| abstract
| - The Kindred have their own magic arts that are fueled by the power of their vitae. Blood Sorcery is about manipulating someone or something outside of the vampire’s state. The manipulation may be a petition, a command or a deception but is essentially an interaction with something outside the vampires purview, be it God or one of the pagan deities. Most of the knowledge of Blood Sorcery rests in the hands of the Covenants- the Lancea Sanctum and the Circle of the Crone respectively, who are not willing to share their secrets. Each Covenant clads the understanding of Blood Sorcery in ritualistic notions akin to the disciplines common among the damned. Despite the levels of commonality exploited by the very rare sorcerers who learn both Disciplines, Crúac and Theban Sorcery (or any Blood Magic, for that matter) are not the same and do not share known common origins or metaphysics. In much the same way that the five clans may learn one another’s Disciplines, the Ritual Disciplines may be leveraged to achieve similar ends by very different means. Those means matter to a ritualist, though; they are the very essence of her craft. The Circle of the Crone and the Lancea Sanctum both regard their sorceries as religious experiences, the prohibitions on teaching until the student earns status serving to preserve the proper reverence for blood sorcery as much as keeping that sorcery proprietary. Other forms of Blood Sorcery are rumored to exist, but are hard to come by. An example for this would be Ahranite Sorcery, the Blood Sorcery of VII. Creative Blood Sorcery is possible, even if it stretches the notions of ritual. While learned and practiced rituals tend to be more stable than spontaneous (such as it is, even a spontaneous casting requires careful preparation) spellcasting, doing so allows a Blood Sorcerer more flexibility in the usage of his powers. The ritual itself is both essential and irrelevant. There must be a ritual in order to channel the Blood, simple expenditure of vitae and efforts of will cannot evoke the effects of Blood Magic. The Lancea Sanctum and Circle of the Crone have devoted centuries to the study of blood sorcery, recording hundreds of rites and miracles. Thanks to the isolation of Kindred across cities, no single vampire has ever known or even heard of all the rituals practiced around the globe. New powers grow and wither with individual Kindred and rise and fall of their covenant. Rumors are that especially powerful Blood Sorcerers may survive Final Death in the form of their own Ashes that can reconstitute themselves via Diablerie of lesser vampires. However, while Blood Sorcery is potent, it is not able to create permanent effects. Durations may vary according to Blood Potency and dedication behind the Ritual, but will one night fail nonetheless. Furthermore, vampiric sorcerers are, by default, unable to contact any other plane of existence besides the Material. Blood sorcery has no analogue to the “counter-magic” found in the ritual magics of some supernatural creatures. Once a ritual has been successfully cast, it can’t be “dispelled” by the powers available to the Kindred, although an additional ritual that negates the original effect might be cast by a blood magician.
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![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)