Editing Vampire: The Masquerade (section)

==The Story in a Nutshell==
The accepted history of the Kindred is collected in the Book of Nod, which is like the Vampire Bible. The first vampire was [[Caine]], the farmer whom God cursed for slaying his shepherd brother Abel. Caine wandered for a time, refusing to repent for murdering Abel three times, and each time receiving a new curse, which ended up with him nocturnal, harmed by sunlight, and subsisting on human blood. He created the vampiric Disciplines with the help of his father Adam's ex-wife Lilith and went on to create at least three spawn to share his gift/curse.

These first vampires lived in the First City as lords, and eventually as gods over the human populace as worship of true God faded away. The three collectively created thirteen more vampires, creating a web of politics and infighting over Caine's favor that caused much grief and abuse for the humans (slaves fed special herbs for better taste of blood and being bled to death in banquets were commonplace, and enforced dimming of night fires so they could fuck around and kill whatever they want) and the deaths of the Second Generation. Understandably, God got pissed off with the edginess and flooded the world (Basically just the Middle East as Tzimisce can attest, who took his herd to Ukraine), drowning the First City and killing most of humanity there. 

Caine and the Third Generation survived, the former cursing the latter for being a bunch of fuckwits who ruined the good thing he had going. The Third Generation shrugged and kept on making new vampires, passing on their curses to their children and become the founders of the clans. The Third Generation became known as the [[Antediluvian]]s ("Before the Flood") and Caine passed into myth and legend.

Vampires prowled the shadows for millennia, carving out positions of power for themselves wherever they could. Between the falls of Rome and Constantinople was the time of the Long Night, followed by the War of Princes as centralized power was lost. Then the Inquisition came around and started killing vampires left right and centre, with the elders sacrificing the younger generations to save their own asses. 

This quite badly cheesed off the younger vampires, causing many younger vampires and even a couple elders to go to rogue during the Anarch Revolt; this more or less broke the power of the elders and saw the rise of the two major factions that would last into the modern day: the Camarilla and the Sabbat, who're basically the vampire government and a pack of rabid thugs respectively.

In modern nights, vampires are thought of as fiction. This is thanks to the efforts of the Camarilla to hide the truth and police their members' actions. Among the vampires themselves, the Antediluvians are thought of as fiction. This is, again, thanks to the efforts of the Camarilla to enforce the idea that they're all either truly dead or so deep in torpor they'll never wake up. As the last few generations are barely expressing any clan qualities, the Kindred fear that the prophesied Time of Thin Blood is coming, which heralds the Final Nights and the end of the world.

This is where you come in, neonate. Make yourself useful to someone in power and you might survive a few more nights.