Secundi Sanguine Ritu

• The Necromantic Library of Phineus

History: In 1022 A.D., seven leaders of the hermetic House of Tremere cast a ritual of magnificent complexity, that was designed by Goratrix to give this conspiracy of seven, immortality. The casting itself took seven days and nights to cast without interruption or sleep. The casting was performed from a ritual described on one thousand leaves of parchment, which were destroyed by fire as they were used. When the ritual reached its climax, the seven conspirators fell upon Goratrix's two apprentices Pharus and Stephen, who had been forcibly embraced by the Tzimisce lord Roland almost two decades before. The seven starving and crazed mages devoured the two sacrificial victims, both in body and in blood. When the cannibalistic frenzy subsided, the participants fell into ecstatic agony and then into unconsciousness. When they awoke, many hours later, they had been transformed into vampires.

Thereafter the 'Ritual of the Second Becoming' was forgotten, a necessary step in reaching immortality, but nothing more. In secret, one of the seven conspirators retained as much of the ceremonial debris as could be gathered without drawing attention to herself and experimented in isolation to recreate and refine Goratrix's ritual into a more viable form. The results of a thousand years of research and testing have produced an elegant and potent ritual to transform a single member of one bloodline or clan of Cainites into an entirely different lineage of vampires.

Description: The ritual requires a willing donor to 'embrace' the subject. The caster can be the subject of the ritual or it can be cast for another's benefit. The caster begins the ritual by drawing the hermetic sigil of House of Tremere on the floor around the subject. Thereafter, the caster and subject (they can be the same person) recite a thousand verse invocation of the original 'Ritual of the Second Becoming', describing the events as they transpired in Medieval Latin. The caster must be fluent in Medieval Latin, but the subject need not be. Upon the climax of the ritual (which coincides with the climax in the narrative) the caster crumbles a pinch of parchment ash into a pure silver chalice inscribed with the names of the original seven conspirator mages, and blesses it with the ritual pronouncement of "So as the Stars are Above, so are the Roots of All below." The caster then hands the silver chalice to the adoptive sire into which he or she will bleed some of their own vampiric blood. The chalice is then handed from adoptive sire to prospective childe, who takes the silver vessel and offers the toast "In honor of Pharus and Stephen, who died that I might be reborn in the blood and spirit of my sire." Then the childe drinks every last drop of the sire's blood and collapses into a fit of agony and ecstasy, and finally, unconsciousness with the coming of day.

System: The player rolls Intelligence + Rituals at a difficulty of nine (9). This ritual takes seven hours to cast; beginning at midnight, it must be completed precisely upon the rising of the sun.

If the ritual is botched, the subject dies the final death in convulsions of agony and ecstasy. Should the caster fail the ritual, then only a night's effort has been lost, but should either of the other two participants err in the casting, then neither can ever again be the subject of this ritual.

A single success on the ritual roll is all that is required to successfully transform the subject into the desired kind of vampire with all the strengths and weaknesses of the new bloodline. This means that the new childe will automatically lose its former bloodline weaknesses and gain the new clan weakness. It also means that the new childe gains three dotes in the requisite clan disciplines, which are arranged at the caster's whim, but the new childe must have at least one dot in all three clan disciplines. Each success beyond the first grants the childe another dot of the chosen clan discipline, which are also arranged according to the caster's desire. The caster may expend a temporary Willpower point to ensure success and avert disaster, but it isn't required. Unfortunately, this ritual can be cast only once on any given subject; the transformation is permanent and irreversible by any currently known means, thus as an exit strategy, it is only of use once.

Thereafter, the new childe will in all ways register to all uses of blood sorcery as the progeny of the adoptive sire. There are two exceptions to this rule however. If there was a disparity in the logical order of generation between childe and sire, then any use of blood sorcery may detect this unusual factor for a number of years equal to the disparity in generation. After this term, the only way to detect any disparity, is to test the blood potency of both sire and childe at the same time.