Tiamat's Offspring

(Level-Three Crúac Ritual)

Vampire the Requiem - Covenant - Circle of the Crone

This ritual creates a homunculus (as described on p. 225 of Vampire: The Requiem) and is particularly prized by Mother and Father Acolytes. This is a lengthy and elaborate rite, not to mention painful.
Females begin by obtaining human semen and then introducing about five pounds of sliced up animal parts into their body cavity. They must have enough organs and limbs for a nearly complete animal — a brain, a heart, legs (if it must move), eyes (if it must see) and so on. When the vampire invokes Ti’amat, mother of monsters (or, in regional variations, Lilith or Kali or other figures of dire fertility), the limbs fuse into a homunculus and it is born, mewling and repulsive. In this case, the results of the rite shed the blood needed to power it. The Mother bleeds in birth, even if the homunculus fails to thrive.
The masculine version references Zeus, who gave birth to Athena directly from his head and to Dionysus after that god was sewn into Zeus’s thigh. Males don’t need to harvest seed as the succubi of legend, but they do need to cut themselves open to arrange the body pieces among their organs. The Vitae they spend to heal themselves with the nascent servitors inside also powers the ritual. As to how the homunculus emerges, it varies but is universally painful and terrible to behold.
Regardless of the gender of the creator, the pieces must remain inside his or her body for at least 13 hours before being born at the next midnight. While the pieces are in place, the Acolyte appears pregnant and suffers a –1 penalty to all Physical dice pools.

Related Discipline

Crúac

Level

3

---

Better Homunculi

With the Circle’s emphasis on creation, Acolytes are very interested in making homunculi. Other than the Embrace, these warped and shriveled creatures are the closest Acolytes can come to real progeny. Due to their Research, they are able to improve homunculi while they are still in what passes for the womb, though (as is typical for the Circle) it’s a route fraught with agony.
It is possible to create smarter, stronger or otherwise better homunculi. Doing so is a twostep process. The first step is to design a ritual that imbues the creature with the desired properties. The character must succeed at an Intelligence + Occult roll to figure out how to do this, but the player mustactually describe what the ritual is. The Storyteller may give bonuses for really evocative descriptions, or even just allow the roll to automatically succeed. Scant or inappropriate descriptions, on the other hand, may impose penalties.
Secondly, the player must spend the experience points required to buy the desired Skill or Attribute, just as if the homunculus were a character. Once a player has improved a homunculus, any subsequent homunculi created by that same character are born with the same advanced traits. A homunculus may only be given Physical Merits with the Storyteller’s permission. A homunculus created with Crúac cannot be larger than Size 2.

---