The King is Dead: Libertines and Liberated

Becoming a vampire means the death of life as you have known it; becoming a vampire means that one is cut off from the act of procreation.  While many vampires claim that drinking blood is a sensation more exquisite than the base pleasures of the flesh, mortal satirists immensely doubt it.  Regardless, the unliving upper crust of Society disdains mere fornication and turns to elaborate tortures and other unnatural means for their pleasures.  The Church of Sathaniel, in turn, preaches hatred of the flesh as part of its support of the monarchy.

The nobles of Malleus are obsessed with the purity of their bloodlines – in terms of both literal genetic inheritance from parent to child and in metaphorical inheritance from master vampire to servitor.  It is not enough to simply be a vampire; one must also be physically descended from the right people.  The mortal descendants of the vampire lords are expected to produce the next generation of children before they are given the gift of immortality. 

Noblewomen live practically cloistered lives before their marriages; many actually are placed in nunneries where they are taught nothing but prayer and music.  Even as the Illuminated champion for equal rights for women and middle-class maids and matrons debate the latest in philosophy and science, the daughters of the vampires are used as pretty pawns to secure allegiances amongst the king’s sons and their descendants.  Rare is the lady of the blood who is given the blessing of unlife before she has whelped and reared a half-dozen aristocratic brats.     

Male vampires can’t have get erection.  Their hearts are dead, their blood does not flow, so they have no apparatus to engorge the male member.  Because it is impossible to impregnate a woman after becoming a vampire, it is the duty of every nobleman to sire children beforehand.  Knowing that immortality also means neutering, it is the pleasure of pre-vampiric noblemen to fornicate as much as possible.  While the not-dead-yet female members of the aristocracy have their virginities better guarded than a Lochlander’s gold, the young men patronize actresses and courtesans, bawdy houses and bordellos. 

Yet More Secret Societies of Malleus

The Balefire Club

A gathering of libertines run as a mock occult society, the Balefire Club appears to outsiders as simply yet another of the putrid excesses of the nobility.  The truth is that it is a honey trap for disaffected still-living nobles, a means of both discovering their secrets and seducing the few worthy ones to the Glorious Revolt.  The Balefire Club mocks Sathaniel with white masses where the communion is drunk in wine instead of blood, bread is shared instead of flesh, and it all ends orgies of that most life-affirming of physical acts.  The club welcomes men and women of all ranks, daring adventurous noblewomen to sneak out of their cloisters, shocking decadent noblemen out of their self-satisfied ruts, and enabling poor seditionists to seduce the nobility into paying for their own destruction.

Archetypes: adventurer, atheist, imposter, poet, rakehell, seducer.

The Sorority of Belquis

Named for an ancient queen of the Morgenland who worshipped the deified sun and tamed ifreet and jinn, the Sorority of Belquis is dedicated to spreading the message of empowerment amongst women of all classes.  The society neither preaches nor desires that men become subject to women, but it does demand that women make their own choices and that their voices be heard.  Sisters of the Sorority have infiltrated nunneries, practiced back-alley abortions, and helped battered wives emigrate to the Colonies.  The Sorority is naturally the target of suspicion and misogyny; even some male members of the Illuminated recoil from what they misperceive as a message of women’s dominance.  Surprisingly, one of the most prominent members of the Sorority of Belquis is technically male – the transvestite spy Ritter von Noe – but the Sorority refuses to discriminate.

Archetypes: adventuress, apostate nun, midwife, scholar, suffragette, transgendered.