Setting, Lore and Documents

This section contains the documents that define the world of Danse Macabre. We describe our homebrew setting, the political structure of Kindred in Belgium, and the mechanics that govern our game. Some of these are required reading before your first event. Others are there to deepen your understanding once you've gotten your footing.

Most newly Embraced vampires do not get handed a manual. But arriving unprepared is ill-advised.

Where to start?

Not every document here needs to be read before you arrive. But some do, and the order matters. For a new player, we recommend the following:

Skim the Character creation page, particularly a reading list.
Then start with System and Disciplines. You do not need to memorise it, but you need to understand how Disciplines are invoked, what Hunger means in practice, and how conflicts are resolved. It is the framework underneath everything else.
Then read the Clan document(s). Your Clan is the blood you were born into, a defining anchor to your Requiem. It shapes your powers, your curse, and the assumptions other Kindred will carry about you before you open your mouth.
Then read your Covenant document(s). This is your ideological home, your political family in the All Night Society, and the lens through which your character interprets the Kindred condition.
Finally, read The Requiem, which will give necessary information on how our setting works and how it is governed. A Recent History of Belgium serves as the backdrop to our game, and details important events most Kindred will have known about.
Remaining documents such as Blood sorcery, or unread Clan and Covenant documents can be absorbed as you play, but cannot be ignored indefinitely.

Setting

A World of Darkness Belgium

Danse Macabre is played in a largely unique homebrew setting, based on the Vampire: The Requiem tabletop roleplaying game.

While information as present in the Vampire: The Requiem Second Edition sourcebook is our base, and considered canon, we might in- or exclude elements based on other books. This means that while other Bloodlines than the five Clans, secret Covenants or even other splats (supernatural creatures) may exist in our world, your Requiem invariably starts as one of the five options we present below.

Our game world is set in the Chronicles of Darkness version of Belgium. It’s a place very much like our world, sharing the same history, culture and geography. Superficially, most people in the world of Danse Macabre live lives like we do. They eat the same food, wear the same clothes and waste time watching stupid television. However, this world has silently and slowly devolved into a dystopia compared to ours. Corruption is rife, as is crime. People go missing with alarming frequency, and unexplained phenomena are quickly glossed over. The gap between haves and have-nots is wide, and industrialists actively try to turn the world into a concrete wasteland. As such, while it is similar to our world, it has taken a different turn sometime in the past, leading to many subtle differences. It is a world where creepy rundown houses emit strange sighs on certain nights of the year, a world where urban legends are whispered into the ears of children by invisible spiders. In this world, the horrors and nightmares of legend aren’t just bedtime stories. They’re real, even though most don’t realize it.

For reference, think about Gotham in the DC universe or Basin City from Sin City.

Social order

In Kindred society, age (how long you have been a Vampire) is an important distinction. Elders machinate and scheme at the top of the food chain, while Neonates (those embraced in recent times) still struggle with the remnants of their past life. Ancillae sit in the middle, serving as a bridge between both. Each of these groups have their own Requiem, and in Danse Macabre, players can choose to play either of them. To maintain coherence, however, we implement the rule of two: each Ancilla must be associated in a shared story or relationship with two Neonates of the same Clan (this is often a Sire/Childe relation, but archnemeses, a mentor or other stories are just as viable), and each aspiring Elder must share a similar story or background with two Ancillae.

These three groups’ Requiem and their dynamics are an important motor for our story, and we strive for multi-layered plot at these different levels. While playing an Elder is associated with certain benefits, their unlife is filled with challenges that younger Kindred simply couldn´t comprehend, and vice versa.

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