OFFICIAL VEKN GANGREL ANTRIBU NEWSLETTER VOLUME 3 NUMBER 12 DECEMBER 2000 IN THIS ISSUE .... WELCOME TO MY HOUSE! [Fiction] SABBAT WAR AND THE GANGREL ANTITRIBU DECK: RAVING WEREWOLVES NON-EUCLIDEAN COORDINATE GEOMETRY OF VAMPIRES [New deck-building tool] WELCOME TO MY HOUSE! "Welcome to my house! Do please come in! Allow the servants to take your coats. Hahaha. Actually the servants are those humans over there, with their clothes on. These are, in fact, the canapes. I recommend the ones with olives braided into their dreadlocks, unless you like anchovies - Lady Legbiter spent a LONG time threading the anchovies into the noses, navels and earlobes of those ones. O, and a cocktail - a Marguerita? A Bloody Mary? A White Lady? Excellent!" I know I am chattering like a horde of carrion crows but I really am pleased to be welcoming our newest recruits to the annual Christmas Revel. As I usher them into the hall the Black Spiral Buddy Holly Band begin what they fondly imagine to be a Stirring Rendition of my newly- composed march the Path of the Feral Heart on the Pibroch Mor. Well, YOU tell them they suck, if you dare. Meanwhile I am performing the introductions. Wren, Ellen Fence and Darrel Boyce rapidly gravitate to the City faction whose members are soon in animated discussion about the matters dearest to their hearts; the best place to hide a flamethrower, watches and knickers considered and rejected as too small and too scratchy respectively; celerity, an advantage in combat but not when it is your turn to buy a round; claws or spurs the best fashion accessory for the modern undead psycopath, with many valuable insights into the best ways of painting the former to look as though you are on the Pull. Omaya meanwhile is looking a bit lost, poor girl. I offer her a grass-stem to chew in the hope of making her feel at home; deploy my VERY limited knowledge of country and bluegrass, succeeding only in displaying its inadequacy; and finally leave her with Caitlin and Monique. Good to see how Monique has blossomed since the war began - Caitlin having been promoted a generation, Monique has suddenly become more popular with those Boys and Girls who like a Younger Fiend, and it shows. Genevieve joins them, angrily shaking off the Mad Prince of Houston who appears to have confused her with Samantha, and the four girls are soon exchanging fashion tips along the lines of Burn the Laura Ashley, girl, Drop the Bunches and Get An Unlife. How very happy I am as I watch my little families prattling away, and how very many evil PLOTS are hatching in my brain as I organise the 7-a-side Huangball game which has become a traditional feature of our Saturnalian revels. And little does the Detestable Prince of Watford suspect how VERY many of his subjects DO know about the Sabbat War, and will be joining it. Bwahahahahaha!!!!! SABBAT WAR AND THE GANGREL ANTITRIBU Of course the new vampires and the Path of the Feral heart will be a great boon to the Gangrel antitribu, but I just want to say a few words about other cards in the set which strike me as having great potential for the clan. I think that rave and Mystic Vagabond, but mainly rave, are well on the way to making a werewolf deck playable at competitive level, as I'll explain below. I also think The Coven, Path of the Feral Heart and Blood of the Sabbat will turn out to be great cards for our clan, because with the Path and Blood of the Sabbat you can bleed unblockably for loads using Horrific Countenance and only pay two blood for it overall! How cool would that be, for the dominate !Gangrel such as Caitlin and Genevieve?? And prior to getting out your Path and Blood, you could Coven your vamps back up to chocolatey-good fullness. I say nothing of the potential of unblockable votes, because I still think the !Gangrel aren't a frightfully serious proposition as a voting clan, City Connections or no. Finally, our old friend Beast is now joined by a new friend in the form of Miller Delmardigen, teacher of Bahari. I think he is going to see a fair bit of contesting because he fits right in to a lot of nice decks. DECK: RAVING WEREWOLVES The basic idea of this deck is simple. Bring out Werewolves. Rush people. Kill them. Then bleed your prey to death. Stay alive meanwhile by Raving the werewolves' lives onto your blood dolls. The werewolves get their lives back next turn anyway. This is a concept deck BTW - not playtested or happy family-fied so quite likely to be a pile of crap. I'm fairly confident the concept is sound, anyway. CRYPT Genevieve Faruq Ingrid Rossler 2 x Caitlin Darrell Boyce Monique Wren Sadie Huang 2 small Gangrels with pro LIBRARY MASTERS [18] Fame 4 x Blood Doll 2 x Dominate Path of the Feral Heart Gangrel Conspiracy Minion Tap Giant's Blood Campground HG KRCG News Radio 5 x Haven Uncovered PROTEAN CARDS [24] 8 x Horrific Countenance 4 x Earth Meld 4 x Earth Control 4 x Rapid Change 4 x Form of Mist DOMINATE CARDS [14] 4 x Govern the Unaligned 4 x Conditioning 2 x Grave Robbing 4 x Deflection DISCIPLINELESS [34] 6 x WWEF 8 x Renegade garou 8 x Rave 4 x Bum's Rush 4 x Dodge Vagabond Mystic 3 x Lucky Blow NON-EUCLIDEAN COORDINATE GEOMETRY OF VAMPIRES [New deck-building tool] I've been trying to draw the structure of vampire society. The basic idea is to have the clans as the vertexes of a figure the lengths of whose edges are proportional to the number of disciplines that are different between the two clans represented by their ends. For example, Malkavians and Tremere have two disciplines in common and one different, so the Malky and Tremere vertexes are joined by a line one unit long. Same is true for the Brujah and Toreador. Brujahs join the Nosferatu by a line 2 units long [potence is the only discipline they have in common], and so on - you don't join clans that have no disciplines in common by any line whatsoever. Anyway it is quite easy to draw this figure. I usually start with a square at the front whose corners [reading from the bottom left anticlockwise] are the Nosferatu, Brujah, Ventrue and gangrel. Running back from the bottom edge of this and roughly perpendicular to it is a quadrilateral whose other corners apart from the Brujah and Nossie are the Toreador and Malkavians. Behind this is a triangle and a pyramid and right at the tip of the pyramid are the Tremere. The figure is non- euclidean so you can't make it but it is immensely enjoyable to "plot" individual vampires, other clans and your decks onto this figure - you get a real sense of the "forces" pulling vampires and clans this way and that, and the positions of the setites and assamites are particularly thought-provoking, I find. I've rather grandly called this concept a tool but I have to admit I am not yet sure how much use it will be in practice - it helps me to think about my deck construction in a more pictorial way, however, and I generally find in my work that once I can picture something I REALLY begin to understand it. Anyway, if I do figure out [a] how to use this systematically, and [b] how to draw it so y'all can see it, you'll be hearing about it again, soon. *************************** So, have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year. And a special tip of the Christmas Glass to White Wolf. It was very brave of them after two of their clever and creative house-developed card-games nose-dived to try again with vampires, and I'm very pleased that their courage and foresight has paid off. See you all in the New Year for more vampy fun and the Final Nights!