Baali (World of Darkness)
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The Baali are a fictional bloodline of vampires, from White Wolf Game Studio's Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Dark Ages books and role-playing games.
The Baali are very strongly rejected by both Camarilla and the Sabbat, because of their infernalist nature — they are called "monsters" and "demons" even by the other vampires. Much of the Baali symbology is Mesopotamian and Phoenician in origin. The very name Baali is originated from the Phoenician word Ba'al, meaning "great lord".
The Baali are infernalists who deal with the names of ancient beings that existed before the "Let there be Light" of Genesis. Baali legend says there was a group of people called the "First Tribe" who discovered the existence of those old ones and became their acolytes. They were degenerates, who murdered their parents and raped their children. One day, an unknown vampire (speculated to be Saulot, the Antediluvian father of the Salubri) encountered the First Tribe and killed every one of them, and then spread drops of his blood over their corpses. Only three (Nergal, Moloch and the Unknown Third) crawled out of the pit of bodies, and thus the vampiric bloodline Baali was created.
In the Dark Ages setting, many Baali imitate this when they Embrace mortals — that is, to create a new vampire, a Baali sire-to-be will drain all the blood out of a target mortal and throw his body into a pit of corpses, where the vampire has hid some of his own vampiric blood in a human heart. Only the strong-willed who find the heart and drink the blood within it can survive and become Baali. This practice is very different from that of other vampires — the Baali childer are not turned into vampires by their sires; they become vampires on their own. In the modern era, this practice has been largely abandoned, due to the difficulty of procuring the number of corpses required without attracting the attention of law enforcement.
Another origin story of the bloodline speaks of a single progenitor, called Shaitan, who was in life a slave-boy with a beautiful singing voice who attracted the attention of an unknown vampire. This version of their creation does not explain the origin of the corpse-pit Embracing tradition.
In the modern era, the Baali are in decline, having been hunted to near extinction. Thematically speaking, this is because a bloodline of Satanist vampires is more appropriate in a game set during the Middle Ages and focusing primarily on religion, and less appropriate in a game set during the modern era and focusing on moral ambiguity.
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Vampire: The Dark Ages and Vampire: The Masquerade clans and bloodlines |
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Assamite · Baali · Brujah · Caitiff · Cappadocian (The Dark Ages) · Followers of Set · Gangrel · Giovanni (The Masquerade) · Kiasyd · Lasombra · Malkavian · Nosferatu · Ravnos · Salubri · Toreador · Tremere · Tzimisce · Ventrue |
