V20 Dark Ages: Laibon

Vampire: The Masquerade

Hi everyone!

I wanted to share something a little more substantial today, since I’ve been hard at work in the word mines, trying to get this book wrapped up and sent over to art/layout.

The Laibon are a weird bit of Vampire: The Masquerade history. The various editions have had conflicting versions, stories, and treatments surrounding them. Having discussed them with my team, we realized that they were really important to the way we wanted to present the Dark Medieval World, since this is a time when Africa and Europe interacted quite a bit. This was an opportunity for us to present interesting thematic tools for your chronicles. In V20 Dark Ages, Laibon is simply the word for “Cainite” for African vampires. They don’t subscribe to the Caine creation myth. Our Laibon come from a few lineages, including three new ones, and some existing ones like the Setites.

The Laibon are a place where we’ve deviated from past editions for a few reasons. Let me touch on a few:

1) Africa’s a big place. It contains a large swath of the human population. We felt that offering a single bloodline just wouldn’t do it justice. While we couldn’t do a whole book dedicated to the Laibon -nor would that book be V20 Dark Ages if we could- we wanted to offer some facets to what Laibon could be.

2) Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom exists already. We couldn’t really rehash that treatment, because it takes a lot of space to do any sort of justice. I’m already stretching it with the word count I have available.

3) The past single-bloodline versions of the Laibon were often interesting, but needed a little attention and depth in our opinion.

4) I wanted to offer more distinct variety for African characters, so as to avoid stereotyping. If all European characters were Gangrel, what would that say about European vampires? With our Laibon, we have a range of character types available.

So, what our writer for this section, Steffie de Vaan, did was use the past content for inspirational material and some names, but come up with new and exciting mythologies for our three Laibon lineages. I don’t want to call them bloodlines (although they appear in the bloodlines section of the book) because as far as anyone in the know knows, they’re effectively clans that don’t descend from Caine. I don’t want to call them clans, however, because the European Cainites don’t recognize them as such.

They draw loosely from African myth, the way most of Vampire draws loosely from European myth. Let us know what you think. These are partly through editing, but not all.

Here’s the three lines, along with Abombwe and the Necromancy Path of Haunting.