Nagaraja (VTM)



Long, long ago the mages of the Chakravanti Tradition experimented with the blood of the Kindred. Regarded as foolish by their mortal mage contemporaries, a faction of Chakravanti actually managed to turn themselves into vampires without being directly Embraced. The human body is too frail to endure pure Oblivionic energies, so those Chakravanti granted themselves more resilient vampiric bodies so that they could become masters of Oblivion, the nothingness of the Underworld. Their own manipulations of the blood, combined with their innate magical natures, produced the Nagaraja, a bloodline of cannibals, necromancers and feared servants of the Black Hand. The Nagaraja are unlike other Kindred in that they must consume flesh, making them among the most reviled and "unnatural" of the bloodlines. The name Nagaraja translates as "serpent kings"; specifically this is a reference to Shiva, the Wyrm of Oblivion.

The Nagaraja are masters of Necromancy &mdash; an art inherited from the Chakravanti and augmented by the mummy Inauhaten. The Nagaraja engage in many strange and terrible Thaumaturgical and Necromantic experiments. They are even believed responsible for the creation of the Samedi, though they refuse to take credit, or guilt, for their awful kind.

Final Nights
Until a catastrophic war with the denizens of the Underworld destroyed the sect to which they belonged, the Nagaraja congregated in the lands of the dead. Since being driven forcibly from that realm, however, the few remaining Nagaraja have made their own fates, leaving their minimal organization behind. The largest remaining group of Nagaraja returned to their cultural homeland, India, and are allied with the Daitya there. A cabal of Nagaraja is reputed to have sought protection among the Cathayans of Korea, but this small group is suspected to be an anomaly. Some other Nagaraja in the Western world may have fallen in with the Followers of Set.

Organization
Ultimately, the Nagaraja are too few to have an extensive bloodline structure and exist instead as isolated, freakish loners when they can be found at all. They rarely even meet with others of their kind, as they hoard their precious secrets from everyone, including others of their clan.

Culture
The Path of Death and the Soul and the Path of Self-Focus are the two most popular paths among this bloodline, though some follow the Path of Lilith, or the Path of the Scorched Heart.

Embraces
Most of the mortals who are chosen already have an intense interest in the study of death, but not in causing death for themselves or others. Indeed, they often choose doctors, priests, cultists, philosophers and parapsychologists. The chosen are often middle-aged, though some prefer Embracing even older mortals.

Weaknesses
They must eat raw human flesh as well as drinking blood. The corpses must be fresh, and the Nagajara often knows rituals that preserve corpses for weeks or longer. For each night they do not partake of raw human flesh (be it from living or dead source), they lose one die from rolls involving their Physicall Attributes. Consuming one Blood Point worth of flesh restores one die to the pool. An average human body has 10 Blood Points worth of flesh, and each point taken from a living victim inflicts one wound level.



Version Differences
In the pre-Gehenna sourcebooks, the Nagaraja were found entirely within the Manus Nigrum, and with its extermination in Revised Edition, members of the bloodline was either wiped out or seeking sanctuary within the Green Courts. In V20, the Nagaraja are mostly independent, and the bloodline as a whole is given more of a Southwest Asian/North African background, rather than the exclusively Indian flavor of the original.