Achieving prominence during the Venetian Renaissance, the Giovanni family built their fortune on the rise of the middle class and the ready profit of banking and Mediterranean trade (and the criminal enterprise that came with it). However, with the family’s rise came hubris, as its paterfamilias sought ever more power, and with that hubris came horror. With his earthly power at its apex, Augustus Giovanni turned to the arts of controlling the dead, and in doing so, gained the Embrace from a forgotten Antediluvian. With a conclave of conspirators, the Giovanni plunged a now-forgotten clan into oblivion and built their own legacy on its corpse.

Since those first nights, the Giovanni have accepted no limits on their ambitions, despite opposition from Kindred outside their clan and a well-deserved reputation as “Devil Kindred.” They studied forbidden arts, becoming formidable in the nigrimancy that allowed them power over the spirits of the departed, and degeneracy followed in the wake of unclean ritual. To this night, the Giovanni are known for the insular nature of their clan and the incestuous practices by which they populate it. A few outside families and factions fall under Giovanni auspices, but the vast majority of the clan comes from the debased mortal family. The family remains successful despite all of their ghastly peccadilloes, and has amassed a vast wealth through crime, politics, and the secrets of the dead that keeps them in their position of degraded opulence.

In public view, the Giovanni make a great show of humility and respect. Part of this gentility is a habit of centuries, still in place from when the other clans hunted the usurping Necromancers (and to preserve their hardwon neutrality from the conflict between the Camarilla and the Sabbat). Another part of it is the velvet glove hiding the iron fist of their nature, remarkable for forcing ghosts, minds, and bodies alike to bow to their needs. To hear the Giovanni tell it, Princes and Archbishops alike owe them favors, and anyone with something to offer may earn their patronage.

For the most part, the Giovanni participate little in the Jyhad, pursuing their own agenda of cultivating wealth and building a foundation of power in the lands beyond the veil of death. Outsiders rarely comprehend the goals of the Necromancers, but only the most trusted of the Giovanni know that the clan wants to plunge the world into a state where the dead and the living commingle. And with their mastery of Necromancy, the Giovanni would be positioned to rule it all.

The Cappadocians

We weren’t always the Giovanni. Before the rise of the Roman Empire, there was the Ioveanus or Jovian family, and even then, they were merchants and moneylenders. However, behind closed doors they practiced black magic, communing with their forebears and making deals with the spirits on the other side of the sudario, the veil between our world and the lands of the dead. A significant amount of the wealth in the Empire belonged to the Jovians, and in the natural progression, they extended their influence from commerce to politics. Even then, the Jovians had dealings with the Kindred. Deep in the Giovanni archives, ancient manifests imply that the family transported a number of Cainites to and fro across the continent.

To understand what happened, you have to understand the vampires who took us in. The Cappadocian founder was, as the stories go, either a holy man or slave (or both) in Enoch, the near-mythical First City. Whatever he was, he drew the attention of Caine. Many assume that he came from the region that would eventually become Kapadokya in Turkey, but nobody but the Antediluvian himself knows for sure, and there are no records of his actual name. Based on the stories I’ve heard, I wouldn’t bet that he knew it himself, near the end. Cainite records and histories never refer to him as anything but Cappadocius, but since Enoch was thousands of years before anyone called Cappadocia anything like that, who knows when he started going by Cappadocius.

The Cappadocians were scholar monks who looked for wisdom in crumbled tombs, picking over the bones of the past. Their experiments and studies taught them a lot about the physical nature of death and how to conquer it, but Cappadocius’ aim was never just to conquer physical death.

By the time Augustus was Embraced, some Cainites were already whispering that the Graverobbers’ High Priest was mad. Among his followers, there were whispers of a grand plan, some goal that Cappadocius sought but could not reach. His lieutenants, Japheth and Constancia, shielded him from the greater Cainite community, kept him locked away in Mount Erciyes where he looked for answers to his great question. He was sure he’d reached the limit of the insight he could get from the study of physical death. The Cappadocians could animate corpses. They could control disease and putrefaction. But Augustus Giovanni and his family could drive death before them. Our Necromancers could reach across the Shroud and compel shades directly, touch and even devour the souls of the dead. It was the key to his plan, the last stepping-stone Cappadocius needed.

See, this group of Cappadocians had somehow worked themselves into believing that the best way to atone for the Curse of Caine was to remove the source of the infection. Nothing as prosaic as wiping out all Kindred from Caine on down the line. No, that wasn’t the plan. Cappadocius and his secret little cabal thought that the best path was also the next step in their own undead evolution. They wanted to ascend to the heavens and commit diablerie upon God himself.

Yes. He was that crazy.

The Becoming

Augustus Giovanni was taken to Mount Erciyes, and against the better judgment of Japheth and Constancia, he was Embraced. It’s strange how easy it is to boil it down like that. “He was Embraced” is just three words, but the event itself was so much bigger than that. That moment doomed the Cappadocians; that moment inexorably bound our entire family line into our patriarch’s deal with the Devil.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “golly, it seems like the Cappadocians just Embraced Augustus to learn the secrets of our Necromancy, so what did Augustus get out of it?” and that’s the thing. They told Augustus all manner of wonderful stories. He was chosen, of course, by the High Priest, the Deathly Saint of the afterlife, and so on. That by joining him as one of his closest advisors, he would be rewarded with eternal life, with enormous power, and he would never have to worry about the family’s legacy because he would personally be able to oversee the business forever and ever, amen. They just didn’t mention the whole dependency on blood, or that we’d never see the sun without combusting, or that the only way to join up was to die.

Augustus didn’t walk blindly into the Embrace like an idiot. They lied, but our boy did all his research. The family knew about vampires, to a point. There were records of Jovian dealings with various creatures over the years, and dealing with ghosts means sooner or later you’re going to hear about them. So the family learned what it could. He looked around, and he had offers from other Cainites to bring him into their Clans. Based on business acumen alone, you know the Ventrue were hot for Uncle Auggie. Somehow, Augustus worked up a full-scale bidding war for the right to give him immortality. Augustus didn’t actually have any interest in the Ventrue and Toreador games of prestation and politics, but the Cappadocians were the perfect marks, and the leverage put Augustus in an even stronger position. They were bookish monks in threadbare robes playing at deception and intrigue. In their desire to get what they wanted from us, they happily gave the game away. They offered the thing that the Toreador and the Ventrue never could: Augustus was to be Embraced directly by one of the most powerful Cainites on the planet. He could have the power of a Methuselah, and be put into position to turn the entire thing around and pull off the biggest coup the vampire world had seen since the Antediluvians slaughtered their sires in the year mumblety-thousand before Christ.

The heads of the various branches of the Giovanni family actively debated the Embrace for the better part of a year. This sounds strange to you, but this was the eleventh century. Maps still had “here be monsters” on them, and the capital-c Church warned against real demons made of flesh and blood, not parables. The Giovanni were already neck-deep in black magic, and they had been enslaving ghosts for nearly a thousand years. It would have been stranger if they hadn’t discussed making a deal for immortality with blood-sucking vampires at their family meetings under the heading of “new business.” The family consulted with Dis Pater and the other spirits, and they approved of the merger. I assume they planned for the continuation of the line, negotiated who would be turned and who would not, and so on. Given the ancestor worship and their belief in the power of family, there’s no way they would have fully converted the Giovanni line. The line had to continue, so it could provide trustworthy agents and potential recruits for the nascent bloodline.

Back to the story at Mount Erciyes: Augustus in the temple with Cappadocius and his bitter little cronies. The Embrace didn’t go the way it usually does. I’m not sure if it was the elder’s need for pomp and circumstance or his fear of Augustus clamping down and draining him right there, drunk on the power of Antediluvian blood flowing through his veins. Cappadocius drained Augustus, and then he bled into a vessel. He passed that vessel to Japheth and Constancia, who fed it to Augustus and turned him into a Cainite. But even here, there was a bit of betrayal and mistrust. Those two little conspirators saved some of the blood from the vessel. They secreted it away as a kind of security deposit. See, the blood gave them a sorcerous connection to both Cappadocius and Augustus, so if something were to go wrong, they could take action against either of them.

Constancia prepared a clay jar and sealed the stolen vitae inside with beeswax while Japheth lay a curse over the jar. The jar became known as the True Vessel. Some Cainite historians think that curse is why our Clan’s bite doesn’t have the same soporific effect as other Kindred. They believe the curse on the True Vessel doomed mortals to feel the same agony that the Cappadocians felt from our betrayal. While that’s poetic, I suppose, it’s also fucking stupid. Shouldn’t they have aimed it so that we were the ones who got hurt when we fed? Of course, they were the Clan that fell for Augustus’ “naïve” ruse, so who knows, maybe they were that stupid.

After we joined the Clan, Augustus wasted no time in convincing the Cappadocians that they were on the wrong path. Their Necromancy was shockingly limited. No wonder they wanted Augustus so badly. Of course, after the Bite, I’m sure they regretted it. But not for long, because Augustus and his cronies spent the next two centuries hunting the remnants of the Cappadocians down and executing them, because... Look, if you don’t get why, then you deserve to get stabbed in the back by the enemy you let go, you idiot.

The Premascines

The Giovanni separate history into two eras: before and after “the Bite,” which is our lovely, understated euphemism for the betrayal of Cappadocius and his childer. But that’s not something we should dwell on. Point is, Cainites from before are Premascines, which is a fancy word that means exactly that: “before the Bite.” This includes Augustus himself, as well as any Giovanni brought over in the years between Augustus’ Embrace and the fifteenth century, but it also includes any theoretical Kindred from whatever remnants of the Cappadocians or their pet Lamia bloodline who may have somehow survived the purges. So, this isn’t necessarily great-great-great-whatever grandpa Gino we’re talking about. These are ancient bogeymen, seven hundred years old if they’re a night. At that age, I’m not even sure human blood would do it for them anymore.

What’s worse, not every Premascine from the family agreed with Augustus’ decision to take the mantle of Clan status upon himself. Indeed, some Giovanni Cappadocians were true believers in Cappadocius and his plans for dark apotheosis. Even now, rumors exist that they are out there, whispered stories to scare young Giovanni — mortal and neonate alike — as they are tucked into bed. Some are rumored to have taken refuge under the canals of Venice, bloated aquatic monsters sliding among the gondolas. Other stories tell of desiccated creatures haunting ancient tombs in search of books and grimoires as faded and dusty as they are themselves. It’s possible the Samedi are descended from Cappadocians who escaped notice. Worse is word out of Mexico, talking about a cabal of angry, vengeful Giovanni corpses calling themselves the Harbingers of Skulls. The Pisanob say they’ve been taking losses, and they’re worried. Now, paranoia is healthy, but every time some Cainite with a bit of panache pops up, Licks start talking. And they always go down the same list of rumors: they’re instruments of one of the Antediluvians (which is always funny, because we know our Antediluvian and, yes), or they’re the last of the “original” Cappadocians, or they’ve hooked up with those Caine-loving psychos in the Sabbat. Whether it is true that, whether they are Cappadocians who survived locked away in some dusty cavern or not, the family has a fucking problem.

Even loyal Giovanni Premascines — if they exist — would be alien, broken things, with parchment skin and rictus smiles, as dry as grave flowers. To them, the rest of us, the postmascines if you will, would be myopic, unenlightened, lesser things trapped closer to mortality and eventually destined to be lost in the Endless Night. Regardless, don’t plan on having a coherent conversation with anyone over seven hundred years old. Don’t try to get something out of them, and definitely don’t try to play them. Some of them probably hate you just because you’re a Giovanni. Just take my advice and stay the fuck away.

The Crusades

A few decades after Augustus was Embraced, the Crusades began when Pope Urban II responded to a plea for help from Alexios I Komnenos, emperor of Byzantium. The Giovanni joined in, of course, and not simply as war profiteers. The Crusades were also an opportunity to openly prove they were good Catholics and to keep people from getting suspicious. Don’t get me wrong; it was mostly war profiteering, and there was quite a lot of relic hunting. As the family became acclimated to their new status, we sought sources of Necromantic power wherever we could.

Certain objects fairly seethe with deathly energy. Their presence is enough to thin and warp the sudario near them. I’ve heard stories of Giovanni who collect those items and ascribe them an almost religious significance. There are death cultists in a family of Necromancers. Shocking, I know. Well, in the very early thirteenth century, they learned that their prima potente relic had been found: the jawbone Caine used to kill his brother was in Constantinople.

See, when Caine murdered Abel, he unleashed something beyond the curse of vampirism. As far as we know, Abel was the first person who died. I’m not spouting some Sabbat Caine-worship bullshit at you. Caine was just the sap who triggered things. The fratricide that created vampires was far more important than that. The jawbone Caine used to murder Abel was the flint that lit the spark that created the underworld. Imagine the potential energy held in that relic. The raw power that bled through the first murder. If memory feeds the dead, imagine how much they could leech off the candlestick in the world’s very first game of Cluedo?

The Giovanni immediately called in favors. The Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, had already been taking our money for years. Told that he would be brought into the family if he got us into Constantinople, he selflessly offered to fund a Fourth Crusade to the Holy Land, providing ships and troops to the Catholic Church. When the gates fell, he led the charge, despite being 90 years old and blind. I don’t think he ever did get Embraced.

The Endless Night

Things were easier, once. The sudario used to be a flimsy thing, more a veil than a curtain. Over time, it got harder to cross over. The sheer fabric thickened, congealing from gauze into Kevlar. It’s harder to reach the other side, and it’s been getting harder. Sure, there are places where it’s thinner than others are. There have been wondrous times when the thickening has reversed itself — the world wars, the beginning of this century — because of the weight of violence and death, of mourning in the world.

But wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to fight it all the time?

Some say that Augustus has a book called the Khazar’s Diary, rumored to contain a ritual that will allow the boundaries between the physical world and the Underworld to be erased. The ritual, according to those with knowledge, requires the souls of one hundred million departed individuals to enact. That’s a lot of souls, but if the sudario was torn down, imagine how much more powerful we’d become. We’d be the top dogs in a world where death was just another demographic.

Entropy and Rot

When things get too comfortable, empires crumble. The Giovanni had everything that mattered in the physical world, and it became far too easy to just enjoy the fruits of their privilege. That led, as it does, to desensitization and ennui. It took more and more to excite them, and that led to many Giovanni becoming sensual spelunkers, digging into the esoteric and the taboo for diversion. And when your “traditional” lifestyle includes summoning ghosts and ritual necrophilia, let’s just say some of the family went pretty far afield.

On top of that, the Giovanni family was, like many wealthy and noble families, extremely selective about who got to join. The purity and prestige of the blood was a matter of great pride to the family. Cousins married cousins to avoid diluting the blood, which was actually shockingly normal at the time. The Giovanni went beyond even that. The mix of jaded perversion and the obsession with the family begat an unhealthy eye for incest. Now, not all Giovanni are incestuous — that would have destroyed the family centuries ago. However, it’s hardly frowned upon, either. In fact, the Giovanni award a certain perverse esteem to those who don’t stray from family lines. You’ll hear talk of “single-blooded” Giovanni and their superiority over the rest of the world, including “double-blooded” members of the family.

The Promise of 1528

In the decades following the fall of the Cappadocians, the Giovanni were the subject of a great deal of gossip and rumor in the nascent community of the Camarilla. The other Kindred called the Giovanni the “Devil Clan,” based on their betrayal and diablerie of Cappadocius as well as the darker proclivities of the family. The Camarilla had only recently experienced the Anarch Revolt, and they were desperate to nip another possible threat in the bud before the Giovanni incited another revolt or, worse — from their point of view — joined with Sascha Vykos and its crazed cohorts in the Caine cult that became the Sabbat. Starting a war with us would have been a problem as well, because where the Sabbat were largely made up of the groundlings, we had footholds in the same halls of power as the Ventrue and the Toreador. It would have been starting a war on a second front. They didn’t want to condemn us for the Great Betrayal, because that would set things off. They didn’t want us shamelessly sauntering around their parties either, because that would make them uncomfortable.

I wasn’t there. I don’t know what the treaty actually says, and neither does anyone else I know. The meetings were secret, and the outcome was just as secret. Maybe there are provisions in the Promise the Camarilla don’t want their own Antediluvians to know about. Maybe Augustus has a ripcord, in case some of us decide to take him out. Who knows? I assume Augustus has a copy, and the Camarilla must have a copy, but it’s not as if we can check the Library of Congress, right? As far as night-to-night existence in the here and now, they stay out of our affairs, and we stay out of theirs. We own Venice, as is only right and fucking proper, but their Inner Circle gets to hold annual meetings there, on “neutral” ground. The fun question is: What else did Augustus agree to on our behalf? He’s not talking, and who knows if one of the Camarilla’s going to show up at our doorstep one night calling in some ancient marker?

Growth and Expansion

With the Camarilla and the Sabbat ignoring us, we were able to focus on the family. As the world built toward the Industrial Revolution, we shored up our resources and started to expand. They continued to fight their precious Jyhad — as if they even know where the battlefield is — and play their games of prestation and influence. Meanwhile, we were amassing soldiers for the real war, and when they did deign to notice us, they helped us on toward the finish line. Every member of the family is chosen for the Embrace for a reason. While the other Clans “grow” organically because of chance and happenstance, the Giovanni have a goal. In everything we do, we build toward that goal with ruthless efficiency.

So, as we expanded and learned more about the world, we did what comes naturally. We married our way in.

Modern Necromancer

The Giovanni are unique among the Kindred in many ways. I mean, the vast majority of the Clan is related before the Embrace. A significant number of our anziani — elders, for the rubes — know our Clan’s patriarch and have talked to him fairly recently. This is a strength and, let’s be honest here, a little restrictive. Most Camarilla sires get more freedom to choose their childe. They have to pay their dues and kiss the right asses to get permission from the Prince before they do the deed, but once they have permission, it’s up to them to find the person they want to drag into eternity. Then they squander it on silly things like “love” or money. The Sabbat chooses their culty little friends or — maybe more accurately — choose not to choose. Of course, most of the ones chosen at random as cannon fodder are just that. The ones who stick around tend to be the ones who were chosen with a little more thought, but the Sabbat are still not strong on what you might call “long-term thinking.”

In the family, it’s a lot more complicated. For one thing, the pool of possibility is much smaller. It doesn’t matter how talented or useful a random mortal is, if she isn’t one of the family bloodlines, her chances of getting the Embrace are incredibly slim. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again, but it’s kind of like a favor with no strings attached: lots of people talk about it, but you’ve never seen it in real life.

People outside the Clan think we groom our kids up from birth to be brought into the “family business.” That’s true, but just because they’re being taught and tested doesn’t mean most of them make the cut, much less know what they’re being tested for. Most of the family never even gets the Proxy Kiss. What’s the saying? “99% of everything is crap.” Only the cream of the crop gets to come behind the curtain.

Many of the Giovanni know something is going on, but have no idea what. Gossip and rumor spreads through a family like wildfire. I mean, even a normal mostly ignorant Giovanni household is morbid and a little Necromantic.

They revere ancestors, make offerings to spirits and all that, so that does make it a little easier when we draw the curtain back. Things tend to click into place when the hermit great uncle everyone is always going on about with such reverence invites you to visit and he looks younger than your father does. But even if the families don’t know, they suspect. They know something is going on, and that whatever it is makes you rich. Makes you powerful. They know you get to look good, dress well, and that some of the family always has a smug, irritating grin. It’s irritating because they want to be in on the joke, too. They want to earn the right to it, even if they don’t know what it is.

The anziani have created this ultra-competitive environment around the Curse of Caine without ever telling anyone what it is. It’s like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. You just know your cousin has seen the glowing thing, and it pisses you off because you didn’t get to see it too.

Basically, the anziani are like hands-off tiger moms. They’ve worked it out so that the entire family is full of neurotic overachievers. The thing is, there’s no list of requirements. Nobody knows what the secret is, so nobody knows what to actually be good at! So while one Giovanni concentrates on getting perfect grades, another collects every sports trophy she can, and another builds up a high school drug empire on the off chance that the family is into La Cosa Nostra. All of them hoping that they’re impressing the right people with the right choices so they can get the reward, whatever that happens to be.

The thing about Embracing among the Giovanni, it’s actually far more complicated than the Camarilla or Sabbat ways of doing things. See, a group of anziani get together and decide who gets to Embrace whom. For example, Diego Giovanni’s grandchilde (and great-granddaughter) Patrizia has wanted to bestow an Embrace for some time, but it’s not her decision. Diego and other members of the low-Generation anziani will have a heavy stake in deciding who and when Patrizia Embraces. She might suggest that one of her mortal children is worthy of the Embrace, but Diego might instead have her do a Milliner or Pisanob. She can propose all she wants; it’s her childe, after all. But the anziani can ignore her, because when all is said and done, it’s their blood — two times over. It’s all about balance and control. You’re actually less likely to get to Embrace the protégé you want just because you want them. Quite often, the sire and the childe come from opposing factions within the family, because it keeps any one family member from building up too much of a power base and deciding it’s her turn for a Great Betrayal.

Keeping Up Appearances

When the Giovanni absolutely have to deal with the other Clans, for example as an emissary to the Prince and Primogen in a city where Camarilla and family interests overlap, appearances are paramount. To the Camarilla the Giovanni are often seen as, essentially, somber Ventrue. And if a few idiot Kindred have seen The Godfather a few too many times, the family doesn’t bother to correct them. The Mafia has a certain alone di mistero that can be useful when making deals with impressionable neonates. Truthfully, our agents spread many of the rumors regarding the family’s darker practices.

This isn’t to say that our intra-Clan ambassadors are all boring yuppies. There’s value to playing into the stereotypes. Sometimes it’s better to send the guy in the sharkskin suit with the thick Jersey accent, or the somber Italian in the coal black suit with the eyes to match. They create a certain effect. Of course, that Jersey boy’s got an Ivy League MBA, but we don’t have to tell them that. We’re “exotic” to the Camarilla stooges, and you’d be surprised how many of their neonates will try to make stupid little deals with us or even just want to hang out with the Giovanni to piss off their sires and prove to their friends how edgy they are.

On the other hand, everything changes when the family is involved. There are family gatherings, and there are family gatherings. Among the Necromancers, power and prestige go hand-in-hand. Conspicuous consumption and being seen with the right people is just as important at a Giovanni party as it is to the Ventrue and the Toreador; it’s just that the right people are often no longer corporeal. Wraith servants flit through the party, bound to their masters by lavish and ornate jewelry that incorporates pieces of the shade’s mortal remains. These artifacts act as anchor and reliquary, helping to maintain the shade and giving the Giovanni power over it. It is a point of pride for the Necromancers to show off how many wraiths they control at family gatherings, and they often show up laden with as much death bling as they can wear. Necklaces strung with finger bones, rings with molar fittings, and other, more elaborate fare are a common sight among the Clan.

All in the Family

You know how things are. Your cousin may be an annoying prick, but he’s still your cousin, and if someone else messes with him, you’ll tear her face off. That’s why we only pick our own. Blood is blood, and we’ve known for millennia that the only people we can count on when the chips are down are family. Here’s a little secret that those idiots in the Camarilla don’t know: not everybody who makes it into the family is named Giovanni. We’re not stupid, you know. I mean, if we were as incestuous as the rumors say, we’d all have three eyes and an extra hip. Just like every other family dynasty in history, we marry for love, and we marry for strategy. We adopt, sometimes. All over the world, there are families bound to us. I’ll be honest; a lot of them have vowels at the end of their names, if you get my drift, because there are a lot of racist old bastards calling the shots who have been around for centuries. But not all of the families are Italian. It works in our favor to encourage a little diversity in the ranks, because a lot of Camarilla Licks have become incredibly hurtful in their mistrust of Italian Kindred. However, for some reason they never expect the Latino gentleman to have wraith spies on his payroll. Always keep ‘em guessing, that’s my motto.

The Giovanni Family

Like I said, not every member of the Giovanni Clan is a member of the Giovanni family. But let’s be honest: the hierarchy definitely favors the original core bloodline. The most effective Pisanob elder is still going to have to defer to a Giovanni anziani. Hell, if eight Dunsirn elders vote no, and a single-blood anziano votes yes, the answer is yes. I’m not saying it’s fair or right, or that it hasn’t ruffled a ton of feathers among the “extended family.” It’s not, and believe me when I say it has. But it’s how it is, and given the vast bulk of the family’s power rests in Giovanni hands on both sides of the sudario, that’s how it will be for the foreseeable future.

The smaller families ostensibly have free rein over their own operations, in return for funneling resources back to the Old Country. The various families provide different things depending on their capabilities. Generally, it comes down to souls or money. Souls are the preferred currency, but those families who don’t focus so much on the Necromantic side still provide valuable services and fiscal contributions.

The Dunsirn

The first major family the Giovanni coopted was the Dunsirn. In the 1700s, the family was looking for inroads into the rapidly growing markets of the New World. Every avenue they tried, the Dunsirn blocked. A Scottish family of bankers who held controlling interest in a number of shipping ventures creating lines to the English colonies of North America, Augustus was intrigued and impressed by their acumen. But I’m not sure we would have brought them into the fold if we hadn’t discovered that in addition to being bankers with vast amounts of influence throughout Great Britain, the Dunsirn were also cannibals.

It’s easy to say Augustus just thought they’d fit in because they were our sort of pervert, but the truth is, he appreciates people who know how to keep a secret and they’re our sort of perverts. Turns out that several centuries before, one of the Dunsirn picked up a taste for human flesh and was summarily kicked out of the family, like you do. After being disowned, he found himself a wife and made a ton of little bog rats. Eventually, they got tired of living in the bogs, and well, they killed and ate the more squeamish side of the family and moved into their digs.

The Dunsirn are now one of the chief sources of financial income for the family. The mortal side still loves that long pig, but the Kindred show almost no interest in Necromancy as a family. Maybe they just don’t feel a need to talk to someone they last saw as a sandwich. For the last few years, they’ve been forced through a kind of black magic night school, from the youngest neonates all the way up through the elder ranks. Being treated like children by the Powers That Be in Venice would chafe no matter what, but the Dunsirn are a stubborn and proud family, and I expect it’s only a matter of time before that becomes complicated.

The Milliners

If you really hate someone, convince him or her to offend the Milliners. They hold grudges like you wouldn’t believe, and they use those grudges to motivate themselves into making tons of cash. We brought the family in back in the ‘50s, and they’ve been bringing in money ever since.

By all accounts, the Milliners have been incredibly effective. They maintain powerful financial and criminal empires while holding their own against the Camarilla and the Sabbat in America. They adapted when the power in organized crime shifted away from Italian families to the Russians and the Armenians. They work as fixers and activists for hire, creating straw-man Astroturf movements to distract from real problems. They don’t set policy, but they do a great job of executing it in very profitable ways. They invested heavily in privatized prisons that bring in a constant source of income and cheap labor, while also placing our people in management positions to ensure that Giovanni can slip into prison to feed safely and out of prison when our secret is at risk. Their operatives in Homeland Security flag known vampire hunters as “persons of interest” or domestic terrorists. Seriously, they have their hand in everything that has turned America into a perfect hunting ground for our kind.

They even gift-wrapped Boston for the Giovanni to step into control. The Camarilla actually recognizes our control over the city as legitimate. That’s a big fucking deal, because while that sounds condescending as hell — and it is, because they’re pretentious bastards — it also keeps them from overtly screwing with us. Not that they won’t do it in secret, but it takes more effort and resources to do things covertly, and our pact means that they have to help if the Sabbat come calling.

What have they gotten in return? Absolutely fuck all. The bigwigs back in the Old Country demand more and more from the Milliners. More money. More territory. More souls. And they give them less. Less freedom to Embrace. Less control as Giovanni lieutenants arrive to take command of their operations. You’d almost think the Old Family was afraid of their competence, wouldn’t you?

The Pisanob

In the early sixteenth century, the Giovanni found the Aztecs as part of the Cortes expeditions. In Tenochtitlan, they uncovered a massive, formalized necromantic tradition. The Spaniards, of course, were good God-fearing Christians, so they killed, enslaved, and converted the heathens. On the other side of the sudario, European spirits followed the trail of the expedition and did the same thing as their living brethren in the Shadowlands. The war on both sides of the Shroud stirred up a maelstrom, and pretty much fucked up everyone’s night.

The Giovanni did what they could to help the Aztecs as both a professional courtesy and a little opportunism, I guess. They approached them and made a deal to bring them into the fold. They formed a family and took the name pisanob, which is a Mayan term that translates as something like “ghosts of the dead that walk the earth” (yeah yeah, I know the Mayans and the Aztecs aren’t the same, but I bet those old Giovanni didn’t give too much of a fuck). Their leader, Pochtli, is still in charge of that branch of the family today. The Giovanni learned a lot from their Latin American brethren, but you’ll never hear them admit it.

Last I heard, the Pisanob have been dealing with a shitstorm, begging for reinforcements as their turf gets attacked by a bunch of tattered old vamps calling themselves the Harbingers of Skulls, which is a name so pretentious you’d think the Tremere came up with it. I don’t know if they’re Giovanni who’ve gone off their rockers, Samedi with delusions of grandeur, or honest-to-Augustus Premascines, but based on the stories, they’ve got it out for us something fierce.

The Minor Families

There are a number of other families we’ve brought in over the years, but the truth is, they’re small time compared to those three. They do help map where the family has been over the years, though. Like the della Passaglia, in the 1400s, who the Giovanni used to build inroads into Asia and the opium trade. The Ghiberti, picked up in the seventeenth century to facilitate Giovanni interests in Africa. Our hustlers, the Puttanesca from Sicily, acquired in the 1660s due to their talent at the street level. Other families, including Rossellini, Dondolo, St. John, Rothstein, Li Weng, Leuchter, Koenig, Beryn, Hidalgo, and more, have married into the blood over the years, but none of them has been absorbed to the same extent as the others.

Tradition

The Giovanni love our traditions. Almost every event in our existence has a ceremony or a party associated with it. The big ones, of course, are the Proxy Kiss and the Last Night.

The Proxy Kiss

There are nearly as many ways of giving the Proxy Kiss — the ceremonial feeding of Giovanni vitae to create a ghoul from a family member — as there are Giovanni. In many places, the Catholic roots of the family are twisted into a kind of “black mass” where only the most loyal and zealous volunteer to receive the “communion wine” and become ghouls. In some cases, an elaborate ceremony is performed and the vitae itself is hidden, masked behind the initiation to mislead prying eyes. In others, the vitae is simply mixed into the prospective ghoul’s food, the better to addict them and force their compliance. The latter option takes much longer, and isn’t as effective, but it’s most often used for mortals whose abilities or connections make them indispensable, or those who have a habit of rebelling. Ostensibly, the blood will make them pliant before they discover the ruse, and they will be loyal servitors regardless of their original inclination. The Giovanni rarely take no for an answer once they’ve made their selection.

An increasing number of families, particularly in America, have begun to eschew the Kiss altogether. Family honor should be enough to inspire loyalty, without the enforced hold of a Blood Bond.

The Last Night

The actual Embrace itself varies from family group to family group, but there’s one tradition I can almost guarantee you’ll find no matter what part of the world you’re in or what family you’ve come to visit: the Last Night. If there’s one thing I dearly miss about being mortal, it’s the food. Mia mamma was a hell of a cook, let me tell you. Almost every Giovanni has a big celebration sending him off into the “other half.” A feast like you wouldn’t believe. A party to make a bachelor’s party look like a baptism. Food, sex, drugs, and all the sins that are so much better on the other side. If there’s something you’ve always wanted to try, but have never done, request it for your Last Night. The name’s a bit of a misnomer, though. Depending on the family or the recruit, it can last anywhere from a night to a week. One of my uncles actually had a heart attack during his Last Night from overdoing everything, and had to be Embraced in the middle.

Some of the European branches believe that there’s a chance, in the crossing over, that il Diavolo can snatch you up during the Embrace and replace you with a demon. You know how devout the anziani can be. In those families, the final step of the Last Night is purification. They bathe the prospect and baptize him again, followed by confession. Then, when he has unburdened his soul, the process of Embrace begins. The sire-to-be acts as a sort of sin-eater. She drains the blood from her prospect, taking any remaining sin into herself, to burn away in the crucible of the Beast. Then, only when he is purely, utterly hollow, she gives him the blood from her veins.

Family Structure

Generally, the pecking order of a Giovanni household is pretty straightforward. The main philosophy you should keep in mind is “shit rolls downhill.” In most cases, the family’s still pretty patriarchal, at least in theory. In practice, I can name almost as many households ruled by a powerful nonna as I could houses run by nonno.

Titles

• Anziano/Anziana: The catchall term for elders. The anziani vote to steer the family when Augustus doesn’t set down specific direction. An elder may also be a padrone or nonna, but if you don’t know a member of the family and she seems powerful, anziana is the safe way to go.
• Capo/Capa: The boss most Giovanni see. This is the local guy on the street, checking in with your household, making sure things are running smoothly and giving marching orders.
• Don/Donna: Traditionally, this is actually a noble title, but you’ll find it used for leaders and people with loads of money, too. So yeah, you’ll sometimes hear us referring to important members of the family this way. But this honorific doesn’t work the way most Americans think it does, with their shitty Hollywood gangsters. You wouldn’t call someone “Don Giovanni,” unless his given name was Giovanni. Antonia Giovanni would be Donna Antonia. It’s mostly gone out of fashion among the younger members of the family, who tend to use it satirically for pretentious douchebags.
• Nonno/Nonna: Grandparents. The eldest members of the family generally carry the most power in a specific household, even if they aren’t technically anziani. If any visiting anziani are about, of course, they get their way, but even then, in most cases, it’s considered polite to appear to defer to the nonni.
• Padrone/Padrona: Every region has a padrone, coordinating the various capi and households, and taking tribute from the households to pass up the chain.
• Maestro/Maestra: Each continent has a master, who reports back to Venice. He controls the padroni, and takes the credit or blame for local failures.

Secrets

If anyone tells you families don’t keep secrets from each other, they must be an orphan, or their family’s been dead for centuries. The Giovanni are secretive as only a secret Necromantic cabal that hid under the Vatican’s nose for centuries can be. Once you get into the habit of keeping secrets from your friends, it’s not much of a stretch to start conspiring against the cousins and siblings you’re supposed to be honest with. It can begin without you even realizing it’s happening.

So let’s talk about Ambrogino. Imagine the sheep that is black enough for the black sheep to avoid. When the family took over from Cappadocius, Augustus trusted Ambrogino to point out the other points of view. He was truly the Devil’s advocate. He had the job of poking holes in Augustus’ plans and that spread, over time, to pointing out the flaws in everybody’s plans. As you might imagine, that didn’t make Ambrogino the most popular cousin at family gatherings.

Ambrogino doesn’t care. He’s focused his existence on hunting down fragments of occult significance, and expanding on the family’s knowledge of Necromancy. He’s done it, too. He found the Anexhexaton, a folio that describes Cappadocius’ goal of Apotheosis, among other things. He’s been scouring the Shadowlands for the Sargon Fragment, part of a missive written by Cappadocius in his mortal years, said to contain “The Anointing,” a ritual that would complete Cappadocius’ goal of replacing God.

Anyone who makes that many people in the family uncomfortable and doesn’t give a shit about it? He can’t be all bad. And you have to admire his dedication.

I’ve heard some folks in the family whisper about a cult who venerate Abel’s murder. They aren’t Caine-worshippers. They believe in the power of the act itself. Killing as creation. Caine created an entire world with a jawbone, and if the right people are pulling the strings, maybe the Giovanni can do more than simply take their place as the rulers of the Endless Night. I’ve heard they even have the jawbone.

If the rumors are true, they believe Augustus is not the right person. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the Great Betrayal happened again? Who would be the best person to take over as head of the family? The logical choice might be Ambrogino, don’t you think? He’s spent so much time on the other side of the sudario looking for the Anexhexaton that he certainly has the chops.

Mortuari

Most Giovanni are recruited from the existing stock of ghouls, whether from the main bloodline or from one of the various ghoul families. In fact, some of the Rossellini have managed to use ghouls and Necromancy to make revenant families — something the Tzimisce say only they can do. I don’t know how they did it, and the results are strange even by our family’s standards, but they’re out there.

Anyhow, I got off topic. Most of us come from ghouls, but in some unfortunate cases, some bright young thing will die early, her light snuffed before she could be chosen for the Proxy Kiss or given the Last Night. Most of the time that’s it. It’s a shame, but you know the saying about omelets, right? They get written off, and another prospect takes their place. But sometimes, that bright young thing is really bright. She’s just too smart to let go, or he’s been more effective than five of his peers have. Now, this is friend-of-a-friend rumor, so it might be completely bullshit, but I’ve heard that if they’re that useful, there might be something that can be done. If the right anziano pulls the right strings, and calls in the right favors, maybe there’s a way.

You’ve heard stories of what the “old Clan” folks looked like, right? Fucking Crypt Keepers. I’ve dealt with a cousin back in the old country, and he wasn’t that old, but I’m telling you, he looked like a damned mummy. He was more than a little touched in the head, if you know what I mean. To hear him tell it, he was dead for a week before they brought his withered ass back. I don’t know if he was just nuts or what, and if they did do that, I have no idea how.

Valentinism

Sometime between the World Wars, there was this ghoul named Valentina della Passaglia who died protecting her mistress. Bring her up some time if you want to see how fast your cousins can fall over each other calling her a traitor. How fast and how loud, how creative they get in bragging about what they’d do to her. It’s a good test of who’s the biggest kiss-ass in the room.

See, Valentina came back. She returned as a spirit and warned us that the Endless Night wasn’t going to shake down the way we want it to. She insisted that destroying the sudario would leave us powerless; we would be at the mercy of the ghosts we’ve been dominating for centuries.

As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well with the family. But I know it got to some members of the family. It’s under their skin and they can’t help but wonder if she’s right. I mean, they aren’t going to jump up and outright defy the anziani, but what did I just say about secrets and conspiracies within the family?

Nobody’s seen Valentina’s ghost in decades. I don’t know if she’s been dealt with or moved on, or maybe she just knows better than to contact us, given the reaction she got last time.