Sabbat

Structure

The Sabbat is very strictly organized, not unlike an army. The higher positions are reversed mostly for those of Clan Lasombra and Clan Tzimisce.
Sabbat often begin at the bottom, as so called 'shovelheads' who are created through mass Embraces. They're mostly used as fodder for raids but can sometimes rise through the ranks if they manage to survive.
Kindred in the Sabbat are organized in small blood bound packs, led by a Ductus and a Priest, with a Bishop overseeing multiple packs.
Above Bishops, you have Archbishops who oversee multiple Bishops. Their position is one akin to to a Prince in the Camarilla.
Archbishops are managed by a Cardinal, who has control over entire countries or continents. Even higher are the Regent, who is elected by a council called the Consistory, and rules the entire sect.

Public Agenda

The Sabbat ideal are in direct opposition with the Camarilla. They believe the first vampires, Caine and the Antediluvians, will come come back and strive to be the army that will destroy them when they arrive during Gehenna.
They regularly break the Masquerade, wish to tear down the Camarilla and rule humans openly.

History

The Sabbat was founded in 1493, largely in reaction to the Convention of Thorns which founded the Camarilla. They are the remnants of the Anarch Revolt of the time.
Leaders of the endeavour were the Tzimisce and the Lasombra, two Clans that had ostensibly destroyed their Antediluvian founders and had accepted that there was no turning back for them. The Tzimisce would not cede their lands to the hated Tremere and submit the philosophy of Metamorphosism for the limited ideals of Humanity, while the Lasombra had invested too much in the Revolt to surrender their success to decrepit Elders of other Clans (in the words of the Clan representative at the Convention of Thorns: "I came to negotiate, not to surrender."). Delegations of both Clans met at the island of Majorca and began their own negotiations, aided by several malcontents among the Anarchs, who refused to surrender to the Elders or did not share the view of their main Clan. Others joined to escape the practice of the Blood Bond, among them venerable Elders like the Malkavian Vasantasena, the Tremere Goratrix, and the Ventrue Dominique Touraine. These groups existed as small packs in the wilderness that harassed the holdings of the Elders and those who had submitted to the Camarilla, called "Sabbats" by the superstitious mortal population for their rapacious behavior and proud display of their inhumanity. Slowly, these disparate packs were brought to heel by the spreading of the Vaulderie, uniting the remnants of the Anarch Revolt as the Sabbat, a sect devoted to warfare against the Antediluvians and the tyranny of their catspaws.
Bitter war raged between the vampires of the newly formed Sabbat and the not-much-older Camarilla. The Inquisition continued to claim victims while all of Europe's Cainites drew lines in the sand to mark their allegiance. As the Camarilla consolidated their hold on the major European cities, the Sabbat was thrusted into the defensive. Within the Black Monastery in Switzerland, the sect formalized the modern Paths of Enlightenment in 1666 out of the old Roads that were no longer applicable. Despite open protests against it as a tool of the Antediluvians, the Sabbat Elders realized the worth of secrecy in the modern night and the real danger of falling into Wassail in the face of the demands of the Beast, so they sought to accommodate to these circumstances without pretending to be human.
Besides Spain, which was controlled by a majority of Lasombra, and territories in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, which were claimed by the Tzimisce, most packs traveled across the sea to the New World. For a while, the sect flourished in the evolving colonies. Amid a revolutionary and radical mortal backdrop, the Sabbat's presence was easy to hide among the insurrectionists, fighting against the Cainite masters of the Aztecs, the dreaded monster Huitzilopochtli and his peers, as well as against the native Lupines.
Source

Type

Religious, Sect

Alternative Names

The Sword of Caine