Malkavian

The Malkavians are a fictional clan of vampires from White Wolf Game Studio's books and role-playing games Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Dark Ages. In modern times, they are associated with the Camarilla. Their symbol is a broken mirror. White Wolf states, "Stories speak of an epidemic of contagious dementia exploding among those of Malkav's blood." (VtM3 -- p.72) Malkavians frequently haunt asylums, hospitals, and slums.

As with all the vampire clans in the World of Darkness setting, Malkavians suffer from a specific flaw: they are incurably insane. However, many Malkavians believe their insanity to be a strength rather than a weakness. Exactly why they suffer from insanity is unknown, but according to the Book of Nod, all third-generation vampires were cursed by Caine after the second-generation vampires were destroyed. One of these third-generation vampires was Malkav, the one Malkavians come from.

According to a hallucination experienced by David, in the Malkavian Clanbook (3rd edition) Malkav diablerized (ate the soul of) one of the second-generation vampires. The Malkavian Clanbook also says that it was Malkav who started the revolt and that he was killed when he ran away from the first city. When Malkav was killed, all his childer came to his corpse and drank the blood of their father, thus collectively diablerizing Malkav. He is said to speak inside each and every Malkavian's soul and connects them into one collective consciousness. This "hive mind" is sometimes called "the Malkavian Madness Network", which contains each thought and memory that any Malkavian in the world has ever had (and sometimes is about to have).

The Malkavian antitribu possess a rare ability (Discipline) called Dementation, which can alter the way a victim senses reality. It can be used to increase the Malkavian's own oracular ability or to induce insanity in others. Most Malkavians are willing to attempt to educate others of their rare power, but they are often neglected as it is believed among other vampires that the knowledge of Dementation drives the user insane. Some Sabbat Tzimisce elders endeaver to learn Dementation, however, to gain insight in the great ways of the Jyhad if they succeed.

According to the Malkavian Clanbook, Dementation was created by a small group of elder Malkavians who called for a gathering of the entire clan through the Malkavian Madness Network. Strangely, no one else noticed that the Malkavians were gone. When almost all the Malkavians had been collected, they were changed. Roughly one tenth of Malkavians did not attend for whatever reason, and as a result the clan was split into two parts, the changed and the unchanged, called antitribu and tribu.

As a condition of joining the Camarilla, the Malkavians agreed to forswear Dementation, instead taking up the commonly-known mental Discipline Dominate. The antitribu of the Sabbat continued to practice Dementation, and so it was through the centuries until the Final Nights, when Dementation surged back into the minds of Malkavians everywhere.

Currently though, the Malkavian clan has been replaced with Malkovians, which are branched off of the Ventrue clan.

References

• Vampire: The Masquerade (3rd Edition) by White Wolf (1998)