Nirriti Cult
Impure
The Kindred of The Circle of the Crone face a painful dichotomy about their place in this world. They believe that Creation is power, and yet, they are the children of a monstrous mother. The idea of conception and formation are central to the covenant’s goals, yet they are forever cursed to be figures of destruction. Their wombs are withered and dead, and the only way to create anything is to use the blood stolen from other beings, potentially destroying such beings in the process. Moreover, a vampire’s taste of creation is truly a mockery of the real thing, a vicious duplication of the Curse rather than a genuine act of conception.
Some Acolytes struggle with this conundrum for their entire Requiems, whereas others merely grow comfortable with the contradiction and accept it. Rarely does a member of the Circle find any true peace about it, and even more unlikely is the Acolyte who has actually managed to include creation while largely excluding acts of destruction.
Except for Alma, of course. Alma, a Daeva ancilla of the Circle, has found a way to shirk the mantle of destruction so critical to a vampire’s Requiem. Or, at least, Alma thinks she has done so. In her mind, she has achieved a careful harmony between good and bad, pleasure and pain. She believes that she is on the positive side of the spectrum, leaving the negative and evil side to a bloodline of Ghouls she has claimed as her own. This lineage is known within the Circle as the Nirriti Cult.
Dwelling in England for the better part of the 19th century, Vishram had ingratiated himself with the mortal spiritualists of the time. Many of these so-called occultists favored such parlor tricks as table levitation, séances and fortune telling. Many also called upon angels and ghosts to aid them and speak to them from the “other side.” Vishram became the center of these spiritualists for a time, attempting to steer them away from such modern occult notions and turn them instead toward forgotten pagan ideals. He spoke to them of reincarnation, of the cycles of creation and destruction, and he helped teach of the sacred powers of various goddess figures. Vishram did not do these things out of any great faith or devotion to the Circle. While he was technically an Acolyte, he became involved with the spiritualists only to serve his ego, placing himself as the central, dominating figure in a cult of personality.
Frankly, it didn’t work. The spiritualists always sought to syncretize Vishram’s ideas of the goddess with the cryptic mysteries of the occult, ideas that Vishram felt were more useful to the fools of The Ordo Dracul. Before leaving England, he heard of a small mystery cult living in Keighley and worshipping a forgotten Hindu goddess. Further investigation yielded the fact that this group actively venerated a figure associated with the Hindi goddess Kalikamata. This figure, the demigoddess Nirriti, was an ancillary figure of destruction, a splinter identity of Kali herself. In Vishram’s eyes, these people were lost sheep, ignorant of true possibility. They needed a hand to guide them, and Vishram gave them that hand.
He made the primary members of this small cult into his own personal Ghouls. He used them in myriad ways, mostly to stroke his own ego and to “shepherd” them into depraved acts for his own amusement. They were his servants and sycophants, ever reaching for the dangling reward of the Embrace. Such a reward came for only one of them, a favorite ghoul named Alma.
At around the same time, her own sister became pregnant with the child of one of the other cultists. The sister perished in childbirth, but the child did not. It was here that the bloodline was born.
Afterward, Vishram was not long for this world. He disappeared one January night just after the turn of the century. He was gone for months. Finally, a small part of his fate became known when his face, separated from the skull, was sent to his childe. Alma found the skin, desiccated and ashen. One word was painted across his forehead in white: “Impure.”
The circumstances surrounding Vishram’s disappearance and Final Death remain unclear. Alma’s suspicions ranged from a number of competing London mages to some mysterious and unrevealed covenant. What she did know is that the single word, “impure,” was significant. In the time she assumed control of the Nirriti Ghouls, she soon came to believe that Vishram had truly failed the Circle, had engaged in too much destruction but not enough creation. She became fixated upon the notion that destruction begets destruction, while creation fosters only purity. Alma also began to believe that Vishram had misused the cultists in general, exploiting them only for his own entertainment. It was then that she changed the direction of the cult, instituting a mandate that has been in place until this day.
The cultists themselves are a mixture of the bizarre and the mundane. At the insistence of Alma, most of them appear to live relatively normal lives during the day, going to jobs, living in rented flats, eating lunch with acquaintances. Yet, under the light of the moon, they come together and effectively remove the masks of a mundane life to become the cultists of Nirriti and servants of Alma. They engage in calculated orgiastic rituals meant to make them pregnant with the spawn of Nirriti, and they also perform acts of bodily mortification. They cut, brand, pierce and Whip one another, all below the standard borders of clothing so as to keep the scars hidden from public life. Some have tried to escape this life of extremes, but few make it far, for when the cult mobilizes to find such a traitor, it acts with frightening efficiency.
Some Acolytes struggle with this conundrum for their entire Requiems, whereas others merely grow comfortable with the contradiction and accept it. Rarely does a member of the Circle find any true peace about it, and even more unlikely is the Acolyte who has actually managed to include creation while largely excluding acts of destruction.
Except for Alma, of course. Alma, a Daeva ancilla of the Circle, has found a way to shirk the mantle of destruction so critical to a vampire’s Requiem. Or, at least, Alma thinks she has done so. In her mind, she has achieved a careful harmony between good and bad, pleasure and pain. She believes that she is on the positive side of the spectrum, leaving the negative and evil side to a bloodline of Ghouls she has claimed as her own. This lineage is known within the Circle as the Nirriti Cult.
Hand of the Goddess
The Nirriti Cult (also known throughout its history as the “Children of Nirriti,” or the “Blood of Nirriti”) did not begin with Alma. Instead, its origins lie with her sire, the long-destroyed Vishram. Vishram, also an Acolyte, was not as obsessed with the refutation of the Curse as his childe would later become. Rather, Vishram was consumed with self-interest, invoking the destructive abilities of the Kindred whenever it served his whims, and offering only loose devotion to any ideas of creation.Dwelling in England for the better part of the 19th century, Vishram had ingratiated himself with the mortal spiritualists of the time. Many of these so-called occultists favored such parlor tricks as table levitation, séances and fortune telling. Many also called upon angels and ghosts to aid them and speak to them from the “other side.” Vishram became the center of these spiritualists for a time, attempting to steer them away from such modern occult notions and turn them instead toward forgotten pagan ideals. He spoke to them of reincarnation, of the cycles of creation and destruction, and he helped teach of the sacred powers of various goddess figures. Vishram did not do these things out of any great faith or devotion to the Circle. While he was technically an Acolyte, he became involved with the spiritualists only to serve his ego, placing himself as the central, dominating figure in a cult of personality.
Frankly, it didn’t work. The spiritualists always sought to syncretize Vishram’s ideas of the goddess with the cryptic mysteries of the occult, ideas that Vishram felt were more useful to the fools of The Ordo Dracul. Before leaving England, he heard of a small mystery cult living in Keighley and worshipping a forgotten Hindu goddess. Further investigation yielded the fact that this group actively venerated a figure associated with the Hindi goddess Kalikamata. This figure, the demigoddess Nirriti, was an ancillary figure of destruction, a splinter identity of Kali herself. In Vishram’s eyes, these people were lost sheep, ignorant of true possibility. They needed a hand to guide them, and Vishram gave them that hand.
He made the primary members of this small cult into his own personal Ghouls. He used them in myriad ways, mostly to stroke his own ego and to “shepherd” them into depraved acts for his own amusement. They were his servants and sycophants, ever reaching for the dangling reward of the Embrace. Such a reward came for only one of them, a favorite ghoul named Alma.
At around the same time, her own sister became pregnant with the child of one of the other cultists. The sister perished in childbirth, but the child did not. It was here that the bloodline was born.
Afterward, Vishram was not long for this world. He disappeared one January night just after the turn of the century. He was gone for months. Finally, a small part of his fate became known when his face, separated from the skull, was sent to his childe. Alma found the skin, desiccated and ashen. One word was painted across his forehead in white: “Impure.”
The circumstances surrounding Vishram’s disappearance and Final Death remain unclear. Alma’s suspicions ranged from a number of competing London mages to some mysterious and unrevealed covenant. What she did know is that the single word, “impure,” was significant. In the time she assumed control of the Nirriti Ghouls, she soon came to believe that Vishram had truly failed the Circle, had engaged in too much destruction but not enough creation. She became fixated upon the notion that destruction begets destruction, while creation fosters only purity. Alma also began to believe that Vishram had misused the cultists in general, exploiting them only for his own entertainment. It was then that she changed the direction of the cult, instituting a mandate that has been in place until this day.
Peverse Absolution
The new direction demanded by Alma is a bizarre one, placing the cult in a kind of “sin-eater” position. That is to say, Alma has shed herself of her sins and inhumanity. Any dark impulse or evil act that comes to her is foisted upon the cult, meaning they become the carriers of her wishes, the enactors of her grotesque will. If Alma has a sudden urge to harm children, to take their tender little hands and break every Bone in them, she calls upon some of the servitors of Nirriti. The cultists do as Alma’s whims demand. When Alma wishes someone violated, the cultists do so for her (perhaps even consummating such abuses upon one another). Alma carries this relationship to an almost absurd point. When she feeds, rarely does she actually go out and drink the blood from the flesh of a mortal. Instead, she has the cultists hunt in her place, finding and exsanguinating any and all suitable victims. (The process for this can be grisly, for many times Alma actually insists the Ghouls bite the victim, swallow his blood, and spit or vomit it into buckets for her own consumption later.) Meanwhile, the vampire sits idly by, tending to her gardens or her pets. Sometimes she sculpts porcelain, other times she pens poetry beneath the moon. In this way, Alma considers herself “pure,” unsullied by perversity or depravity. The cult becomes her dark side, absolving her of any destructive habits.The cultists themselves are a mixture of the bizarre and the mundane. At the insistence of Alma, most of them appear to live relatively normal lives during the day, going to jobs, living in rented flats, eating lunch with acquaintances. Yet, under the light of the moon, they come together and effectively remove the masks of a mundane life to become the cultists of Nirriti and servants of Alma. They engage in calculated orgiastic rituals meant to make them pregnant with the spawn of Nirriti, and they also perform acts of bodily mortification. They cut, brand, pierce and Whip one another, all below the standard borders of clothing so as to keep the scars hidden from public life. Some have tried to escape this life of extremes, but few make it far, for when the cult mobilizes to find such a traitor, it acts with frightening efficiency.
Culture
Common Dress code
Appearance: As directed by their High Priestess, the Children of Nirriti feign normality by day. They work at various jobs and have regular apartments or suburban houses. Nirriti Cultists dress conservatively during the day to avoid attracting any sort of attention, and are usually careful to do their jobs sufficiently without any hint of excellence. They are polite but not friendly, meeting those who try to form closer relationships with pleasant rebuffs or false openness. Really, each Cultist is always in a state of anticipation, hardly able to wait for the appropriate moment to rip off the stifling clothes of normality and dance naked before the dark goddess.
Art & Architecture
Havens: Alma’s Haven is built on the dreams and contributions of her followers. She owns a property that, at just over 20 acres, is truly palatial by the area’s standards. On this land she keeps many plants and animals that suit her tastes, caring for them and breeding them. The huge house and grounds serve both as canvas for Alma’s creative endeavors and as ritual observance spot for the most significant ceremonies of the Nirriti Cult. Cultists commute from all over the area to attend some of the monthly and yearly observances. Alma has also gifted some of her most trusted servants with the Embrace, and they own similar though smaller havens.
Major organizations
Covenants: Obviously, The Circle of the Crone directly controls the Nirriti Cult through Alma. The Circle views the cult as a useful tool and a successful endeavor, sometimes modeling other cults it wishes to set up after the way Alma administers the Nirriti. Alma has allowed several other members of the Circle to join her in her peculiar form of absolution through victimization, though she requires that anyone who wishes to do so submit to a Vinculum to her. Other Covenants look on with mixed envy and distaste. For The Ordo Dracul, envy is the predominant emotion, because many among them wish they could have tools so zealously loyal. The Invictus and Lancea Sanctum mostly view the cult with distaste, although they envy the Zeal of the Cultists. Kindred of The Carthian Movement are often intrigued by any form of cult activity because of what it implies in regard to what people want from society, and the Nirriti Cult is no exception to this pattern of general interest.
Organization: Alma is High Priestess. No one may surpass her, for it is through her advancement that others may ascend to higher levels. If the High Priestess were to die, the whole cult would suffer a setback to the level of her chosen successor. Alma does, however, employ other Kindred as priests and priestesses of her cult to keep track of the Herd. Several of them are her own childer and all are bonded to her through full Vinculum. Under these Kindred are the mortal supplicants, those with some small amount of Status, whether they know what that means, or (more likely) not. Under the supplicants are the children, for though all cult members are “Children of Nirriti,” some have matured and are children only in the sense of descent. The average cultist is still considered a child, and is afforded no respect until a certain amount of extremely unpleasant drudge-work has been completed. Then the real rituals begin — the learning process that can take a child and turn him into a supplicant, and perhaps eventually a Priest.
Organization: Alma is High Priestess. No one may surpass her, for it is through her advancement that others may ascend to higher levels. If the High Priestess were to die, the whole cult would suffer a setback to the level of her chosen successor. Alma does, however, employ other Kindred as priests and priestesses of her cult to keep track of the Herd. Several of them are her own childer and all are bonded to her through full Vinculum. Under these Kindred are the mortal supplicants, those with some small amount of Status, whether they know what that means, or (more likely) not. Under the supplicants are the children, for though all cult members are “Children of Nirriti,” some have matured and are children only in the sense of descent. The average cultist is still considered a child, and is afforded no respect until a certain amount of extremely unpleasant drudge-work has been completed. Then the real rituals begin — the learning process that can take a child and turn him into a supplicant, and perhaps eventually a Priest.
Nickname: Sin-Eaters or simply Cultists
Clans: The cult was founded around a Daeva and is led by his childe, but a fair number of Mekhet and Nosferatu of the Circle have become interested in the Nirriti Cult. Gangrel sometimes find the pleasure/ pain thrill of the cult alluring. Ventrue are positively disgusted with the idea usually, but a very few of them have taken a hand with the cult once in a while, especially if they develop Derangements of Megalomania and delusions of grandeur. The mortal Cultists themselves are utterly unaware of the Kindred politics that go on around them as they zealously follow their High Priestess Alma with the utmost dedication.
Strengths: Even as Ghouls, members of the Cult may purchase up to Status • in The Circle of the Crone, and just as for vampires, Status in The Circle of the Crone confers the privilege of learning Crúac blood sorcery. Nirriti Cultists may also have a vampiric Mentor (normally Alma or a former Sin-Eater).
Weaknesses: The mindset of the Nirriti Cultists is fragile. They truly believe in their mistress’ dogma, but when they fall into a moral quandary, they don’t cope with it well. Whenever a Sin- Eater loses a dot of Morality, she automatically gains a derangement, regardless of her Morality level. No Morality roll may be made.
Concepts: attention addict, true believer, sadist, masochist, alternative lifestyle seeker
At this point, the cult consists almost entirely of Ghouls from a single descendent, hence belonging to the same supernatural lineage. The cult doesn’t think of itself as family, however. While it maintains some understanding that producing children together certainly links each member that way, Alma has given the cult the idea that it is more than just a family. The members needn’t share a last name or any other familial trappings, because the links and manacles of the goddess Nirriti fetter them to one another. That is all they need to know.
The cult has some members who are not part of the bloodline. Such members are Ghouls of Alma’s, and may one day contribute seed or egg to the group’s unholy pairings.
Some players and Storytellers might find themselves attracted to the concept of playing the thralls who do evil things so that Alma and her cronies can feel good and pure. Most people will probably get sick of this after a while. Fear not: There is a light at the end of the tunnel, even for the vessels of Alma’s sin and torment. The most obvious form of this is that when Alma considers a Sin-Eater to be sufficiently advanced in the faith, she arranges for that person’s Embrace, allowing him the purity of the Requiem as she has found it. Such converts then gleefully set about foisting their former duties of pain and torture on their newly subordinated Cultists.
The other interesting thing is that Alma actually buys into her own philosophy. She has spent so much time ridding herself of her sins, even in such odd ways as she has chosen, that her destructive desires have diminished greatly. In fact, although her Humanity is fairly low, she maintains almost ironclad control over her Beast, seldom succumbing to frenzy. She allows her childer to create childer of their own only if they have reached the same level of sinlessness as herself, and no Nirriti Cultist without at least Willpower 7 ever receives the Embrace. Usually, once Cultists have shown a sufficient degree of faithfulness, they are sent on to Alma’s personal serving Staff. The tasks Alma asks of her personal Staff are quite tame compared to the usual activities of the Cult, allowing those who reach this plateau to start freeing themselves of corruption and move toward purity.
Strengths: Even as Ghouls, members of the Cult may purchase up to Status • in The Circle of the Crone, and just as for vampires, Status in The Circle of the Crone confers the privilege of learning Crúac blood sorcery. Nirriti Cultists may also have a vampiric Mentor (normally Alma or a former Sin-Eater).
Weaknesses: The mindset of the Nirriti Cultists is fragile. They truly believe in their mistress’ dogma, but when they fall into a moral quandary, they don’t cope with it well. Whenever a Sin- Eater loses a dot of Morality, she automatically gains a derangement, regardless of her Morality level. No Morality roll may be made.
Concepts: attention addict, true believer, sadist, masochist, alternative lifestyle seeker
How Is the Cult a Bloodline
At this point, the cult consists almost entirely of Ghouls from a single descendent, hence belonging to the same supernatural lineage. The cult doesn’t think of itself as family, however. While it maintains some understanding that producing children together certainly links each member that way, Alma has given the cult the idea that it is more than just a family. The members needn’t share a last name or any other familial trappings, because the links and manacles of the goddess Nirriti fetter them to one another. That is all they need to know.The cult has some members who are not part of the bloodline. Such members are Ghouls of Alma’s, and may one day contribute seed or egg to the group’s unholy pairings.
Hope — Future Damnation
Some players and Storytellers might find themselves attracted to the concept of playing the thralls who do evil things so that Alma and her cronies can feel good and pure. Most people will probably get sick of this after a while. Fear not: There is a light at the end of the tunnel, even for the vessels of Alma’s sin and torment. The most obvious form of this is that when Alma considers a Sin-Eater to be sufficiently advanced in the faith, she arranges for that person’s Embrace, allowing him the purity of the Requiem as she has found it. Such converts then gleefully set about foisting their former duties of pain and torture on their newly subordinated Cultists.The other interesting thing is that Alma actually buys into her own philosophy. She has spent so much time ridding herself of her sins, even in such odd ways as she has chosen, that her destructive desires have diminished greatly. In fact, although her Humanity is fairly low, she maintains almost ironclad control over her Beast, seldom succumbing to frenzy. She allows her childer to create childer of their own only if they have reached the same level of sinlessness as herself, and no Nirriti Cultist without at least Willpower 7 ever receives the Embrace. Usually, once Cultists have shown a sufficient degree of faithfulness, they are sent on to Alma’s personal serving Staff. The tasks Alma asks of her personal Staff are quite tame compared to the usual activities of the Cult, allowing those who reach this plateau to start freeing themselves of corruption and move toward purity.