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See also: Clanbook: Malkavian Revised

Clanbook: Malkavian is a sourcebook for Vampire: The Masquerade, detailing much of the information for clan Malkavian. The book is subtitled, Method in the Madness.

Summary[]

From the White Wolf catalog:

What is this thing called madness? They say those touched by insanity have also been touched by divinity. No they don't. Madness is often only a step away from enlightenment and, for some, is a step beyond. No it isn't. Now learn how the Malkavians twist the world for their benefit. You won't learn a thing. Discover the truth of their madness. It's too late for that.
Clanbook: Malkavian includes:
  • The history of the clan and the true depth of its member's insanities;
  • 10 sample characters suitable for players and Storytellers; and
  • ιφ ψου χαν ρεαδ τηισ, ψου αρε οφφιχιαλλψ τραγιχαλλψ ηιπ.

Contents[]

Introduction[]

Chapter Won: The Malkavians[]

The story of Adam and his sire, Madame LaVeel. Or was it a story of Madame LaVeel and their childe, Adam. Adam breaks on through to the other side. He Malkavian She Crazy Jane.

Chapter To: Legends of the Malkavians[]

The Core Beliefs and History of the Clan, such as it is.

Chapter 3: Traditions of the Malkavians[]

The Seven (or Eight) Traditions of the Malkavians. Secrets of the Malkavian - New Knowledge and Elder Powers. Malkavian Hierarchy and Attitudes toward the World. Storyteller advice.

  • Knowledges: Malkavian Time
  • Disciplines
    • Babble - Level 6 Auspex
    • Melange - Level 7 Auspex
    • Malkavian Madness Network - Level 8 Auspex
    • Rerpession of the Obvious - Level 7 Dominate
    • Scrawl - Level 6 Obfuscate
    • Visit Faerieland - Level 7 Obfuscate

Chapter Fore!!!: Malkavian Templates[]

  • The Conspiracy Theorist
  • The Crazed Monster
  • Detached Scientist
  • The Freak
  • The Mad Prophet
  • Mesmeric Manipulator
  • The Moody Loner
  • Raving Lunatic
  • Reality Buster
  • The Waking Dreamer

Liver 1: Who's Who Among Malkavians[]

Appendix 2 The Secret to the Riddle of the Universe[]

Background Information[]

  • The back cover contains the Greek text "ιφ ψου χαν ρεαδ τηισ, ψου αρε οφφιχιαλλψ τραγιχαλλψ ηιπ." This says "if you can read this, you are officially tragically hip." This is not a translation (the words don't exist in Greek) nor a transliteration (the letters do not all match the sounds from the original words). The effect was likely achieved by simply converting the English text to a Greek alphabet font. So while ψ (psi) makes a "ps" sound, it was likely physically mapped to the keyboard's "Y" key, so any Y in the original text became a psi.
  • In an example of breaking the fourth wall, the title page reads "If You Buy This, You'll Believe Anything."
  • The table of contents (and the chapters themselves) plays fast and loose with homonyms and synonyms. Contents becomes Contense, the first Appendix is called a Liver, and so on.
  • All of Chapter Won uses Roman numerals for the page numbers.
  • The final page of Chapter Won is Page XX, which ironically enough is located not on page 20 (XX in Roman numerals) but on page 11 (XI in Roman numerals).
  • Page 17 is black/white inverted. This is the only known example outside of the Shadow Players Guide and Clanbook: Lasombra.
  • Page 26 describes a Malkavian known as the "Word-Eater." The accompanying illustration presumably shows the Word-Eater, as the book's text is disrupted around his raised hand and continue to disintegrate off the page, leaving the cryptic "and other butchers' aprons" finishing the text at the top of the next page.
  • Page 34 is reflected left/right. Text at the bottom suggests that "a mirror might help you read this. maybe."
  • Page 66-67 is about drawing your own Malkavian and sending it to Andrew Greenberg through the White Wolf Game Studio's address.
  • A fan would send in a découpage of the Malkavian character sheet to White Wolf Magazine.
  • Word From the White Wolf Game Studio mentions that The Masquerade is coming closer and closer to release.
  • The ad at the back of the book is for White Wolf Magazine "Join the Pack!".
  • Special, Special Thanks (is made) to the Oasis, Claudie, Angie, Tracie and Julie for making Richard’s wake...er, bachelor party...so memorable.

Memorable Quotes[]

The important thing

is to pull yourself up by your own hair

to turn yourself inside out

and see the who world with fresh eyes.

- Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade

Mad, adj.; Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to the standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conforments from study of themselves.

- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.

- Shakespeare, Hamlet

I have had a most rare vision...past the wit of any man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream.

- Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night's Dream

We know for certain, for instance, that for some reason, for some time in the beginning, there were hot lumps... Animals without backbones hid form each other, or fell down.

- The Firesign Theatre, I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus

True history lies in a subterranean tradition that must be brought to light.

- David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History

In times of breakdown and incipient discontinuity, vision, and transcendence - what amount to the gnosis of ascent - become vehicles for fundamental change.

- Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses

To stay young,

To save the world,

Break the mirror.

- Nanao Sakaki, - "Break the Mirror"

Perhaps from the very moment of their monstrous births, it was decreed, by some sadistic jack-in-office of the universe, that they should befoul and ruin a fellow creature they had never heard of ... in a city they had never seen.

-Dylan Thomas, The Doctor and the Devils

Everything you know is wrong!

- The Firesign Theatre, Everything You Know Is Wrong

...his acts seemed thoroughly insane. He explained that he had deliberately tried to scare me out of my wits because I was driving him up the walls with my expected behavior ... (He said) "either we take everything for sure and read, or we don't. If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and the world. If we follow the second ... we create a fog machine around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which nobody knows where the rabbit will pop put, not even ourselves.

- Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan

A change of worldview can change the world viewed.

- Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: Changing Constructs of Mind and Reality

Sometimes in life, situations develop that only the half-crazy can get out of.

- LaRochefoucauld, Maxims

This life's five windows of the soul

Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole

And leads you to believe a lie

When you see with, not thro' the eye.

-William Blake, "The Everlasting Gospel"

Paranoia and blind faith are psychic handmaidens.

-Bill Griffith, Zippy the Pinhead, 12/5/92

There's something seething in the air we're breathing.

- Natalie Merchant, "Tolerance"

The women all control their men,

With razors and with wrists

And the princess squeezes grape juice

On a torrid, bloody lass.

- Tom Waits, "In the Colosseum"

People will remember this show when they're fifty years old and you know you're doing that to them while you're performing. You can see that you haven't changed anyone's life, but you've put a crease in their brain they'll never be able to unfold.

- Jim Rose, Jim Rose's Traveling Circus Side Show

I cannot count on being FULLY understood because things are dealt with which cannot be dealt with in human language... but one thing I am certain of. I have come infinitely closer to the truth than human beings who have not received divine revelation.

- Daniel Paul Schreber, "Memoirs of My Nervous illness, 1903"

Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.

- Eugene O'Neill, "A Long Day's Journey Into Night"

Down, Emperor, down. Back to your grave. You know you're not allowed out after your death.

- Grytpype-Thynne, The Goon Show: "Battle of Spion Kof"

A mad animal

Man's a mad animal

I'm a million years old, and in my time

I've helped commit a million murders

The earth is spread

The earth is spread thick

with squashed human guts

We few survivors

We few survivors

walk over a quaking bog of corpses

- Peter Weiss, "Marat/Sade"

...there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth. I dare not tell it in words, even in these songs.

- Walt Whitman, "Earth, My Likeness"

Every emotion is a motion.

- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus: The Eye in the Pyramid

The Truth can be made up if you know how.

- Lily Tomlin, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.

When self-deceit is destroyed and a man begins to see the difference between the mechanical and the conscious in himself, there begins a struggle for the realization of consciousness in life and for the subordination of the mechanical to the conscious.

- P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous

I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance ... there arose confusedly and paradoxically, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense - of extreme despair.

- Edgar Allen Poe, "The Man in the Crowd"

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humble in acknowledging his ignorance, yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Characters[]

  • Others Mentioned

Terminology[]

Arcadia, Faerie, Lunatic Fringe (Group/Alliance of Malkavian and Ragabash Garou), Malkavian Madness Network,

Gallery[]

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