Something dead approaches. It comes from way out, where The End eats the road. It is a brother to owls and a companion to scarecrows. No escape. You’ll try to kill it, but it will not die. You’ll try to outrun it, but it will lope after on four feet. You’ll try to escape, but it goes where other monsters fear to tread. You’ll lock yourself in a tower or a vault, but it will come on nighted wings or as ravenous smoke. You’ll plead to its human face, but it will only grin and say, “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” You’ll die wondering whom the monster quoted. The Gangrel are the ultimate survivors. Close to the Beast and close to the bone, they’re primal. No. Feral! They’re tough, shrugging off what should be terrible wounds as the weapons harmlessly thunk in their dead flesh. They’re out there, and you can’t do a damn thing about them. More than any other clan, they are a reminder that the greatest lie the Devil ever told was, “Congratulations, you escaped the food chain!” Where do they come from? Fuck you! That’s where. Ask the sun where it comes from. Ask the moon. Ask Ekhidna, Baba Yaga, and Enkidu. Their history is the space between sharp teeth and your throat. They are the ripping, barking now now now! Still want the stories? Best get rambling. Hit the freeways, highways, rails, trails, and cornfields lovely, dark, and deep. Read the runic rhymes on ancient stone. Riddles written on the walls of moaning alleys. Fragments of epics scratched into condom machines in gas station bathrooms. Seek out the oral traditions, echoed by the bleating herd. Ask the meth-head trucker about that black dog that harshed his buzz. Ask about the Unholy and her crows. The Gangrel make more bogeymen amongst their Kindred, per capita, and that’s a fact. They are the voice in the bog. They are the thirsty earth. They are the reason men discovered fire. They are all mouths on the devouring road. Let the other clans wrestle and strain with esoteric riddles of what it is to be a monster. The Gangrel offer something more pure. Power without guilt. Lust without doubt. The other clans need. Always needing. They need havens, an audience, solitude, mortal institutions, or secrets. The Gangrel take what they want. All that they need is locked away in the endless potential of their horrific clay. ---- Some have a perception of the Gangrel as a clan of wild men and women, of monsters clothed in animals skins who howl at the sky with blood-drenched maws. There's some truth to the stereotype but the clan is far more numbered and varied than a simple, comfortable image in one's mind could ever be. The Gangrel are survivalists. They excel at adapting to their surroundings and enduring whatever comes. The clan has a strong tradition of self-reliance but woe to the vampire, mortal, or Other who incurs their wrath //en masse//. Paradi City is an urban jungle but Survival of the Fittest is no less prevalent there than in the middle of the rainforest. The Gangrel stalk where they will, taking what they want, and vanish back into the air as a cloud of mist.