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The Sabbat
Sabbat Minions
The Sabbat are worthless, man. Fake tits on a zombie worthless. Fun to watch though. Like The Three Stooges with chainsaws.
— Jack
Composed of antitribu note vampiresnote , human thugs, ghouls and Tzimisce-created monsters, the minions of the Sabbat rely on a quantity-over-quality approach. Members of the Sabbat embrace their monstrous natures, and think nothing of breaking the Masquerade or randomly Embracing humans to pad out their numbers.
- Adaptational Wimp: The Sabbat is the second most influential Sect among Kindred, right after the Camarilla, and one of the most vicious vampire factions. Fortunately for you, the Sabbat of Los Angeles is a pale shadow of what they are, since it is not their turf, and they do not have roots in the city. Their involvement in the game's plot is marginal and most of the Sabbat characters in the game are shovelheads with delusions of being complete badasses, instead of its genuinely dangerous elements. If the game took place in somewhere where Sabbat have called the shots for a long time, like Mexico City, Montreal, or New York, instead of Los Angeles, an Anarch Free State, you might have been able to see just how terrifying, ruthless, and brutal the Sabbat can be.
- Always Chaotic Evil: None of the Sabbat minions you get to meet are depicted as remotely sympathetic, even by vampire standards.
- Always Male: Averted, but only at the very very end. For the majority of the game, they're represented by male character models alone, but when you storm Hallowbrook Hotel, you'll face 3 female Sabbat mooks. They're presumably Lasombra, given their teleportation abilities, and make up the only Lasombra in the game note , as well as the only female Sabbat mooks, aside from a Tremere antitribu in the same hotel who can appear as either gender.
- Ax-Crazy: As expected from vampires who embrace the Beast. During the brief part where they kidnap you as revenge for the destruction of their warehouse, you can hear them talk with glee about how they intend to torture you and rip your body apart.
- Being Watched: Some versions of the game include a Sabbat mook watching you from a dark alley in Santa Monica. Though apparently they learn your involvement in their warehouse's explosion through LaCroix.
- Creepily Long Arms: The Gangrel antitribu have unsettlingly long arms that reach past their knees.
- Degraded Boss: Unless you used stealth, two Gangrel will show up as mini-bosses when you try to escape the warehouse and they're very dangerous at that point with their aggravated damage attacks. By the time you meet them again in the Hallowbrook Hotel, they're only slightly worse than their Brujah counterparts.
- Dumb Muscle: They aren't particularly smart, and according to Smiling Jack some of them don't even know they are vampires, since the Sabbat sometimes Embrace people randomly after tapping them on the head to then use them as cannon fodder.
- Elite Mooks: Most of the vampires are "Mooks" in the sense that they are unintelligent, numerous, and easily disposable, but "Elite" in the sense that they still are vampires, so they can cause you more troubles than human thugs or ghouls if they have the right Disciplines. If you get noticed while trying to blow up the warehouse, a few of them with show up to stop you, and prove to be genuinely tough opponents.
- Evil Makes You Monstrous: The L.A. Sabbat's vampire Mooks seem mostly comprised of Gangrel antitribu. Gangrel gain animal features when they give in to the Beast. The Sabbat MO is to basically let the Beast have its way with you any way it wants. You do the math.
- Fake Ultimate Mook: The Gangrel that one faces in the tutorial are as weak as any standard enemy, justified because as Jack said, most of them are random people who were kidnapped and transformed, and are not even aware that they are vampires. This is averted with the vampires that appear after that usually use their disciplines and have weapons.
- Fantastic Slur: Sabbat vampires are typically referred to as "shovelheads", after a common initiation ritual that involves burying a newly-Embraced vampire under the ground before they completely revive, forcing them to literally rise from the grave. It's also a remark on their habit of Embracing people unwillingly, usually after thwacking them over the head with a blunt object - usually a shovel.
- Hated by All: Nobody in L.A. respects them or take them remotely seriously; the Camarilla sees them as a nuisance that needs to be taken care of in order to protect the Masquerade, while the Anarchs perceive them as a bunch of psychotic useless idiots, with both sides agreeing about them being Too Dumb to Live in their refusal of the Masquerade.
- Hellish Pupils: The mooks all have red, slitted eyes. Justified for the Gangrel antitribu, given that they have animalistic mutations, but the Brujah antitribu also have them despite mutations not being a part of the clan's quirks.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The Sabbat keep humans like cattle, which allows the protagonist to feed on them, without any resistance.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: During a cutscene, one of them turns toward the camera with a "Those of you in the first few rows will get wet."
- Quantity vs. Quality: The Sabbat does not have the Population Control mentality of the Camarilla, so they have very low standards and have no problems taking random people to turn them into vampires. This is demonstrated by the fact that in the tutorial the protagonist is capable of killing several of them despite being a newbie themself.
- Small Name, Big Ego: The Sabbat shovelheads you get to interact with talk tough and clearly have delusions of being badasses. However, they are disposable mooks at best, and absolutely nobody takes them seriously on either side of vampire society, seeing them at best as annoying.
- Super Loser: Most of them were brought into the embrace to be Cannon Fodder and aren't much more intimidating than the human gangsters.
- Super-Speed: The Brujah antitribu have Celerity, and will use it to keep their distance from you while they blast away with guns.
- Teleport Spam: A trio of Elite Mooks in the Hallowbrook Hotel (implied to be Lasombra) will teleport around a room while shooting at you.
Andrei
Voiced by: Steve Blum
Tell me, child, is my appearance that frightening or is it my knowledge of you that is so unnerving?
A Tzimisce vampire and one of the highest-ranking members of the L.A. Sabbat. He lurks in a dilapidated mansion in the Hollywood Hills, where he crafts monsters out of junkies, runaways, illegal immigrants, Thin Bloods, anyone who won't be missed, before unleashing them on the Nosferatu in order to "blind" the Camarilla.
- Affably Evil:
- The first time you meet, he holds to Sacred Hospitality very seriously, and offers you power and "improvements" if you defect. Unless you're Tremere.
- In the unofficial patch: if you decide to join forces with him when you meet him the second time. Like Ming Xiao, he refuses to open the sarcophagus or otherwise use it to his advantage - but unlike Xiao, he does not betray you, and keeps you as his ally.
- Berserk Button: As with most Tzimisce, Andrei loathes Tremere, calling a Tremere PC a "squirming larva of the wretched brood who stole their immortality".
- Big Bad: The leader of the villainous Sabbat faction that hounds the player and their fellow Kindred throughout the game. Subverted. Foiling his plans is an important plot of the endgame, but the main antagonists prove to be the Big Bad Duumvirate of LaCroix and Ming Xiao.
- Big Bad Wannabe: Andrei is far from being a Harmless Villain, but at the end of the day he has no idea what's really going on in the city. He doesn't know that LaCroix and Ming Xiao are working together, that the sarcophagus doesn't contain an Antediluvian, or that Caine is in L.A. as a humble taxi driver. Even his ending in the unofficial Sabbat ending is full of Dramatic Irony that they drown the coffin in a Meaningless Villain Victory.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Obvious from his speech on metamorphosis that he doesn't follow human notions of morality (or, for the matter, aesthetics).
- Body Horror: His soldiers are hideously mutated humans, his wallpaper is made of living flesh, quite a few of the chairs and beds seem to have faces, and he himself is even more monstrous-looking than the Nosferatu. It all comes with being a Tzimisce.
- Card-Carrying Villain: He's Sabbat. Denying their humanity and reveling in how 'evil'/inhuman they are practically goes with the territory.
- Classy Cravat: Wears a deep red cravat, in keeping with his Old World nobility vibe.
- Cold Ham: He rarely raises his voice, but he nonetheless maintains a chilling presence when onscreen.
- Draconic Humanoid: Has turned himself into one with his fleshcrafting.
- Disc-One Final Boss: He and his Sabbat followers are introduced as the game's premiere villains who the player will have to rise to the occasion to overcome. However, they are ultimately sidelined in favor of the story arcs involving the hunt for the Ankaran Sarcophagus and the machinations of the Camarilla and Kuei-jin. Andrei himself is defeated in a penultimate encounter prior to the story's endgame phase.
- Even Evil Has Standards:
- Blue-and-Orange Morality aside, part of what causes Andrei's Villainous Breakdown is his utter horror at the concept LaCroix has his hands on the Ankaran Sarcophagus and is going to open it to diablerize whatever's inside, essentially (in some way, shape, or form) unleashing an Eldritch Abomination of unimaginable power on the rest of the world. He freaks out when you confront him a second time, largely because you're the one who delivered it to him! Subverted in that he's only concerned because he wants what every other Sabbat wants: to destroy the Antediluvians so that the Sabbat can reign over humanity without their progenitors to pose a threat.
- In the fan-created ending in which you join the Sabbat
, Andrei dumps the sarcophagus in the ocean. Unlike the Kei-Jin ending, you're not tied to it this time. - As is common with his clan, he loathes the Tremere, who he sees as having stolen their immortality by murdering so many of his own number. Of course, the Tzimisce aren't exactly a universally good lot themselves.
- Evil Is Petty: When he's not doing things that involve murder, intrigue, or Body Horror, he favorite activity seems to involve
trolling late night radio shows. - Evil Overlord: Though his "castle" is more of a condo. He says it's merely a base, and that his ancestral home is much more grand.
- Evil Sounds Deep: Steve Blum doing what Steve Blum does best.
- Evil Versus Evil: His ultimate goal is to prevent the Ankaran Sarcophagus from being opened, as the Sabbat are openly opposed to the Antediluvians and seek to prevent Gehenna. However, like the majority of Sabbat vampires, Andrei does so less to save the world and more to ensure a dark future where vampire-kind will openly rule over humanity.
- Expy: Andrei is basically Sascha Vykos, the Tzimisce signature NPC. The only differences are that Andrei is unambiguously a man rather than a genderless Lady Gaga-creature, he's far less wily than Vykos, and you can kill him.
- Fantastic Racism: Like most Tzimisce, he absolutely despises the Tremere, who killed many Tzimisce to fuel the blood ritual that originally turned them into vampires.
- Flunky Boss: In the first fight against him, he won't attack you directly, preferring to have his weakest creations take bites off of you.
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: When you confront him on 609 King's Way, the entire fight consists of you running around the room trying to hit him as he teleports and summons his monsters to kill you.
- Mad Scientist: A Tzimisce fleshcrafter. It goes with the territory.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Just in case him decorating his home with human tissues and reshaping himself into a monstrous form wasn't a hint already, one of the dialogue options involve him implying he considers the Nosferatu player "magnificent".
- Nothing Is Scarier: We never get to see his ancestral home, but he describes it as much more horrific than his current base of operations.
- One-Winged Angel: He uses his Zulo Form for the second battle.
- Pet the Dog: Unlike nearly everyone else in the game, he sincerely tells a Nosferatu PC to not be ashamed of their appearance, saying that the beast takes many forms but all are beautiful.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: As a leader in the Sabbat, he's a vampire supremacist above all else, but he's implied to be especially contemptuous of illegal immigrants and race mixing, which he refers to as "the bane of society" and transforming them into crazed abominations, regardless of whether they're humans or vampires.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Has vivid red eyes with black sclerae, leads the L.A. Sabbat, and is a deadly combatant when he's not twisting people into monsters. Given the extent to which he's modified his own body, he might well have invoked the trope.
- Snuff Film: He records his killings on tape, which was somehow found and distributed by Death Mask Productions.
- Tom the Dark Lord: Andrei is a common Eastern European name and thus unassuming for someone who looks like... that.
- Vampire Vords: The only one who speaks like this in the entire game. Justified, in that he's an elder Tzimisce, and thus is likely to actually be from Eastern Europe.
- Villainous Breakdown: Suffers an impressive one when you meet him for the second time and you don't join him.
- Villains Out Shopping: He calls the Deb of Night at some point in the game, apparently just to taunt a mortal about their ignorance of the coming Gehenna. Deb doesn't miss a beat and quickly shut him down.
- Wicked Cultured: His aristocratic demeanor stands in marked contrast to the other Sabbat the player meets over the course of the game.
- Would Hurt a Child: Evidently had no problem using pregnant women in his Tzimisce Creations.
- Xanatos Gambit: His motive for creating the snuff film, apparently - he wanted to draw potential antitribu out. It wasn't intended to fall into mortal hands, however.
Tzimisce Creations
Andrei's pets, which he created thanks to the Tzimisce clan's signature discipline, Vicissitude. All of them are feral, horrifying, and were once people. They come in three different flavors, a head with arms coming out of where the ears would be, an obese man with a claw and a ranged attack, and three different women fused into a spider-like creature at the hips.
- Acid Attack: The fat creatures throw acidic slime from a skull-shaped appendage replacing their right hand. It can slow you down long enough for them to catch up to you.
- Armless Biped: The head creatures invert this, as they only have arms for locomotion.
- Body Horror: Standard practice for the Tzimisce is to create monstrous minions from whatever living material they can work with, and to make it difficult for anyone with a high Humanity score to stomach looking at them.
- Degraded Boss: The first spider-women you'll face is a mandatory boss with her own health bar. There are more of her kind in the last stretch of the sewers, though fighting them is optional.
- Fat Bastard: The second creatures are morbidly obese, making them slow to chase you, but they have a ranged attack and plenty of health to make up for it.
- Fragile Speedster: The head creatures can only take roughly three hits before dying, but they can cross a room faster than the average player can react. When encountered, expect them to land at least one hit of damage per monster.
- Ludicrous Gibs: The head creatures explode into showers of blood and body parts when killed.
- No Body Left Behind: Unlike the other large monsters in the game, the creatures turn to ash when they die, revealing that a Kindred was an ingredient in each of their creations.
- Tragic Monster: Once normal people, they're now unidentifiable monstrosities with a Blood Bond enforced loyalty to Andrei. Put them out of their misery if you can.
- Was Once a Man: Junkies, runaways, illegal immigrants, Thin Bloods, whoever Andrei could get a hold of without drawing attention. They're no longer sentient by any stretch of the word.
