# Human Hardcore
Human Hardcore
of Note
Lasombra argue about the merits of Embracing serial killers and other particularly violent, driven criminals. Some vampires idealize serial killers as vampires in all but unlife already, humans becoming glorious predators, while others look at serial killers and see only dangerous competition, good enough to be a nuisance but not good enough to avoid efforts at capture which can in turn seriously interfere with vampiric affairs.
Clan consensus currently leans away from rewarding such people with vampirism. Many of them are intelligent, but the psychological foundations of serial killing almost always involve a level of obsession and behavioral constraint — the so-called “signature” of the criminal — that makes it hard to adapt to vampirism. Serial killers let loose among the undead almost inevitably burn themselves out in a few years, if not months or weeks. They can’t continue doing what they used to without significant modifications to their routine, and even though their unliving brains don’t have the biological compulsions anymore, the habit remains. So they go down in gunfire, or under the fangs of their fellow vampires.
Another experiment failed.
Still, a fad for Embracing serial killers arises every few decades. The last one passed in the early ‘90s.
The one before that ran from the end of World War II through the early ‘50s. Whenever a significant number of Lasombra feels dissatisfied with the way their faction fares in Sabbat society, they turn to extreme measures of this sort.
Ideally, the testing happens over the course of years, though circumstances often reduce it to months or less. The testing measures the candidate’s response to adversity — the sire usually attempts to break him by ruining his life.
The sire begins by striking at whatever the candidate seems to regard as most important. If it’s his family, the sire kills them, or uses Disciplines and mundane means to alienate his relatives. If it’s physical ability, the sire cripples the candidate, infects him with a chronic disease or otherwise takes the ability away. If it’s social standing, the sire arranges a series of scandals to isolate the candidate from former associates. Whatever it is, a dedicated Lasombra can take it away, either by himself or with the assistance of packmates and other allies.
Step by step, the vampire cuts off her childe-to-be from the world. The candidate must remain in control Chapter Two: The Keepers’ Unlit Halls of himself; Lasombra regard using Dominate to force states of mind as cheating — the point is to see how the candidate copes. A candidate who breaks under the strain generally ends up in pure misery. The sire abandons the experiment but seldom bothers undoing the wounds inflicted along the way.
The tricky part of all this is to keep the prospective childe from simply feeling deprived of purpose.
Each loss must give rise to some new motive, whether it’s simply reclaiming the lost thing or an emphasis on something that hasn’t previously seemed important or desirable. A vampire who lacks drive cannot fend off the Beast or flourish in the Sabbat’s harshly competitive environment, and the Lasombra prefer to separate the losers from the passionately alienated before the Embrace. The ideal Lasombra candidate, for most of the clan (and this applies to the antitribu as well), is someone who feels distanced from his society and yearns to change or overthrow it, but isn’t locked into an overly narrow sense of what must be done. Even if the mortal’s current vision looks only at what’s close, it must contain the seeds of grandeur, or the centuries of unlife will become a burden.