Tremere (Founder)

The cold-blooded, brilliant, radical and vaguely tragic founder of the House and clan that bear his name, Tremere was a central European mage born in the 8th century AD. Inducted into the Order of Hermes during the early dark ages, Tremere was ambitious enough to create his own house (the majority of House names are either titles or refer to mages who existed near the founding of the order).

As with other Hermetic mages, he found that the encroaching, if nascent, Technocratic Paradigm was affecting vital Hermetic tools, in particular the longevity potions that allowed he and his peers to live so long. Casting for solutions with his disciples, he eventually settled on a potion using Vampiric blood that would (theoretically) provide all the benefits of vampirism without the side effects.

It half worked. Tremere and his councilors found themselves converted from a respected, Hermetic house into pariahs among the Order of Hermes and the vampires whose blood they had stolen to convert themselves into undead. Furthermore, with no knowledge of vampiric society, the fledgling bloodline found itself with no magical resources - the potion shattered their avatars, leaving them unable to work true magic.

Tremere rallied his students and launched an intensive program of research and rebuilding that shook vampiric society. Developing a blood fueled imitation of hermetic theory, the Thaumaturgy discipline, as well as horros such as gargoyles to defend the fledgling line. In the meantime, the Tremere searched out additonal sources to provide them with social defenses against the vampires who, to a clan, seemed singly intent on exterminating them. Tremere learned about Antediluvians and resolved to create a clan by diablerizing one. He choose the relatively innocuous Saulot.

Again, the plan half worked. Tremere had the blood of an Antediluvian in his veins, as well as the fully aware and already expecting this soul of an Antediluvian facing him in spiritual combat. Knocked into torpor for centuries, Tremere was able to surface only briefly to guide the clan, and even then he risked Saulot employing the same tactic to destroy the clan in order to further his own inscrutable goals.

In 1999, Tremere finally lost the war with Saulot, and he fled to the body of his former discipline Goratrix. At that point, along with his clan, he prepared for Gehenna by preparing rituals of a power previously unimagined.

These rituals also half worked. In one of the Gehenna scenarios, Tremere uses a potent ritual channeling all of humanity's true name to defeat the Tzimisce Antediluvian. The ritual backfires and turns what is left of humanity into part of Tzimisce.

Tremere is a case study in hubris; his brilliance led him and his fellows further down the road to damnation every step of the way. A weakness that echoed throughout his clan.