The Sabbat

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

The Sabbat has collapsed.  Its implosion was so sudden and so chaotic that even the Kindred who were there to watch it collapse struggle to piece together an accurate picture of what happened.

With the revelation of the murder and replacement of Regent Miranda Galbraith, the Sabbat was left on the verge of a third civil war.  One of the candidates for the Regency, Francisco Domingo de Polonia, whipped the most fervent Noddists of the Sabbat into a frenzy with his claims of having orchestrated the terrorist attacks on 09/11/2001 (he didn't) to create conflict in the Middle East that would act as cover for a Gehenna Crusade, where the Sabbat would take the war to the Ancients in their lairs.  This religious turmoil began to tear the Sabbat apart at the seams, causing its blood-wet grip on matters like its code of silence to slip.

When the Second Inquisition began its hunt, Sabbat domains offered the most immediate and obvious targets.  The worst of the packs barely bothered to hide their depredations, and the Sabbat's limited pool of cleaners and influence-mongers could hardly keep up with the workload of mopping up their messes.  It was easy for the hunters to locate Sabbat packs and burn them out; entire domains were depleted in a matter of days.  

The Sabbat's spiritual heart of Montreal fell to the Camarilla when Justicar Pascek usurped control of the Ivory Tower's assault on the city from the inexperienced Tremere Justicar di Zagreb.  Instead of an inexperienced hack who swayed in the political wind, the wounded Montreal Sabbat found themselves up against a Brujah warlord with a hatred of the Sabbat that burned like sunlight - and were completely outmatched.  Pascek crushed the packs under his boot and personally beheaded Cardinal Kyle Strathcona in the Black Cathedral.  The fall of Montreal fanned the flames of discord in the Sabbat, as the ardently religious accused the sect's more secular wing of having cost them the heart of the Black Church through their faithless posturing.

Influential Sabbat elders like the Malkavian Vasantasena witnessed the sect's cascading collapse, gathered their followers and withdrew - the depleted and distracted Sabbat was unable to pursue.  Factions tasked with maintaining the Masquerade such as the Order of St. Blaise and the Serpents of the Light vanished into the night, taking with them the Sabbat's already thin ability to hide its activities from its enemies.  Sabbat who were unable or unwilling to essay a Path of Enlightenment, whose Path no longer conformed to the Sword's wild frenzying, or who simply counseled restraint found that there was no more room for moderates in the shrinking sect.  They faced a choice - either go all-in on the Sabbat's mad new direction, flee, or be devoured by their sectmates in a flurry of Monomacies and outright passionate murder.

The Lasombra watched the sect burn around them, witnessed the horrors the Sword's blundering was awakening in the Middle East, and then an edict came down from the Amici Noctis that the Sabbat had failed in its purpose; to survive, the clan would petition for membership in the Camarilla.  This ripped the clan in half; many Lasombra renounced the Amici Noctis and their entire lineage and stayed with the Sabbat, but the other half decamped, compounding the Sabbat's inability to protect itself from the Inquisition and accelerating its collapse.

The most alien and freakish Tzimisce became easy prey for the Second Inquisition; those who escaped were the subtlest, the cleverest, the fiercest; many fiends gathered around the Metamorphosist Sascha Vykos and declared it the "Martyr of Caine", a title the vain creature accepted with delight.  In a proclamation to its flock, Vykos declared they had transcended their old lineage and its restraints of tradition and obligation.  The Draculs who were unwilling to part with their honor spat a hateful phrase from the clan's past - Asakku - at Vykos and looked to the traditions of the past for their survival, withdrawing to their voivodates and holding them against all comers with hellhounds and szlachta retainers.

Sabbat domains in the Western world collapsed like dominoes.  Some fell to the Anarchs and the Camarilla, others to the Second Inquisition; some seemed to depopulate entirely on their own, as if the Sabbat had simply lost interest in holding them.  Only after initial rush to claim these domains had abated did the truth of the Sabbat's transformation become apparent; in West Asia and Northern Africa, the Sabbat wages the Gehenna Crusade.  It races to unearth and devour the most ancient Methuselahs before they can awaken.

In the West, the Sabbat has gone clandestine, as the packs that remained behind wage a guerilla campaign of terror against Anarch and Camarilla domains alike.  They snatch neonates in the night to convert them via torture and brainwashing, ambush elders, disrupt domains and brutalize the Masquerade.  The remaining Cainites of the Sabbat have given up on all pretense of society and survival, and are dead-set on ushering things toward a final, bloody eschaton.

Many of the Sabbat's old domains are marked "off-limits" by the Camarilla, meaning that no Princedoms will be established in those cities until they have been investigated by the Justiciary and found to be safe.  In the meantime, Anarchs have claimed many such domains, or ex-Sabbat who remained have set themselves up as Autarkis Princes, and still others sit strangely, bizzarely empty of Kindred.  The Camarilla suspects the Sabbat is using many of its old domains as a trap to lure in the greedy and foolhardy.

The View from Without: 

The Sabbat is the biggest, most dangerous Blood Cult in the Jyhad.  Before, it was brutal, nasty and dangerous, but it had rules, things it would and wouldn't do and ways it would and wouldn't do those things.  If you knew those rules, if you knew what factions within it to seek out for diplomacy, you could deal with it.  Dealing with the Sabbat was always a risk, but it could be done.  Now it has no rules you can count on, except that the Sabbat exists to violate every single rule that protects the Kindred.  They don't hold domain, except to suck resources from it for their war.  Once they have the blood and money and guns and meat they need, they abandon their turf and leave the gnawed, dry bones behind them.  They don't keep the Masquerade, except insofar as secrecy helps them advance their goal of bringing about eschaton.  If it advances their goals, they'll rip the Masquerade to shreds, usually to force their enemies to expend blood and treasure to mend the breach.  You are either a potential convert and as such better off ashing yourself, an enemy, in which case they'll just cut to the quick and try to kill you, or an Elder, in which case they'll diablerize you.  Sabbat Cainites cannot be negotiated with, and an appeal to reason and conscience is a waste of time because they've decided they no longer have a need of either of those things.  Is it possible for an entire sect to degenerate into a group-think Wassail?  Because if so, that's what's happened to the Sabbat.

The View from Within: 

You don't wanna know.