“I heart Nossies, yes I do,
I heart Nossies, so should you!”
“But… WHY?”, the average reader might ask, “They’re… Nossies…” That is exactly the reason I love the Nosferatu Clan. People keep underestimating them. The Nosferatu have a lot of valuable life lessons to teach, foremost among them is “Don’t judge a fugly bastard by his face. Most of the time”. In the World of Darkness, there are always those exceptions who only prove it when it’s way too late to escape.
One of the things I love best about the Nosferatu is that they have minds underneath it all. You can’t take many of the same shortcuts that amateur roleplayers take when designing a character: making them super-attractive, with gleaming muscles and taut bellies and luxurious hair, standing tall and proud atop a hill surrounded by the broken bodies of their enemies. Nossies got the slime and the gunk, and they worked with it. They have the reputation as one of the smartest and most knowledgeable Clans in the entire world – in many ways, they’re smarter and more knowledgeable than the Tremere. The Nosferatu are scary smart. If you need to know, to the Nosferatu you go. To paraphrase Bertram Tung, the Camarilla need the Nosferatu, and that’s a pretty sweet spot to have in the afterlife. The Sabbat, though they would never admit it (a Ventrue Prince might be persuaded to admit it under duress if he needed something else from the Nossies), also need the Nosferatu, though their role in the Sabbat is much less about pure information-mongering as it is taking a much more active role in the Jyhad. Teresita, a Nosferatu dominion of the Black Hand, is three feet tall, has the physique of a young child, and a grandmotherly demeanor. In any other Clan, she would be something of a liability, but as a Nosferatu, she gets Potence to make up for her spindly figure, can blend into any crowd, and can fit through the tiniest of pipes or ductways in the classic alien horror-movie fashion.
The Nosferatu are obviously the best example of the physically grotesque, which is a powerful motif especially in a Dark Ages or Victorian Era game. The Gangrel can be excused (especially since the influx of “furry”-/anthropomorphic animal-lovers from Japan), and the Tzimisce can be blamed, but the Nosferatu are usually met with a mask of pity but a heart of scorn or fear. The interplay between what a Nosferatu feels and how they look should, I think, be a central part of any Nossie character. Are they humane on the inside, just looking for a nice break? Or do they look as gross on the inside as they do on the outside, and only use the attitude of “I just want to be loved!” to sucker in their prey?
The second major advantage the Nosferatu have is that they are easily ignored. It’s just a sad fact of unlife. People don’t want to think about the fugly bastards, and that has nothing to do with the mind-clouding effects of Obfuscate. But as the entire Clan has proven for the past couple thousand years, being ignored is an extremely powerful tool in the World of Darkness. The Nosferatu are nothing like the classical hero who stands up to be counted with a gleam glancing off his teeth. The Nosferatu are the ones doing the counting, and that’s where the scary part in “scary smart” comes in.
The Nosferatu have one of the easiest ways to get into the horror veins of Vampire: The Masquerade. Any vampire has this potential, of course, but the Nosferatu can develop horror in new and terrible ways. Think about it: Nosferatu are isolated, outcast, scorned, and loathed by everybody in the world. That’s gotta lead to some really psychotic mental breakdowns, and there’s a whole Clan archetype called the “Leatherface”, who is basically a mutilating cannibal hermit. Then turn that into a mutilating cannibal hermit you can’t see. Horror-wise, the Nosferatu would deal in suspense and the classic “out of the corner of your eye” scene. A Nosferatu who is very good with Obfuscate could easily drive somebody insane by offering them momentary glimpses of their true face, haunting the edges of their perception, instilling phobia, paranoia, and some more phobia.
And then you can turn the tables on the Nosferatu and send things after them that even they fear. Everything that the Nosferatu can do to humans or other vampires, the Nictuku can do to the Nosferatu. In the darkest depths of the sewers, nobody can hear you scream – but they make you scream anyway, because they love the sound. Then consider that the Nictuku also get Animalism. That ancient albino alligator who you thought was perfectly trustworthy turns around and bites off your leg on the wrong night, leaving you crippled. The next night, your warren-mate, Embraced at the same time you were, flashes a different horrific face for a split-second, and you’re pretty sure it wasn’t Mask of a Thousand Faces. Then he goes missing. Then you find his ashes at the bottom of some scum-covered cistern and realize he’s been dead for weeks. The distant echo of something that may have been a sadistic chuckle echoes from somewhere in the maze of passages below, and you run. But you can’t run, only hobble slowly – oh-so-slowly, too slowly! – away. Behind you, the ashes of your brother-in-blood stir slightly as something moving too fast to see whispers past them.
This is the final thing I love about the Nosferatu: they stretch between the two extremes of horror – reaching out from the darkness to put their slimy cold hands on the collective neck of humanity, but being dragged just as steadily by the icy and skeletal hands of their own kind (or their own minds) into an even deeper darkness.