Thanatosis

Thanatosis
Clans	Cappadocian
Bloodlines	Samedi
Sects	Camarilla, Independents
Rituals	None
Combination Disciplines	Thanatosis Combination Disciplines
Rarity	Legendary

Thanatosis is the discipline of death in all its physical forms: decay, putrefaction, and withering. Its practitioners often believe that this power is the pathway to truly understanding the vampiric condition of death, drawing from the lessons to be learned about how vampiric flesh and blood behave the same as, and differently from, the truly rotting dead.

Basic Powers

Hags' Wrinkles

You may separate skin from the fatty tissue beneath it, altering the way it lies upon the body to create or remove wrinkles and folds. While this can be used as an alternative to cosmetic surgery (especially for vampires, whose undead bodies reject most attempts when the sun next sets), it is more commonly used as a way to create secret pockets in the skin to hide small objects, or to fashion a disguise by distorting the skin and features of a face.

Putrefaction

With a simple touch, you inflict the rot of aging on your victim - even if they are alive or undead, they begin to decompose, their flesh necrotizing and their bones cracking and withering. In mortals, this power is almost always fatal after a few minutes; even if the leprous destruction of limbs and organs doesn't kill them outright, the ensuing infections and bleeding probably will. Vampires and other supernatural beings can survive, especially if they are able to heal the continuing damage or remove the affected portion of their body without dying, but are often left with long-lasting or even permanent physical damage. If your victim manages to survive until the sun rises, the rotting stops (although remaining dead tissue and so on does not magically disappear and may require surgery to remove).

Intermediate Powers

Ashes to Ashes

Vampires are merely still-active corpses, a fact that becomes obvious when they die and collapse into rotting corpses or piles of ashes, and this power allows you to accept that fact while still remaining alive yourself. You collapse into your constituent ashes and become inert; in this form, it is extremely difficult to harm you, and even supernatural beings may not realize that they are seeing anything other than a harmless layer of dust, although you experience a long blackout period as long as you're in this form and cannot do or perceive anything. As long as some of your ashes remain intact, you may return to your usual form at the beginning of the next scene.

This power is primarily useful for older vampires; younger vampires do not decompose to ash upon death but instead fall into whatever state of rotting corpse they would have been in if they had been dead for the same span of time, often leaving bones and liquefying tissue behind. A younger vampire who uses this will still look convincingly dead, but they will also be recognizably a dead body rather than an innocuous collection of dust and ash.

Withering

By grabbing one of your victim's limbs, you may instantly wither it into a dry, useless husk, skin turning to easily rippable paper and bones becoming riddled with fragile matchstick imperfections. The withered limb is inflexible, cannot make fine movements, and is likely to break if any pressure is placed on it, making it functionally useless. Supernatural victims may be able to heal or regenerate this damage if they are powerful enough, but lesser creatures and mortals are likely to never regain the use of the limb at all.

Advanced Powers

Infection

You may infect others with your deathly vitae, not only bloodbonding them to you but also causing them severe suffering. By touching someone who is currently carrying aggravated damage, you can allow microscopic bits of your blood to flow out of you and into the wounds, instantly bloodbonding your target. The wound remains infected and cannot be fully healed, even if your victim manages to repair the rest of their body, until the bloodbond expires or is removed.

Necrosis

By touching or striking someone, you may instantly necrotize their flesh, causing it to instantly shrivel, rot, and slough off of their body. This deals aggravated damage and is terrifying and disgusting besides, and the wounds it creates cannot be healed by any but the most potent supernatural creatures; they must slowly and laboriously regrow their tissue as if they were humans recovering from a terrible disease. Needless to say, mortals are immediately killed or horrifically injured and disfigured by the use of this power.

Elder Powers

Compress

You may cause your victim's skin to begin shrinking as if they were being mummified, drawing tightly in against their flesh until it becomes painful and eventually until it actually splits, tearing off them in disgusting agony. The skin shed this way is not automatically replaced unless your victim has the ability to regrow it (mortals may undergo skin grafts, although since they have lost their entire skin, their chances aren't good), and you may take it from them and incorporate it into your own body, healing minor wounds and replacing some of the blood you have spent. Since you have mummified the skin, it carries none of your victim's blood and will not cause a blood bond.

Creeping Infection

You may infect your victim with the powers of Putrefaction, Withering, or Necrosis - but make them a slow, creeping disease, one that waits weeks or even months to truly begin to manifest itself. The power you choose works the same as usual, but surfaces gradually over time, appearing to be a progressive necrotic disease with no known cause. You may choose to end the disease at any time by visiting and touching your victim if you're feeling merciful, but if you don't, they suffer through its full effects, becoming cured only if they manage to survive it for a full month of symptoms.

Marrow Sucker

You no longer have to drink blood to sustain yourself; you may now also gain sustenance by drinking bone marrow. As with blood, this marrow must come from a human being or supernatural creature; animal marrow is unpleasant and fails to give you the nutrients you need to survive.

Dust to Dust

You may collapse into your decomposed ashes, just as in the Ashes to Ashes power, but you are now able to perceive your surroundings and to move, albeit slowly; onlookers see what appear to be small breezes or tilts in gravity that move your ashes slowly and naturally. In addition, you can also use your disciplines while in this form, provided that they do not require you to have a solid physical body to do so.

Putrescent Servitude

The truly dead are easy for you to manipulate, becoming your willing servants (or at least something close). By touching a recently deceased mortal corpse, you may cause it to reanimate and rise again, regaining some sense of its former self and becoming a ghoul bound to you. The resulting ghoul is not especially effective - they have difficulty remembering much about their previous life and tend to be on the slow side both physically and mentally, a consequence of being dragged back from beyond the grave - but is unquestionably loyal to you, even more than an average ghoul. The ghoul also retains its appearance from the moment of reanimation, so depending on the state of the original corpse, it may be more than a little obvious that it is not a healthy or even living person. If at any point this ghoul no longer has any of your blood in its body, it immediately dies again, this time permanently.

Alternatively, if you use this power on a still-living mortal, it instantly kills them and then reanimates them to become a ghoul as well. This ghoul is no less loyal and attached to you and appears much "fresher" than others might, but some vampires (especially Cappadocians) consider this a contravention of the power's ability to work with death, not attempt to cheat it.

Rigor Mortis

You may touch a victim to inflict the state of rigor mortis on them, causing all their muscles to seize and their tendons and ligaments to inflexibly freeze in place. Doing such a thing to a living being causes them extreme pain, and to add insult to injury, they cannot even complain about it, since they are fully paralyzed and cannot move or make any sound. Vampires are likely to enter Frenzy when this power is used on them, while others must survive whatever psychological damage is inflicted upon them by the experience. Your victim is freed at the end of the scene.

Important Things to Keep in Mind

Thanatosis is considered creepy even for a vampiric power - even the undead generally don't like being reminded of how close they are to the rotting corpses sleeping underground. Because it was once the cherished power of Clan Cappadocian before they were largely destroyed, anyone using it is likely to attract the attention of Clan Giovanni, who may either wish to capture them for study or, more likely, destroy them to avoid any possibility of a vendetta.