The Omen War was a conflict between the Tremere and Tzimisce clans in and around Transylvania during the Dark Ages. The war escalated, and grew to involve other clans, when it was learned that the Tremere had created their Gargoyle servants from the bodies of captive Tzimisce, Gangrel, and Nosferatu. As the Tremere established their power and the Anarch Revolt reconstructed Cainite society, the Omen War was forgotten in favor of more pressing concerns, particularly once the Camarilla and Sabbat arose.
The Tremere knew the conflict as the Great War.
Overview[]
The war was started when the usurping Tremere used Tzimisce captives to develop their immortality formula and become cainites themselves, then established their stronghold in Ceoris, deep within Tzimisce territory.
For every Tzimisce bent on some mysterious end or other, there are three whose aim are all too clear: the utter annihilation of House Tremere. They come by night, mustered from all sides like great swarms of bats, and the villagers in the Old Country know all too well to bar their doors. The Tzimisce have enlisted Transylvania's other vampyrs to assist them, so that oft one may hear the eerie hunting call of the Gangrel or discover a loathsome Nosferatu ensconded amid one's defenses. The majority of their soldiers are abominations from human wretches. Tzimisce at war have been known to depopulate entire villages, taking the inhabitants into their dungeons and twisting them into hideous monsters, shapeless lumps of fang, talon and gristle.
And once the humans' bodies are no more, the Fiends likewise destroy their creations' souls, inflaming their blood against the Tremere and sending them to besiege their chantries in noxious waves. Occasionally, in the darkest hours, one hears a distant crack as trees splinter like kindling. One sees dread descend on even the ghoul-soldiers' nigh-unrecognizable countenances. And then the thing known as the "vozhd" roars gargantuan and ravenous from the deep forests, often towering above the trees themselves, flailing this way and that with fists the size of millstones, greedily shoving enemy and ally alike into any of a dozen befanged maws.
Eventually, the Ventrue allied themselves with the Austrian Tremere and used the Teutonic Knights against the local Tzimisce hordes. The Tremere left their Prime Chantry vulnerable as they used most of their forces to wage open war on the invading Tzimisce forces.
The conflict suited the wishes of the Lasombra methuselah Montano and his progeny, hoping that both clans eliminate each other in their own "primitive" corner of the world, without troubling the Lasombra lands of the Sea of Shadows.
Later in the war, the Tzimisce Krevcheski revenant family, who built siege engines for their masters, broke their oaths and betrayed the Fiends. They joined the Tremere side and changed their name to Ducheski.
The war thinned Tzimisce numbers; the inability of the voivodes to act in unison or restrain from stabbing each other in the back when opportunity offered itself had doomed their offensive efforts from the start. The younger Tzimisce, who faced the Tremere and their gargoyles in the front lines, for all intents and purposes ended the war that neither they, nor their elders, could win in a blaze of rebellion which was the Anarch Revolt. Responding to years of abuse and callous disdain, the young Tzimisce anarchs broke the bonds of blood and turned against their own sires. Many elders fell to their childer's appetites, or perished when their havens burned to the ground.
Trivia[]
- The Gangrel used their alliance with the Tzimisce to wage war upon Clan Ventrue.