Malkavian
|
|
The Malkavians are a fictional clan of vampires from White Wolf Game Studio's Vampire: The Masquerade books and role-playing games. They are associated with the Camarilla. Their symbol is a broken mirror. White Wolf states, "Stories speak of an epidemic of contagious dementia exploding among those of Malkav's blood." (VtM3 -- p.72) Malkavians frequently haunt asylums, hospitals, and slums.
As with all the White Wolf vampire clans, Malkavians suffer from a specific flaw: Malkavians are incurably insane. However, many Malkavians believe their insanity to be a strength rather than a weakness. Exactly why they suffer from insanity is unknown, but according to the Book of Nod, all third generation vampires were cursed by Caine after the second generation vampires were destroyed. One of these third generation vampires was Malkav, and all Malkavians come from him.
According to a hallucination experienced by David, in the Malkavian Clanbook (3rd edition) it says that Malkav diablerized (ate the soul of) one of the second generation vampires. The Malkavian Clanbook also says that it was Malkav who started the revolt and that he was killed when he ran away from the first city. When Malkav was killed, all his children came to his corpse and drank the blood of their father. By drinking the blood from their father, the Malkavians are believed to have collectively diablerized Malkav. He is said to speak inside each and every Malkavian's soul and connects them into one collective consciousness. This "collective hivemind" is sometimes called "the Malkavian Madness Network", a network that contains each thought and memory that any Malkavian in the world has ever had (and sometimes is about to have!)
The Malkavian antitribu possess a rare ability (discipline) called Dementation. With Dementation they can alter the way their victim senses reality. It can both be used to increase the Malkavian's own oracular ability or to create total insanity on others. Most Malkavians are willing to educate others with their rare power, but they are often neglected as it is believed that the knowledge of Dementation drives the user insane. Some Sabbat Tzimisce elders know Dementation though, just to get an insight in the great ways of the Jyhad.
According to the Malkavian Clanbook, Dementation was created by a couple of elder Malkavians that called for a gathering through the Malkavian Madness Network. Strangely, no one noticed that the Malkavians were gone. When almost all the Malkavians had been collected, they were changed. Some Malkavians (about one-tenth of them) didn't go to the gathering for some reason, and because of this the clan was split into two parts. The changed and the unchanged, the antitribu and the tribu.
As a condition of joining the Camarilla, the Malkavians agreed to forswear Dementation, instead taking up the commonly-known mental Discipline Dominate. the antitribu of the Sabbat continued to practice Dementation, and so it was for centuries, until the Final Nights, when Dementation surged back into the minds of Malkavians everywhere.
References
- Vampire: The Masquerade (3rd Edition) by White Wolf (1998)