Order and Disorder

Vampire society is organized into bloodlines — long threads of connection that can span hundreds (if not thousands) of years. The city of New Valencia is home to several long lineages of vampires, and over time those lineages have become houses. More recently, younger vampires (ones turned less than 100 years ago) have also formed dangerous gangs that insist on operating outside of the traditional house system.

A house’s history in the human world is generally that of either a criminal gang, spiritual organization or military entity that made it possible to operate openly among mortals while maintaining an essential degree of secrecy. As any citizen of New Valencia can tell you, each house descends from a culturally specific group, and represents a unique aspect of the vampire tradition.

DaVinci's Lady With An Ermine (c. 1483-1490). House Cosca's tastes for pleasure and luxury are rooted in Renaissance nobility.

House Cosca

House Cosca, descended from Italians that trace their heritage back through the mafia to the renaissance, has always led vampire society in their ability to drive social trends in the mortal world. Over hundreds of years, its past as a hard-charging band of brilliant thieves has been replaced by a taste for setting trends and enjoying the fruits of the human world.

Maya Charise, the house’s young Matriarch, was turned only fifty years ago. Once the kind of heiress/socialite who spent summers in Monaco and winters skiing the alps, she has brought continued glamour to the house. She was the favored protégée of the previous Matriarch, who died mysteriously and passed the title on. While some other Houses have a wavering confidence in her ability to lead, there’s no question that she is House Cosca’s most talented and intuitive forecaster of social change.

Members of House Cosca embody elite nighttime cool. They can recall intoxicants that were cutting-edge at the turn of the century, know what’s worth stealing in every world capital, wear finely tailored clothing and generally live the life of rock stars. They maintain a very profitable sideline creating new cultural trends among mortals. An invitation to any event thrown by House Cosca is a rare opportunity to experience the finest pleasures of either the mortal or immortal world.

House Cosca makes its headquarters in Club Hypnotique located in New Valencia’s Downtown district.

Gaiana Bianili, founder of House Gaiana, circa 5th century AD (Credit: Creative Commons)

House Gaiana

House Gaiana was born with its founder, Gaiana, in Yerevan, the modern capital of Armenia, in 782 BC. The lineage barely made it through the brutal violence of the Iron Age, but Gaiana and her followers survived to Christendom, and eventually her house came to reconcile its thirst for human blood with a deeply felt sense of spirituality and ethical responsibility. House Gaiana took many forms over the years: a women’s monastery (where the legend of the massacred St. Gaiana was born), an art school, a veterinary hospital, all the while observing a code of relative peace. Today, House Gaiana represents the unofficial memory of the vampire civilization.

As one of the last surviving vampires of the original ten, Gaiana is one of the oldest people to walk the earth, and the House named for her is the keeper of both history and order among vampires.

House Gaiana has the fewest members, but they take seriously their role as the conscience and memory of Vampire civilization. They keep long and detailed accounts of the history of New Valencia and its citizens, and their headquarters in the city’s museum is packed with artifacts and archaeological treasures from nearly 3000 years of Vampire existence.

House Gaiana makes its headquarters in the city museum.

Arturo DuArc, who survived the successful 1565 defense of Malta—by becoming a vampire. (Credit: Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, München)

House duArc

House duArc is descended from the Roman soldiers who watched their empire crumble under Julius Nepos and Romulus Augustus in the late 5th century AD, and then, as Vampires, lived on through some of the greatest military campaigns of Western history. As “survivors” of repeated warfare, members of House DuArc slowly became philosophical about their experiences, and eventually established a warrior-philosopher tradition carried on throughout the world.

The house’s leader, Arturo duArc, was turned in time to survive the Siege of Malta in 1565, and under his leadership the house members shifted their focus from the study of war and combat to the study of letters, philosophy, and mathematics. In keeping with their fine pedigree and deep understanding of the ways of the world, the members of House duArc are well educated and inclined toward intellectualism and sophistication, while at the same time they are deadly combatants and rigorously self-disciplined. House duArc has the most organization and internal laws of any house. While some vampires find this confining, many also thrive within the sense of structure and order, especially after centuries of seeing life at its most chaotic.

House duArc makes its headquarter in The Mahogany Secret, a bookstore in New Valencia.

Early members of House Zakone were Soviet-era scientists and criminal masterminds. (Credit: Creative Commons)

House Zakone

House Zakone has its origins in the extraordinarily creative and cutthroat 18th-century Russian criminal underworld, but developed a particular aptitude for technology that it now carries through to the present day. Members of House Zakone have been involved in everything from the first transatlantic wireless transmissions to the development of rocketry.

Celeste Zakone, born 1887, was an early pioneer in the Soviet Union’s fledgling rocket propulsion research program until she was turned in 1933 and fled Stalin’s Russia. Celeste Z not only believes in the power of technology to overcome the difficulties of Vampire life, she has believed since the turn of the 20th century that with the right technology, Vampires could leave this planet entirely and begin again.

The members of House Zakone have taken full advantage of the boundless energy and lifelong path of learning available to Vampires, and as a result they produce technology that far surpasses what human researchers have been able to accomplish. For the most part, the members of the House live online, and while their outward appearance suggests that they do nothing but cruise the web from the various cyber cafes they own, they in fact live rich and varied lives through their virtual connection to the outside world.

House Zakone makes its headquarters in the Half Moon Cyber Cafe.