Bram's Vampire Hunter Handbook

Chapter 6 - Vampire Society

The Vampire Society is difficult to define in a few words. It is not simply a club for vampires. For all intends and purposes, it is their government. However, it is not a sovereign state and has no real territory. While all vampires are welcomed to join the Society, only members who pay their tax can enjoy their legal protection. The ones who do not pay are at the mercy of the hunters.

The smallest cell of the Vampire Society is the Family, a group of vampires bound by the same blood. Those families might be as big as hundreds (e.g., the Draculas) or as small as one member. Only families with a patriarch/matriarch have the right to take part of the Council, who propose and vote laws. The president of the Vampire Society is elected every twenty years, and their only real power over the Council is to veto its decisions, if they think those decisions are harmful to the vampirekind.

History

The Society was created in 1900, after the end of the trial of Abraham van Helsing, as a part of the Amsterdam Treaties. Until 1890, the vampires were ruled by Vlad Dracula I, the one and only king of the vampires. After his death, since no one inherited his 'royal' domination magic and his son was just a baby, the vampires had a lot of trouble deciding who would be the next ruler. The patriarch of the Ruthven family and the Matriarch of the Báthory family joined the regent of the Draculas (since the next patriarch was still a baby, as previously stated) and they formed a temporary council, to avoid the ill effects of a power vacuum.

Still, it took the vampires around ten years to finally organize themselves enough to bring Van Helsing to court about Vlad I's death. After being acquitted of the murder charge against him, he joined the Vampire Hunter Association and pressed for peace treaties among vampires and hunters to avoid a massive war. Those treaties, among other things, helped the vampires to give a definite shape to their new government.

Competences

Nowadays, the main competences of the Vampire Society include:

- Registering any new vampires and their respective families;

- Gather the council at least once a month for deliberation, or whenever it becomes necessary (they throw a big ball while this gathering is happening, to ensue troublemakers will be all in one safe place);

- Making and updating the laws governing all vampires;

- Calling for intervention of the Vampire Hunter Association to deal with rogue ones and other kinds of trouble;

- Judging and punishing any law-breakers;

- Representing the vampires whenever diplomacy is required;

- Declaring State of War, if need be.

Hierarchy

The positions in the Vampire Society are:

President: They keep the Society running. The President has the power to break ties in Council votes, veto decisions they do not agree with, call for Vampire Hunters Association intervention and ban vampires from the Society, which means they are no longer protected by the Amsterdam Treaties. When the President is killed by another vampire, the hunters are allowed to investigate and punish the killer and their accomplices without any intervention, which can potentially be abused by the Association (the reason why the President's position becomes a bit more secure).

Presidents rule for twenty years, and are elected by a two-stage process: first, all members of Vampire Society indicate their preferred candidate for the post, then the Council elects the President among the three with most votes. They can be reelected twice. There has been three Presidents since the Society was created. The most recent one is Ignatius Ventrue.