The Great Game

The Jyhad, or Jihad, is known among the eldest vampires in the world as the Antediluvians' great game. It resurfaced after centuries of silence during the nights of the Great Anarch Revolt, then continued through the oppression of neonates by the ancients, and survives into our own nights in the form of the endless war the Sabbat and the Camarilla wage with such ferocity.

The Jyhad is also spoken of as a self-destructive war between generations, each deadlier, crueler, and more potent than the one below it, all struggling for supremacy of the blood. Elder vampires, stronger in both vitae and years, manipulate the younger and the weaker, using them as pawns in a terrible game whose rules few can truly grasp.

But to understand the Jyhad, one must first understand those who set it in motion in an age so distant that trying to date it would be meaningless.

Taken from a fragment of the Book of Nod:

Cain and the First Nights...

According to Kindred myth, the first of them was Cain, the first murderer, who, for the crime he committed, was cursed by God and transformed into a vampire. Exiled from his people, Cain was forced to wander at the edges of civilisation, terrified of the sun and thirsting for blood. In his solitude, Cain found a powerful sorceress named Lilith, Adam's first wife. She taught Cain many things, among them how to use his blood to invoke mystical powers, including the power to create others like himself.

The Second Generation and the First City...

At first Cain refused to sire childer, for he believed he would curse the world with others like himself. In time, however, he brought three candidates to his side. They, in turn, created thirteen more, and those voracious beings preyed carelessly upon the inhabitants of the world and used them as puppets in their fraternal fiefdoms. Cain, angered by such behaviour, forbade the creation of further progeny. He gathered his childer and the childer of his childer and created a great city, the First City of the world, where vampires and mortals coexisted in peace.

The Antediluvians and the Clans....

This could not last. Cain's childer contested for the affection of their sire, and once again humans were used as pawns. In the end the city fell. Some say it was because of a natural disaster; others claim that the conspiracy of a scorned and vengeful Kindred hastened the cataclysm. Cain vanished into the desert, and nothing more was heard of him. The three vampires of the Second Generation disappeared likewise into the mists of legend. But the thirteen children of that generation, now free of restraint, began to create new vampires irresponsibly. In time they came to be known as the Antediluvians, and the childer they created in their own image inherited their gifts and their mystical curses. Thus were the clans formed.

Those Ill-Raised Childer...

The Jyhad revealed itself after centuries of silence during the nights of the Great Anarch Revolt. Then came the oppression of the neonates at the hands of the ancients, and finally it reached our own nights in the form of the everlasting war that the Sabbat and the Camarilla have long fought with savage fury.

The Time of Thin Blood...

And the world shall grow cold
and impure things shall spring from the ground
and great storms shall break,
their lightning bringing fire;
the animals shall be marked by sores,
and their twisted bodies shall fall.

The sires of our sires shall rise
from the earth;
they shall break their fast upon
the best part of us;
they shall consume us whole...

And you shall know these final nights by the
Time of Thin Blood, marked by vampires
who shall be unable to Embrace;
you shall know them by the Clanless,
who shall come to rule;
you shall know them by the Wild Ones,
who shall hunt us even in the mightiest city.

You shall know them by the awakening
of some of the eldest...

And those who drink the heart's blood shall flourish,
and the Kindred shall gather,
and vitae shall become as rare
as diamonds...

The Sun shall shine black!
The Moon shall shine blood!
Gehenna approaches.