The dead scientist who experiments on humans, werewolves, and fairies in a sterile white laboratory. The occult archaeologist who rifles through the tombs of the terrifying beasts of old. The chillingly plausible preacher who leads his disciples into self-mutilation and surgical alteration. The robed cultists whose rituals depend on the sacrifice of angels. These are the Ordo Dracul. They are the Order of the Dragon, the children of Dracula himself.

They adopt mystical names, play at arcane ceremonies, forge underground fighting rings, start cults, explore places they should not go. The Ordo Dracul knows more about the hidden world than perhaps any other group of vampires. If they do not always share the things they’ve learned with each other, they still have a source of knowledge and experience that ensures the other covenants keep them around.

Like the Lancea et Sanctum, the self-styled Dragons seek knowledge through seeking out artifacts and text. But while the Sanctified seem to collect it to keep it or destroy it, the Dragons, instructed by their cold leaders, whom they call the Kogaions, collect it to learn about it and make use of it, no matter how dangerous it might be. It has to have a purpose. Nothing the Ordo Dracul learns is without a use. Everything works towards tightly defined goals: the betterment of the vampire condition, the amassing of an individual’s supernatural power, and the defeat of God.

Like the Sanctified, the vampires of the Ordo Dracul teach their neonates that God ordained that they be vampires; but in their eyes, this makes God an enemy. They spit in the face of God’s injustice. God is senile, they say. God is mad. God must be torn down from his throne. They would fight angels themselves to weaken God’s hold on the Damned. The goal is life, but not simple human life: the life of an immortal, unleashed by the curse of mortality and the curse of undeath alike. The spiritual disciplines taught by the Order, the Coils, don’t quite get a vampire there, but it’s a start. And a start on the road to transcendence is enough.