Vicissitude

Vicissitude
Clans	Ærquic, Naglopers, Tzimisce
Bloodlines	Volgirre
Sects	Laibon, Quiet Nations, Sabbat
Rituals	None
Combination Disciplines	Vicissitude Combination Disciplines
Rarity	Uncommon

Vicissitude is considered something of a horror, a feat among the undead blood-drinkers of the Kindred. Its powers allow the shaping, changing, and molding of flesh, bone, and blood - useful, many allow, but also very easily perverted into hideous, misshapen abominations. The vampires who specialize in it are overwhelmingly members of the Sabbat, and their terrifying experiments in transforming bodies into weapons and sculpting themselves into monsters with little resemblance to human beings does little to disprove the general mistrust of the discipline.

A rumor exists that Vicissitude is not just a discipline but actually an infectious disease, and that anyone who carries it may pass it on to others via blood contact; an even more obscure suggestion is that all Tzimisce are simply facets of the enormous fleshcrafted body of the original, ancient founder of their clan, still experimenting with them as if they were atoms of its flesh. Regardless, most non-Tzimisce vampires aren't willing to take the chance of finding out firsthand.

Basic Powers

Malleable Visage

You may reshape your own flesh like clay, changing your appearance to practically anything on the humanoid spectrum that you wish. Many vampires use this power to make themselves hauntingly beautiful or intimidatingly hideous; if you wish, you may also use it in an attempt to impersonate someone else, although the more socially adept that person is, the more trouble you will have in creating a copy good enough to fool anyone. Like most Vicissitude powers, stretching and moving your own muscles and fat is painful... but so is most beauty, Vicissitude users maintain.

Fleshcraft

You may sculpt the flesh of others just as you would your own, twisting them into hideous deformity or bestowing beautiful new features on them at your discretion. You must be able to touch their bare flesh with your own in order to sculpt it, and although you cannot actually inflict any injuries, the changes you create are permanent unless you (or someone else with this power) choose to reverse them, and the process is painful. If you want to perform changes on an unwilling subject, they must be either unconscious or suitably restrained for you to be able to work with the finesse you need.

Intermediate Powers

Bonecraft

You can sculpt, twist, sharpen, and re-design bones, allowing you to completely remodel your own skeleton or that of anyone else. Many Tzimisce use this power for combat purposes, drawing their own bones out of their flesh in order to create wickedly sharp bone blades and flat, protective outer bone plates; doing so is hideously painful, and you must also Fleshcraft at the same time or else inflict injuries on yourself or your victim as bones are dragged and sliced through helpless flesh. You may also use this power to redesign your skeleton build, give yourself features only found in other species, or anything else you can think of.

Horrid Form

You may twist yourself into a hulking, terrifying monster, reordering your entire body to become something out of a nightmare. Such forms vary depending upon the Tzimisce who uses this power, but they average around eight feet tall with hideously exposed body parts, razor-sharp bone and teeth weapons and defenses, and blood dripping from all damaged orifices and limbs. You may transform into this form at any time (if you are in combat, this takes two rounds to achieve), and anyone who has never seen such a horrible sight before or is particularly sensitive may be automatically forced to try to flee in fear. You inflict more damage on enemies you fight while in this form, but are incapable of positive social interactions thanks to your awful appearance.

Infectious Bite

You have developed a hideous bloodborne illness (one that doesn't affect yourself, of course), using your own body as its crucible. By biting or touching someone's open wound, you can inflict that disease upon them, giving them a permanent affliction. From minor annoyances to life-threatening illnesses, your blood pumped into them causes the disease instead of a blood bond, but once it has been applied it cannot be healed without the intervention of Vicissitude.

Advanced Powers

Ascendancy of the Sanguine Humor

You may use this power to not only sever a small piece of yourself (such as a hand or leg) but also liquefy it, turning it into pure, drinkable vitae. Anyone may drink this vitae and be nourished by it; mortals become ghouls bound to you if they do, while other vampires can gain sustenance if they are willing to risk the blood bond. You may also drink this vitae yourself, allowing you to heal other injuries or use powers in emergency situations by turning your very body into a usable resource. You may regrow the removed part later if you wish, although it will cost blood to do so and therefore is usually an afterthought after the crisis has passed.

Bloodform

By concentrating and dissolving the connective tissue of your body, you may liquefy yourself and become a pool of living, sentient blood, capable of moving under your own disgusting power and remaining together as a single contiguous body of liquid as long as you concentrate. You may move at a slow oozing pace, making it possible to escape danger by literally trickling away down a drain or under a door, and you are immune to any damage except for fire and sunlight. Becoming a pool of blood has obvious dangers around other vampires, however, and if you are totally consumed while in this form, you will permanently die.

The Body Impolitic

Each body part is just part of the overall construction project that is you, and they can be detached and used at will. You may detach any body part, with intense concentration, and control it even separate from you, allowing a disembodied hand to crawl across the room to fetch things for you or your hideous tongue to scare the life out of an unsuspecting intruder into your domain. You suffer just as much injury from separating your body parts as usual, but this injury is removed once the parts are reunited; detaching your head is most likely a poor idea, since most vampires tend not to survive the experience, even with blood manipulation at their disposal.

Inner Mastery

You can reshape the delicate circuitry of brain matter and the nervous system, causing changes even to the personality and processes of your subject. You may use this power on yourself; many vampires do so in order to disconnect the nervous processes that carry pain signals, making them immune to any pesky unpleasant sensations. If you choose to use it on others with less than pure intentions, you may affect brain chemistry to inflict Derangements or remove fear responses, or perform alterations that put them in constant pain or prevent certain body parts from working correctly.

Elder Powers

Blood of Acid

You may turn your blood into a highly corrosive acid, capable of eating through flesh, wood, stone, and even metal, similar to a potent form of hydrochloric acid. This power's effects are permanent, and have the handy side effect of making it very difficult to drink from or attempt to diablerize you as well as allowing you to bleed on enemies to terrible effect. You may, however, be unable to feed or maintain ghouls or blood bond other vampires, as any attempt to ingest your vitae is more likely to injure or kill them than anything else.

Body Arsenal

With this power, every bone in your body is potentially a weapon, as movable and wieldable by you as any outside missile or object. You may creatively attack others with your bones in any way that makes sense; bones might erupt from your flesh so that you can stab victims with their sharpened edges, collapse around others to crush and choke them even while still in your flesh, or you can even allow small bones to shoot out of your flesh like throwing knives. Any bones that fully detach from you are lost and must be regrown, and ripping your own skeleton apart is a painful ordeal that will probably have to be healed from later.

Chiropteran Marauder

You may transform yourself into a monstrous creature out of legend: with huge teeth, massive bat wings, and a scaly hide, you resemble a dragon or demon from medieval legends (which were probably inspired by sightings of vampires using this power). In this form, you can fly and are capable of inflicting enormous damage on helpless humans and lesser vampires with your claws and teeth. You may remain transformed for as long as you wish, even sleeping through the day in this form, but vampires who remain in their marauder form for too long often become increasingly mentally strange, beginning to think like the monster they resemble after a while.

Ecstatic Agony

By touching someone (including yourself), you may choose to reverse the flow of their nervous system in regards to pain; specifically, you can turn pain to pleasure, making the agony of wounds into a sudden ecstasy or the slow miserable pounding of a headache become a pleasant euphoria. While this power is very useful for preventing suffering and allowing you to carry on even when severely hurt, it is also dangerous, since those with weak wills or who are not sure what is happening may intentionally wound themselves, even to the point of death, in order to feel the pleasurable high. If you use this power on yourself, it is permanent until you choose to remove it; if you use it on someone else, it lasts for a single scene.

Entrail Saraband

Like most vampires, you probably don't use your intestines for very much, but this power changes that, allowing you to turn them into powerful (and disgusting) weapons. You may use this power to open up your belly, causing your intestines to explode outward in a mass of writhing tentacles, each of which you can use individually like a flexible limb. This power is often used as a way of having additional options for attacking or defending against somone in a fight, but it is so viscerally horrifying that it is also sometimes just used to clear the room, since most minds, even those possessed by the supernatural, do not react well to the prospect of slithering tentacles made of guts.

Graft Life to Life

This power allows you to graft limbs and other small body parts on to a person - even a person who did not originally possess them. While this can be used to return severed limbs to someone who has been decapitated, it can also be used to graft one person's limbs onto a completely different person, either to replace one they have lost or to give them additional ones beyond the normal amount. These limbs are fully useable just as they originally were.

Living Testudo

You may use this power to grab any living thing and turn it into a weapon and shield all in one, reshaping your hapless victim's body on the fly into protective shielding and vicious bone weapons. Although you can technically fix whatever you do to this person later with other Vicissitude powers, it's much more common that they are killed or injured beyond repair during the fighting, especially if they are a mortal or ghoul.

Plasmic Form

Just as in Bloodform, you can turn your entire body into a sentient liquid; however, you can now move as quickly and easily as if you were in your regular form, and furthermore you can hold your shape, making your blood take on whatever proportions it can manage with your mass. You are still fully liquid, with all the concerns and safeties this implies.

Skin Trap

By touching someone, you may cause the top layers of your skin to peel off and fold around them, creating a sudden hideous net that is very difficult to escape. The skin trap isn't quite sentient, but it still has an uncanny ability to anticipate your victim's moves and hold onto them more effectively than any mere inanimate one. If you wish to create multiple skin traps, or hand them off to allies to use, you may do so by concentrating and sloughing off your skin, a process that takes a minute on its own; as parts of your body, the skin traps remain viable only until the end of the night, after which they rot or turn to dust according to your age.

Cocoon

With this power, you may secrete fluids from your body that harden into an almost impenetrable shell, which you can fashion around yourself until it becomes an unbreakable cocoon. No one with less Potence (or similar strength powers) than you have Vicissitude can break through it while it surrounds you; inside, you may remain conscious if you wish, but you cannot do anything that involves moving or leaving the cocoon without destroying it. Many elders are especially fond of using this power when they rest during the day, guaranteeing that enemies will have a harder time trying to hurt them if they find their resting place.

Flesh Rot

Just as you can control living and undead flesh, you can also control its decay, inflicting a hideous flesh-eating disease that slowly eats away at your victim's body. The disease is much like leprosy in effect, although it is not communicable to anyone else; even vampires are helpless to stop its progress, although they can temporarily appear unaffected by spending blood to heal the damage it does. The disease lasts for up to a year, although in practice many sufferers of it will die or fall into torpor well before then.

Impaler's Fence

With this power, you may inflict perhaps the most hideous pain known to even vampires: you loosen your victim's spine, causing it to stab up and down into their body, inflicting horrible damage and excruciating pain as nerves stretch or break free. It is technically possible to survive this for especially hardy supernatural creatures, but even they are likely to be left with lifelong disabilities and pain unless they have Vicissitude themselves.

Kraken's Kiss

You may give up your nose and mouth for the much more efficient form of a long, toothed or lamprey-like tentacle, capable of latching onto your victims and easily sucking them dry. Obviously, you may not talk or smell while in this state... unless you shape additional sensory organs on your body elsewhere, of course.

Liquefy the Mortal Coil

By touching your victim, you may simply liquefy their body, turning a portion of it no larger than a hand or heart instantly to a soup of blood, humors, and liquefied bone. Victims who lose body parts to this power are not only permanently maimed but also likely to bleed to death, since they have lost not only a large amount of blood all at once but also now have a large hole in their body somewhere that until a moment ago connected to solid flesh.

Transcend the Flesh

Your body is now so malleable and flexible that you can force it to perform impossible feats; you may expel any foreign substances from your body, not only solid objects such as bullets or stakes but also liquids and gases, making it almost impossible to poison or drug you as your body simply refuses to accept the foreign material. You may also now ooze through solid objects, permeating their tiny imperfections and crevices as a liquid; this process takes some time, so seeping through a solid wall may take more than a few minutes, but it is almost impossible to keep you in (or out of) anywhere you do not wish to be without the use of high-grade non-porous materials such as those used in space travel. (And even then, there is no guarantee - everything has a seam somewhere.)

Bauble

You may now condense your matter, allowing you to shrink down and mimic an object no smaller than half your usual size. Mischievous elders like to use this power to surprise enemies (or friends!) by impersonating chairs, tables, or chests, but other more horrible uses also exist, such as turning into a suit of clothing that devours the victim when they put it on, or allowing a victim to believe they have barricaded themself safely inside only to discover that the innocuous suitcase they brought with them is all too eager to feed.

Blood of the Earth

With this power, your blood becomes viscous and acidic, turning into a thick sulphurous substance not unlike a lava flow. While this does not hurt you or anything else while it remains in your body, any exposure of your blood to air immediately burns with extreme heat and is likely to destroy anything it comes into contact with.

Breath of the Dragon

You may reorganize the organs and chemicals inside your body to become very literally dragonish, creating an explosive chemical reaction that allows you to breathe a gout of flame over your enemies (or just the local area, if you feel like setting it on fire). This flame does not harm you, but you may still find yourself entering Rötschreck if the sight of uncontrolled flame triggers your vampiric survival reflex.

Oathbreaker

Your blood is so potent and rich that you can use it to isolate and defeat foreign blood within you. This is useful for avoiding blood-borne diseases or purging damaged vitae from your system, but most elders learn it in order to have the power to temporarily break their blood bonds: while you cannot truly remove the foreign blood from your system, you can store it away long enough to have unaffected free will for the rest of the night, after which the bond snaps back into place.

Sublimation of the Larval Flesh

While you may change your form to anything you desire, others are not so lucky; this power allows you to give them a similar rebirth. By touching someone, you cause their flesh to writhe and separate, becoming a huge cocoon of skin and muscle that surrounds them completely and cannot be outrun. They remain cocooned for the next week, during which time they slowly transform into the shape that they think of most as their true, authentic self. This power can be a boon, as it allows you to help others achieve their true natures or escape from disabilities or dysphoria, but it can also be a monstrous attack, especially when combined with efforts to warp your victim's self-image so that they turn themself into a monster.

Will Over Form

With this power, you no longer need to physically touch your victims in order to use your other Vicissitude powers; anyone in the scene with you whom you can perceive is fair game.

Doppelgänger

There are no longer any restrictions on what you can and cannot transform into; only your imagination and the amount of flesh you have available restrict you. Vampires with this power can transform into terrible beasts, sublime angels, bizarre aliens, and anything else they can think of; most begin, over time, to remember to resemble human beings only very rarely and superficially.

Earth's Vast Haven

You may dissolve your body into the earth, becoming one with the local landscape into which your blood sinks. You cannot be removed from the area by any outside force and you retain a basic awareness of everything that happens within it; at any time, you may choose to reconstitute yourself back into a separate form, rising up from the ground anywhere within ten miles of where you originally sank.

The Last Dracul

You may transform into the creatures most feared by the human imagination and most associated with the ancient horrors of the Tzimisce: the dragon. You become a towering dragon with wings and fiery breath, terrible claws and teeth, impregnable scales, and any other specific features you choose to shape as your signatures. Anyone who injures you (which is difficult but not impossible) also finds that your blood is a potent chemical poison and corrosive.

Obviously, this power causes massive panic and confusion, not only among mortals but among most other supernatural beings, too, who are ill-equipped to deal with a fifty-foot legendary marauding machine that shouldn't exist. Interestingly, there exist no tales of encounters between vampires in this form and the true Bygone dragons, leading to the question of whether there ever was such a thing as a "true" dragon or only the exaggerated tales of the most terrible of vampire lords.

Perfect Essence

You have perfected a control over your blood that no other living being can boast; it is now efficient to the point of being effortless, allowing you to use powers with much less blood expenditure and heal your wounds with very little thought or strain. To onlookers, you appear to simply be inexhaustible, no matter how much you do or how long it has been since you fed.

Reform Body

Death no longer exists for your when you have this power, which allows you to ignore the most fatal of effects as if they had never been. When you are killed, even if you are burnt to ashes or chippered into microscopic fragments, you may reform your body over the next year, slowly rebuilding piece by piece until you rise again unscathed.

Important Things to Keep in Mind

Vicissitude is not exactly healthy, so keep in mind that it is possible to injure yourself very critically with it, and this should not be glossed over. It also requires direct flesh-to-flesh contact for most of its powers to affect others, forcing you to put yourself in direct physical danger in crisis situations. It is also very obviously a Sabbat power to most vampires, and a nasty one at that, so anyone flaunting it is likely to earn a one-way trip to a bloodhunt and a morning sunbathing party, courtesy of the Prince and his minions.