Gangrel (Vampire: The Masquerade)
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The Gangrel are a clan of vampires, associated with the Camarilla, from White Wolf Game Studio's Vampire: The Masquerade books and role-playing games. The Gangrel are associated with Gypsies, transmogrification, and vagrants. As a symbol, Gangrel often use a wolf's head. The Gangrel clan's magical Discipline, Protean, allows them to assume partial or complete animal forms. Their mastery of Protean is so much greater than any other Clan that Gangrel can assume virtually any animal form, providing it is a scavenger or a predator (other vampires with the Protean Discipline are limited to the forms of Wolf and Bat, no one- not even the Gangrel- know why this is). Gangrel are commonly allies of the Brujah and enemies of the Ravnos. The Gangrel, despite living in the wilderness, are attacked much less often by werewolves than other vampires; some speculate that the werewolves and Gangrel have a shared origin.
In the World of Darkness metaplot, Clan Gangrel severed its ties with the Camarilla in 1998, when the Camarilla's ruling body refused to lend aid to the clan's Justicar to fight a creature he identified as an Antedeluvian (the god-like progenitors of the vampire clans).
After the "Time of Judgment" storyline which brought the metaplot of the original World of Darkness to an end, the Gangrel were recreated for Vampire: The Requiem as one of the 5 major clans. Thematically, they remained pretty much the same, with some minor differences. In this new system, they are described as being animalistic to the point of eschewing mortal contact other than to feed, mostly as a consequence of their close connection with their inner Beast. Their emblem has changed to an animalistic eye stylized to look like an eagle head, with claws beneath it. They maintain close tie to the Bruja, a Gangrel bloodline loosely based on Vampire: The Masquerade's Brujah).
References
- Vampire: The Masquerade (Revised Edition) by White Wolf (1998)
- Vampire: The Requiem (1st Edition) by White Wolf (2004)es:Clan Gangrel