So today we'll be taking a crack at one of my favorite RPG's of all time, the one that set the tone for a decade, and probably one of the coolest vampire stories ever, Vampire: The Masquerade. There's so many themes to be tackled here, but this is RPG Antagonists, so I'll start on the biggest, baddest fish in the sea, the Antediluvians.
For the uninitiated to the backstory, Caine, the first vampire, cursed by god for his unorthodox approach to family bonding time, fled the land of Nod and founded his own city, Enoch, possibly with or without blackjack and hookers. There, he did what every other emo teen does when gifted with phenomenal supernatural powers and a healthily homicidal attitude and turned a bunch of people into vampires. Well, more accurately, he turned three, Zillah, Irad, and the unimaginatively named Enoch. He then told his childer not to sire any more vampires, because Caine, being the intelligent man he was, realized that vampires outnumbering humans would be quite a bad thing, given that they needed them to live. His childer, paying no attention whatsoever whoopsied another 13 vampires into existence, who decided to thank them by eating them all. Caine, being a bit perturbed by this, cursed them all, and sent them away.
In the modern day, the 13 Antediluvians are little more than legends and folklore. Each one represents what their clan could be, and represent the father whose sins their children inherited. The Antediluvians aren't really active characters, but their presence should be felt. Each one of them is an ancient, genocidal monster that wants to turn the earth into their own personal buffet. Antediluvians are never seen, but felt. The Tzimisce know, whenever they use Vicissitude, that their founder bubbles just beneath their skin. When the Ventrue dominate the minds of the kine, they feel their founder's dread gaze pouring through them, breaking the mortal's will. Vampires like to be in charge, and they like to feel powerful. Each vampire, from the oldest elder to the youngest neonate wants to feel like the apex predator on top of the food chain, and the Antediluvians are there to remind them that they aren't. They're really a representation of what it means to have failed the main aim of the game, that is, to retain one's humanity and reconcile that with one's unholy nature. The Antediluvians, to a man, have discarded humanity entirely, and in doing so have become things that are very certainly not human. Besides Caine, who, depending on who you believe is either dead, sleeping, or driving a taxi around Los Angeles, these alien beings are the very masters of the chessboard of the night. Even hoary old elders who have spent centuries accumulating wealth and resources may be nothing but a pawn to an Antediluvian, who remote controls him from a tomb beneath some mountain halfway across the world.
The Antediluvians make the best antagonists when they aren't seen. Like many of the best RPG Antagonists, they can instill a real feeling of paranoia to a campaign, where everyone could be (and probably is) working for them. You yourself are probably serving some inscrutable scheme of your elders, who could very easily be planting suggestions in your head via the power of the blood. Antediluvians are an inescapable, lingering doom, which vampires fear, because ironically, even creatures as eternal as they are, are running out of time. When Gehenna comes, The Antediluvians will rise and it's game over man. The Camarilla ignores the threat because they don't like their stooges knowing that even the big boys in the inner circle are little more than tools for the elders, and the Sabbat actively oppose and try to destroy the Antediluvians, but really, are far too disorganized and silly to put up a particularly good fight. Antediluvians add an element of urgency to a game, and ensures the players can't just hole themselves up in a nuclear bunker with ten crates of blood packs and every final fantasy video game to wait out the apocalypse.
Now most importantly, a little something I think that a lot of players, and really, even the writers have missed. THIS COULD ALL BE TOTAL BULLSHIT. No one has ever seen an Antediluvian and lived to tell about it. Even Tremere, who's entire clan was founded on the diablerie of Saulot could have just been blowing smoke out of his ass to make his bloodline of usurpers feel more legit. There is absolutely not a shred of evidence given that Caine or the Antediluvians are still alive, or hell, if they ever existed in the first place. Vampirism could easily be some kind of disease, or the taint of the Wyrm, as in Werewolf, or just some kind of entropic glitch in the Tapestry. Sure, we have things like Generation implying that it all has to come from somewhere, but that doesn't mean that Patient Zero was necessarily the biblical Caine of all people. Vampirism could in fact be a lot younger than most vampires think, or could have had multiple origins. None of this detracts, however, from the power of the Antediluvians as a concept. Defining them, or having them seen in a game, robs them of a lot of their power to create horror. Yes, they could all be dead, yes, the Camarilla could be right, and it's all rumors and hearsay. But there's always that lingering doubt, that sense of paranoia in the back of every vampire's head. What if they're wrong?
Antediluvians add a very special, nihilistic undertone to the game, and they really should never be in the forefront, because it makes players feel railroaded. But like great Cthulhu himself, they should always be just out of sight, watching and waiting for the day the stars are right.
Here are some fictional examples I think inspire a good Antediluvian based story:
Queen of the Damned: A very, very, campy, silly vampire movie based on a slightly less campy and silly vampire book. I mean, it's hard to get over the fact that the world-devouring elder was woken by rock music. That said, Akasha is actually quite a good example of an Antediluvian being an unstoppable ancient horror creating merry havoc for a secret society that has nowhere to run for help. She may look human, and even has the same human tastes and lusts, but deep down, she's a ravenous, hungry, insane monster.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: I feel like I'm almost cheating by including this one, given that it is a vampire chronicle, but it shows how to handle a Gehenna based storyline almost perfectly. Some people believe in the Antes, some don't, and the only potential Antediluvian is simply a macguffin, sleeping in a sarcophagus for everyone to chase. The story, for all it's terror, funny moments and awesome, has a creeping apocalyptic feel to it, as if someone's about to make that one fatal mistake that ends the world.
Dragon Age: Origins: Yes, I'm aware that this one seems to come out of nowhere, as it's a fantasy game that has precisely zip to do with vampires. Still, the themes are all there. Humans fucked up in the distant past, and now their sins are coming back in the form of a massive apocalyptic horde of infected monsters and a massive zombified dragon. The game has a very rich mythology to justify the coming apocalypse, all of which is conveniently espoused by the rather corrupt church, and given not a shred of evidence for. Characters (and the player) are free to believe or disbelieve, but it doesn't really matter, because the Darkspawn are coming regardless of where they came from, and they don't really give a damn what you believe.
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