide berth to begin with.
Nagloper – these fallen descendents of the horrid Tzimisce are basically a well used African stereotype. Take every horror stereotype about Africa you can find, put it into a humanoid shape and you likely stare into the face of one of those. They are basically only allowed to live for two reasons: 1) they can be very useful, 2) they are perfect examples as to what happens if you do not keep a reign on your inner beast. These Laibon practically throw themselves to the beast, some of them becoming barely more than forces of nature, while others are horrifying witches and brutal monsters. Like the Tzimisce they posess fleshcrafting powers (albeit more suitable for fighting than crafting) and must bury themselves in the earth during the day. But unlike with the Tzimisce, all earth does it, not just their home soil. Which makes them of course more independent.
Nkulu Zao – and we have another legacy of last survivors, these Laibon are one of the few survivors of clan Salubri, the so to say holy clan of healers and warriors, but being hunted for centuries has driven these Laibon to the extreme when they settled in the Ebony Kingdom. They are now the very soul suckers they were once accused to be, they are incredibly secretive and paranoid and even their third eye (once a sign of their special status) has atrophied. And the fact that they only gain sustenance from those that willingly give their blood to them doesn't make unlife any easier for them.
Osebo – oh yeah, the offshot of clan Brujah, these Laibon are as violent as their parent clan are and when left to themselves it always fails. But while the Brujah are usually anarchs of the finest the Osebo take an interesting twist. You see, usually in fiction when we have such beings with quick tempers and bloodlust they usually go around like "fuck the system", not these though. The common attitude of the Osebo is that they cannot control themselves and so someone else has to do it. So they usually serve the local power figure (usually non-Osebo of course) and so far it paid of well for them. When being in service they actually thrive but when left to themselves they quickly destroy each other.
Shango – now there is the offshot of the killer clan Assamite, but these are of course different, they dispense judgement of course, but are also capable fighters and accomplished sorcerers. You could say that they are in many ways the secret police of the Kingdom.
Xi Dundu – and now the final Legacy, the shadow-controlling powers they have reveal them as being part of clan Lasombra, but while the Lasombra have no reflection these people have no shadow and they cannot by any means remain on their home soil for long. They are the schemers and common threats of the Kingdom planning to overthrow the Guruhi.
Now there are some other vampiric factions in the Kingdom but they are mostly newcomers and none of them are Laibon, the book makes it clear.
Also before I close this, the images here are interesting. The so to say spider-human presenting the Akunanse is kind of gender ambiguous, unless the clothes say anything in that regard, but except for that nearly all other legacies are presented by men, except for the Guruhi, Xi-Dundu and Nagloper. So basically three of the four (when Shango included) most influential and dangerous legacies are presented by women and the wise one by a gender ambiguous being. I am not sure what to think of that to be honest. It gives female figures places of power but on the other hand these are one of the few we see in the book.
And just for the record: these names are not the origin of their "real" counterparts, but they were named after the various gods, beings and all, even within the book. Truly underlining that there is nothing a Laibon has that isn't stolen from mortals.

2) The Tenets. These are the basic laws of the Laibon, the fundamental rules that apply to all regions of the kingdom, albeit their interpretations vary, sometimes drastically. I think you can give the writers credit for having rules that sound so easy but in application can be so difficult and have so many ramifications.
3) The unique disciplines. The majority of disciplines (vampiric powers) function the same in the Ebony Kingdom albeit their names and administration might differ (e.g. praying before calling an animal). However there are two disciplines who are different from their Kindred counterparts and one that is unique to the Laibon. And these three are actually quite impressive. The two that are different are Auspex and Vicissitude.
Auspex is an many ways the same in the Kingdom as outside and in 1-2 cases is not as refined as its Kindred counterpart but is at the same time more versatile. You cannot just see auras, read psychic impressions and talk via telepathy, as well as doing Astral Projection. You may also perceive ghosts and spirits, plant thoughts into others minds and actually transform your soul temporally into a spirit, seeing both the world of the living and dead in the process, you can even travel in those worlds and transform yourself completely into a spirit.
Now unlike the version of the Tzimisce, the Vicissitude of the Nagloper is less about crafting flesh for shapeshifting (albeit that is still possible, just a tad more difficult) but to twist it for the use of combat. Thereby it affects others much more quickly but less controlled (e.g. litreally ripping flesh from bone) and the warshapes they learn at level four (the first level Tzmisce can actually use this power for fighting directly instead of having to craft their bodies into weapons) are more varied and depend on the Nagloper itself.
And the unique discipline of the Laibon is the one called Abombwe, the traitmark power of the Akunanse. This is a discipline in the truest sense and basically is the equivalent of mastering yourself, since the higher you advance in this discipline the more control do you have about your inner Beast (not a primal selve but the embodiment of all your negative and destructive impulses). The power allows you to sense the Beast of others, take on animal characteristics for several purposes (with some limits, e.g. wings are never good for more than gliding or slowing a fall), hide inside stone, earth, trees etc., channel your Beast to gain impressive physical powers of strength and speed, respectively even grow appendages, and at level 5 learning to take the inner Beast of predatory animals (at least the size of cat) and take on their shapes, with skill storing them and so being able to have several animal shapes. Now this is similar to the vampire power Protean (shapeshifting) and you could say if you have both you are superpowerful. Well you would be right except that the rules make it clear that these two powers are exclusive, you can just have one but never both. So a vampire with Protean at level 5 has the power tro transform into mist, but has only 2 animal forms, while a Laibon using Abombwe can have several, so who knows whether the owl from the evening, the dog at midnight or that vulture near dawn aren't all the same Laibon following you.
It is sad really that none of these powers go beyond level 5 though, I am curious how the higher levels would look like.

4) The morality system. Unlike the Kindred the Laibon function totally different on a basic morality level. They have two traits, called Orun and Aye, and where on these two charts they stand affects their mystic powers and how they look. I already mentioned two examples. But one with high Aye and low Orun seems almost human, might even feel warm to the touch, while one with low Aye and high Orun often looks like a demon, with mouths for palms, burning footprints, maybe some horns or giant wards (it is all based on the individual Laibon and can differ widely). Of course there are cosmetic things and don't give the Laibon any special powers or so, think of them as "natural" plastic surgery. Also the laws of these two traits are ecqually interesting.
5) The merits and flaws. They reflect how much more malleable in nature these Laibon are and how much more spiritual of a "people" they are. And this leads to the last point.
6) The different looks on what being a Laibon means. The Kindred basically come from Judeo-Christian, respectivley Muslim, stock or are atheists shapes by those believes. So there is not much variation. But while Laibon can belong to these faiths as well, there is the strong element of animism in the Kingdom and that shapes how these Laibon see themselves. Some think they are damned, others general monsters, others as part spirit and others as demi- or even gods (based on a famous origin story they have). And this has remaifications on how they act and see the world around them.
I think all in all they give these vampires a very unique flavor and show them as not just another version of Kindred but a variety on the vampire myth
PS. No they do not ignore HIV and all, they incoporate that pretty neatly into the book. Trust me.

But sadly, from the points that I like best about this book and that make it a really good book in my mind, there are some flaws it has:
1) The spelling has been bad a few times, e.g it spelled "money" instead of "monkey" and "a" instead of "and".
2) From time to time the book speaks about the more primal nature of many aspects of Laibon in contrast to the Kindred. Which is weird if you ask me since the rest of the book doesn't actually show that. But even then I think things like the merits and flaws, their laws, the designs of the legacies and especially the Laibon special disciplines more than make up for that.
3) I found it weird that when referring to Egyptians they put the word "white" in quotes as if that is somehow ambiguous. Sure for a time they were ruled by people from the South, but on average they were white people, they simply weren't pale.
4) If Sangoma and Inyanga are traditional healers from South Africa, why does this book treat them as universally Sub-Saharan African from time to time?
5) Why are they the same species as the Kindred (this also means you need at least the Vampire The Masquerade corebook or wiki to understand some stuff in this book)? Sure it is an interesting picture on how different these vampires can be (the Laibon culture feels in many ways pretty different, more like family, and they can practice their powers more openly), but still all the powers, the morality traits, the laws and all, would have easily made for a new sort of monster. Especially since it was never stated why the Laibon became so different from the Kindred. Religion and philosophy are one thing, but these vampires function fundamentally different from all other ones.
6) There is the old flaw this whole game line has: the older vampires are always more powerful and stay so. That is set. There is a certain number of vampire generations and the higher the generation number the weaker the vampire. And with all the malleability that is inherent in the Laibon culture and all I think they would have fitted the new World of Darkness better.

So all in all this is a pretty good and inspirational book and I really like these vampires and all, albeit the book has a few flaws and so it, again, will only be 4 stars instead of 5. Too bad the game line was pretty much stopped.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom is a lot like Kindred of the East, in that it's an attempt to create a different kind of vampires for a part of the world with other traditions and histories, but unfortunately falls prey to a lot of the stereotypes about that region in its attempt.

Let me start with the good. The Legacies--African Clans--of the Laibon are very well done. They come in two major groups: Equivalent to a Kindred Clan with a minor change, and separate enough to be a bloodlines. In the first group are the Followers of Set, who are just Setites who are south of Egypt; the Kinyonyi, African Ravnos; the Naglopers, Tzimisce who need to bury themselves beneath the soil when they sleep; and the Xi Dundu, Lasombra who have no shadows rather than no reflections. In the second group are the Akunanse, like Gangrel but with the old Laibon Discipline of Abombwe rather than Protean, and who adopt the animal features from the places where they live rather than as the result of frenzy; the Guruhi, the rulers of Africa, like Nosferatu but with Presence instead of Obfuscate, whose appearance is always obviously supernatural rather than always monstrous; the Ishtarri, Toreador with Fortitude instead of Auspex, who have an easy time becoming addicted (there is no system for this); the Osebo, Brujah with Auspex instead of Presence; and the Shango, Assamites with Dur-An-Ki from Blood Sacrifice instead of Quietus.

Though, since these are groups of Africa, maybe its the other way around. Maybe the Guruhi were the original and the Nosferatu came later, or so on for the other Legacies? The Osebo even have a note in their description about methuselahs waking up after having slumbered for millennia on the shores of the Mediterranean and coming south with stories of a glorious city where vampires and humans lived together in harmony.

All of that is great! Diversity of local vampirism for everywhere in the world is a good thing, rather than something like "Here are the Assamites, the vampires of the Middle East. Also Europe gets ten Clans."

The power structure is interesting as well. The Guruhi are the rulers, that's just how it is. Most of the time, though, they don't actually do the ruling--the local ruler, known as a magaji (in Hausa, "heir, successor") holds the power in trust from the Guruhi and makes all the decisions. The eldest members of the Legacies, known as the Kholo (in Sesotho, "big") advise the magaji. Pretty similar to the Prince and Primogen.

However, the book heavily leans into the Darkest Africa cliches. Africa is violent. Africa is cut off from the world, filled with dirt roads and isolated villages, so the Laibon can use their powers with somewhat more ease than elsewhere. Africans believe in the supernatural and are more willing to accept the Laibon in their midst (though only somewhat--a blooddrinker is still a blooddrinker). There's a travelogue in the middle of the book written from the perspective of an Akunanse Embraced in the 17th century and then a Cameroonian man accompanying an American Peace Corpse volunteer on vacation, and both hammer on the same things. Violence and war everywhere, roads filled with potholes, guards and officials that need a bribe before they'll do anything, barely-controlled chaos being the order of things, grinding poverty, and in probably the most obvious distillation of the problem, there's this quote when they visit Dakar:

The city was a mixture of European sophistication and local squalor.

That's a hell of a way to characterize Africa in a book about Africa, right?

There's also that sometimes Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom treats Africa as a continent with a wide variety of societies, languages, cultures, and governments, like it is, and sometimes talks about "African people," which is about as useful as talking about "Asian people." That is to say, not at all, not to mention it buys into the common stereotype of Africa being all the same--violent, poor, backward. The Dark Continent. The...Ebony Kingdom?

Hmm.

I kept thinking as I was reading that so much of the talk about Africa being less connected from the world no longer apply. They didn't install a lot of land-line infrastructure, but they skipped forward to smartphones, whose penetration in Sub-Saharan Africa is now at 40%. Not much space to operate unhindered for Laibon when they're just as likely to find someone who can film them and put them on Youtube as they are anywhere else in the world.

I appreciate the effort and the new vampires, but 200 pages isn't nearly enough to cover a continent, and it shows.

[Anscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I certainly enjoyed the fresh attempt at new types of vampires from the familiar 13 clans, whilst it still being clear which progenitor they originated from. Still things felt a little off though, like how Malkavians and Ventrue aren't prevalent in the continent despite thousands of years of contact. And how homogenous many of 'legacies' are despite the vastness of the continent and thousands of years of cultural separation (the Shango, who revere only a Yoruba-specific god, is a good example of this), and could have benefitted from at least a cursory glance at 'bloodlines' and legacy variants that have developed across the millennia.

The stereotypes of the 'dark continent' are leaned into here, but that didn't bother me too much, since I understand that this is the World of Darkness, and all the darkness of our own world is dialled up to 11. So of course government corruption, civil war and smuggling are going to be emphasised in a WoD book about Africa, just like how police corruption, government surveillance, gang warfare and terrorism are emphasised in WoD books about Europe and North America.

On the whole I enjoyed this book but felt it could have gone further and deeper and more detailed with its lore to improve the depth and realism of Africa in the WoD.

[Gamal Hennessy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom translates the urban Eurocentric horror RPG into a broad African setting. The sourcebook maintains the classic secret-supernatural conflict as a metaphor for real world politics found in all the Vampire books, and the “unique” aspects of the game mechanics often feel like reskins of traditional Vampire tropes. But there is enough here to throw a welcome curve to players and storytellers alike who are looking for something different*.

*P.S. The book is more than fifteen years old, so I doubt it’s compatible with current versions of Vampire.