[Meta] Why Giovanni, Anyway?

(C) White Wolf: art by Joshua Gabriel Timbrook.

They had me from the Revised edition splat art. I mean... phwoar. (Also, I'm a Warhammer guy. Vampires should do necromancy.) (Also, I like Guy Ritchie's films.)

They're not just bankers. They're not just necromancers. They're not just gangsters. They're not just war profiteers. They're not just Venetian aristocracy. They're all of these things at once, and going back into their history to knit all that together is how I make them sing.

I also correlate them with eighteenth-century Gothic novels, full of black magic, incest and villainous Italians as they are: those novels gave me a structural co-ordinate or two to build off, with their themes of family secrets, sins of the father, the breaking down of guilt and shame through sensation...

My chronicles have two secret spines. One is "the Bahari were right all along," which has never been the focus of a game but has been essentially true since my Gehenna game back in 2005. The other is a Giovanni bloodline and its through-the-ages rise to power. We shall now explore that, at immodest length, to show-and-tell how my obsession with context works here.

It starts in the thirteenth century, in the Latin Empire of Constantinople, where neonate Minerva di Giovani follows the Fourth Crusade to Byzar's city. As a minor courtier to the Lasombra prince Alfonso di Venici, Minerva is searching the city for the tomb of a Cappadocian methuselah older than Constantine. This mirrors what's going on in mortal society, with art and money and loot going back to Venice after the occupation, which the Venetian families essentially paid off the Crusade to perform.

That mortal profiteering and plundering is where Minerva's ghoul and later childe comes in. Iago, the fixer, the charmer, the get-things-done go-between who hoodwinked some player characters into looking the wrong way while the body of Byzar was retrieved and smuggled out. He got the Embrace for that, and one day I'll get to tell the story of what he did next (hanging in Genoa trying to find the Library of the Forgotten - the Tzimisce grimoires and treasures that were split up and spirited away before he could get his hands in them).

Iago turns up again as the Adversary at arms' length in my current game, a Victorian Age story in which the last childe of Garinol Cappadocius attempts to find his feet and keep his head after a six hundred year torpor. By this stage, Iago has a childe of his own: Riccardo Giovanni, late Republican bravo, a proper street fighter for Venetian independence. (The occupation of Venice by Napoleon's armies, the handing over to Austria, and the subsequent rebellions are mortal society set dressing for this story, like the Fourth Crusade was before.)

Riccardo's a thug, but he's a thug with ideas, and one of his ideas is marrying, then ghouling, then Embracing the purest single-blood Giovanni baddie he can. This is Luciana. I made Luciana partly as a mechanical challenge (can I make a "decker" archetype work in VtM, maxing out Necromancy and stacking Flaws that force her to do action scenes by spectral proxy?) and partly as a personal reflection (I've been dealing with degenerative illness and chronic pain for a good decade and a bit now, and Luciana exaggerates and eroticises that body-horror so I can explore it).

She's my Victorian Age Vampire neonate, and my Final Nights ancilla. She remains one of my absolute favourites, a high Gothic "mad wife in the attic" trope - except she's entirely in command of her faculties, even if she needs to be carried every time she leaves her rooms and can't stand up without a ten minute warning. These two are located right in the eighteenth-century Romantic, Byronic, Gothic literary moment, and I get to indulge my extremely basic D/s instincts as well.

In the 1900s, the power couple decamps to America. Riccardo has heard that you can buy California by the yard, and he becomes the Kindred power behind Abbot Kinney. Decrepit, stagnant Venice (CA) is Riccardo's domain for most of the twentieth century, until his waning Humanity starts to drag him down and he needs... to rest.

He lets Luciana pick a consort to keep her in the manner to which she's accustomed while he's gone. She picks Santino - black sheep, family failure, dropped out to front a rock band - and spends the next twenty-five years grooming him into a successor. A tame Riccardo, one who'll answer to her rather than control her, who'll remember what it was like to love her, and who'll get rid of the old one when he inevitably emerges and gets back on his bullshit.

(Have you seen Rocknrolla? It's like that, but with sexy Italians.)

The mad one-eyed spectre-haunted bastard actually does it, diablerising Riccardo in 2017 and enabling ancilla Luciana's ascension as an aspiring anziana. Now he's her prince of darkness - an international man of mystery who shows up anywhere there's gains to be made from mediating in the Hecata's internal conflicts, guided by Luciana's prolific correspondence with her peers.

She has another childe, and he has a childe, who's been digging into all of this from the very end of the line, but... they're Dunsirn, and theirs is another story, and frankly, I've talked about my characters enough. Eight hundred years of conspiracy, a two hundred year soap opera, and a bloodstained Vettriano painting on the wall. Let that be that.