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The Anarchs
Overall Tropes
The smallest of the three main sects, the Anarchs reject both the oppressive rule of the Camarilla and the zealousness of the Sabbat. They draw numbers from nearly all clans present, mainly Camarilla ones, and Brujah in particular, but quite a few ex-Sabbat members have been convinced to join the fray over time and a small but notable minority of independent clans. All of them do tend to have one thing in common, however, which is a desire for change.
- Anti-Hero: Like the Camarilla, they aren't exactly good guys, but at least they keep in touch with their humanity.
- Blood Sport: While usually not resulting in final death, the Anarchs have a lot of games that would be considered lethal by human standards, ranging from two opponents hitting each other with a blunt weapon until one gives up or goes into torpor, to paintball tag using real guns and ammunition.
- Bomb-Throwing Anarchists: Averted, despite the name of the sect, on a larger level. While the sect does have a few of these, they also count to their numbers a surprising amount of scholars and diplomats.
- Demoted to Extra:
- The game used to be primarily about the Anarchs as the protagonist struggling to keep their freedom against the Camarilla, with the Sabbat kept in the background. As Editions have progressed, however, the story has become more and more about the struggle between the Camarilla and the Sabbat, with the Anarchs becoming a smaller faction caught in the middle.
- V5 would pull something of a 180 on this, with the Sabbat practically disappearing due to the Second Inquisition inspiring a mass defection among the survivors and the rest leaving their territories behind as they went on their Gehenna Crusade as well as the Camarilla consolidating their forces against the Sabbat in the Middle East. The Western USA (read: as far as Las Vegas) is being mostly left to the Anarchs now.
- The Gadfly: A tactic they sometimes employ simply to make elders lose their tempers inside of Elysium.
- Heel–Face Turn: Vampires who come from the Sabbat reject almost all of their nastier aspects when they join the Anarchs. For the Camarilla, it's a little murkier, and could be either this or a Face–Heel Turn.
- Hypocrite: They resent the Camarilla for their oppressive laws and using the sect's younger members as disposable pawns to keep the oldest members in power. However, this doesn't stop the oldest members of the Anarchs from treating their own youngest the same way, to say nothing of the Anarchs who only want to overthrow the Camarilla so they can be the ones tyrannically ruling over other Kindred.
- I Hate You, Vampire Dad: One of the core reasons many Kindred join the sect.
- The Last DJ: Tends to serve this role to the Camarilla.
- Non-Indicative Name: While they oppose the closest thing Kindred society has to a government, the Camarilla, the Anarchs aren't anarchists in the sense that they're opposed to the idea of there being any kind of government at all. In fact, they end up installing their own system of authority on the same level, or in some cases even worse, as the Camarilla over their territories.
- Order Versus Chaos: Clear-cut chaos to counter the Camarilla's order, with minor variations. However, they do respect the Masquerade, though while the Camarilla make strict laws to uphold it, the Anarchs basically state the Masquerade is plain common sense, and there's no need to enforce it.
- Rebellious Spirit: Very prominent within the movement. Doubly so with the Brujah Anarchs.
- Revolutionaries Who Don't Do Anything: They tend to accomplish very little in the way of actually combating the oppression of the Elders due to constant in-fighting for territory and personal power.
- Vice City: Los Angeles as the center of the Anarch Free State quickly devolved into this after the ousting of the Camarilla in the 1940s, and remained as such until the New Promise Mandarinate arrived in California and shook up the power balance in the region. The Gehenna novel claims that the Anarchs reclaimed LA shortly before Gehenna started.
The Inconnu
Overall Tropes
The Inconnu are a mysterious sect of whom little is known, aside from an association with Golconda.
- Ancient Conspiracy: Believed to trace their origins to ancient Rome. Actually an Ancient Tradition, which makes it rare as the Inconnu are mostly devoted to achieving Golconda and staying out of mortal affairs.
- Big Good: As close as exists in the vampire world.
- Depending on the Writer: What they're even hinted to be about varies a lot from sourcebook to sourcebook. In practice, their canon is kept so vague that they can serve whatever story purpose they need to for individual Storytellers.
- Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: They're so powerful they really don't have to do the casual brutality and evil of the other vampire factions.
- Shrouded in Myth: No-one has the faintest clue what they're about. In Kindred society, this is deeply unnerving.
- The Watcher: The Monitors, members of the Inconnu who oversee particular cities, but mainly remain aloof from events.
The Tal'Mahe'Ra
Overall Tropes
Known also as the manus nigrum or the True Black Hand, the Tal'Mahe'Ra are a hidden apocalypse cult dedicated to the Antediluvians that hunts the infernal, protects humanity (for certain values of 'protect'), and tries to manipulate the other sects to serve their ends.
- Ancient Conspiracy: The oldest known Kindred sect still active, dating back three thousand years.
- Demon Slaying: Hunt down demons and Infernalists with extreme prejudice.
- Eldritch Location: Enoch is the First City of vampires cast into the Underworld by the Great Flood, which has had millennia-worth of dead cities layered onto it by necromancers; the Alien Geometries that wander the city are actively lethal. Those who control Enoch will shape the end of the world.
- Killed Off for Real: The order was destroyed when the Smiling One detonated a relic nuke in Enoch, completely destroying the remains of the First City. The blast's shockwave detonated a second nuke near Oblivion, triggering the Sixth Great Maelstrom that ruined Stygia and wrecked the Underworld. The True Brujah, the Nagaraja and the Harbingers of Skulls survived, and by the time of V5, the latter two merged with the Samedi, the Giovanni and the Lamia to form Clan Hecata.
- Let's You and Him Fight: The Tal'Mahe'Ra wants the Camarilla and Sabbat fighting, as it keeps them occupied and distracted, their attention turned inwards to vampire society.
- The Mole:
- They have a number spread throughout Kindred society, some of whom are highly ranked in the other sects.
- Deconstructed in Revised Edition; while the group has many immortal and mortal "agents," the mortal ones are mostly too twisted from living in the Underworld to be of non-trivial use, and the vampire agents know so little of the Tal'Mahe'Ra or its intentions that they can't meaningfully advance their agenda.
- The Necrocracy: Enoch, their base in the Underworld.
- Necromancer: Originating in a group of Chakravanti necromancers and being based in the Underworld, they have a number, most notably the Nagaraja and the Harbingers of Skulls.
- Nuke 'em: Notoriously had their original version destroyed by a relic nuke in Ends of Empire for Wraith: The Oblivion... which ended up helping to trigger the Sixth Great Maelstrom.
- One-Steve Limit: Intentionally averted. The Sabbat also has a group called the Black Hand, and the Tal'Mahe'Ra make use of the Sabbat Hand to help conceal their activities. They distinguish between the two by calling the Sabbat Hand the False Hand.
- Predator Turned Protector: The Tal'Mahe'Ra aren't big on behaving humanely or acting like humans, but they are, at their best, dedicated to protecting humanity.
- Retcon: First in the revised Vampire Storyteller's Handbook, undermining their presentation as undead Illuminati in Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, then again in V20 Black Hand, which kept much of DSotBH's gonzo weirdness but toned down the more OTT elements.
- Shrouded in Myth: They're sitting on a lot of things they don't fully understand and which may or may not be what they think.
