As I'm sure I have mentioned, I'm running a vampire chronicle. In this the character all started out as mortals on the west coast of Norway in 754. I did not let the players them selves chose clan or even when they were going to be embraced. After 19 session the character have progressed from to the year 767 and two out of three have been embraced. The last character is a ghoul.
Having one character that was embraced and the rest as moral worked out very nicely. Especially in the beginning when the vampire tried to hide it's true form. Hiding this information worked nicely for a while. The bigest problem was that I felt the need to communicate secretly with the vampire-player during the first session. Since I do not do that a lot it made the others suspicious. To better allow the player to hid her characters nightly habit we had agreed that she should explain her activities during the day, just make sure that she did not run in to any of the other players, and I would just ignore what she said. So she would go: "I'm out of bed early that morning, I'm going to enjoy the sunny spring day practicing my tailoring skills" and I would interpret it as "I'm going to be sleeping during the day far far away from the rays of the sun." The other players would still believe that she had been out and about that day.
Even after the fact became known it still worked out nicely for a while, but then again the group seemed somewhat artificially glued together. Why would a vampire spend so much time with these mortals, and not try to better her standing among the vampires? In addition I felt it was difficult to give the vampire aspect of the story the proper focus. The beast, the road of enlightenment, the feeding all became secondary things instead of primary things as I think they should. So after some session with one vampire in the group I started encouraging others to get them selves embraced.
The two vampire character and their players still does not know which clan they belong to, since I decided that the Norse vampires (einherjar) have no concept of clan nor generation. It has been a challenge to keep the clans a secret. Especially the clan weakness causes some problems. How do you hide the fact that the Lasombra character no longer cast any reflection or that a ventrue only can feed from certain types of mortals? Some of them where hidden by a change I made to the setting. I changed it so that each vampire has more flaws than is usual. I also made it so that flaws could be inherited from your sire during embrace. Amaranth will very ofthen generate a new flaw for the perpetrator. Some of the flaws that are much more common in my game are cast no reflection, prey exclusion and light sensetive, all of which also hide a clan weaknes. The main intention was not to hide the clan weakenes, but that was a nice side effect. Some of the other clan weakenes I have hidden in other ways, but I can't divulge tham at this time.
Conclusion:
It was an interesting aspect of the story to let the characters be embraced at different time. However, next time I will for sure make the characters all enter the supernatural aspect of the setting at aproximately the same time (with in 4 session of each other). By hiding the clans from the players and the characters the normal clan rivalry have been avoided. I'm planing to introduce it to the game when they travel south in to Europe and meet vampires a customed to the clan consept. Still it will be centuries before there are any Tremere around to tell them which clans they are, so untill then they can only guess.
