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The Gangrel are a clan of vampires, often associated with the Camarilla, from White Wolf Game Studio's The Masquerade, The Dark Ages, and The Requiem books and role-playing games.
Vampire: The Masquerade
The Gangrel are associated with Gypsies, transmogrification, and vagrants. As a symbol, Gangrel often use a wolf's head. The Gangrel clan's magical Discipline, Protean, allows them to assume partial or complete animal forms. Their mastery of Protean is so much greater than any other Clan that Gangrel can assume virtually any animal form, providing it is a scavenger or a predator. Other vampires with the Protean Discipline are limited to the forms of Wolf and Bat; no one (not even the Gangrel) know why this is so.
The Gangrel, despite living in the wilderness, are attacked much less often by werewolves than other vampires; some speculate that the werewolves and Gangrel have a shared origin.
In the Dark Ages, the Gangrel were the vampires most commonly associated with the Road of the Beast, which dictates a life based on instinct, similar to that of an animal (living in the immediate present, having no morality, killing whenever necessary but only then).
In the modern setting, Gangrel are commonly allies of the Brujah and enemies of the Ravnos. The Gangrel severed its ties with the Camarilla in 1998, when the Camarilla's ruling body refused to lend aid to the clan's Justicar to fight a creature he identified as an Antediluvian (the god-like progenitors of the vampire clans).
Vampire: The Dark Ages
Unlike their brethren, Gangrel spurn the trappings of civilization, preferring to roam the deep wilds of solitude. The Grangrel is a clan only in the loosest sense; its members tend to be rugged individualists, indifferent to the protocols of either mortal or vampire. They are the bestial ones, the closest to losing themselves to the wild.
Appearance: Many Gangrel Appear as, and dress in the manner of barbarian people. Furs, plaids, deerskin clothing and similar garb predominate. Some, emulating the Highland Picts, go about in woad and little else.
Of course, those unfortunate Gangrel who have fallen prey to the Beast one too many times have a look all their own. Tufted ears, horns, coats of fur, razor talons, gleaming catlike eyes, even feathers and scales adorn (deform?) these bêtes noires, and feral musk wafts from them.
Vampire: The Requiem
Gangrel
The Gangrel clan from Vampire: The Masquerade was recreated for The Requiem as one of the five major clans. In Vampire: The Requiem, their close connection with the Beast has left some members becoming animalistic and barbaric, to the point where some are unable to interact with mortals other than to feed. These members have left members of the other clans as viewing them as dim-witted and coarse.
Gangrel favor the Disciplines of Animalism (control over the beasts of nature and the Beast within a vampire's soul), Resilience (supernatural toughness), and Protean (shapeshifting). Gangrels have a unique weakness caused by their close connection to the Beast; their animalistic instincts are drawn close to their surface, clouding more reasoned thought. This is represented mechanically by preventing Gangrel characters from re-rolling tens on rolls requiring Mental attributes, and subtracting ones from the total successes rolled.
While the stereotypical Gangrel is savage and socially unsophisticated, there have been many upstanding and respectable Gangrels in Vampire society who resist the touch of the beast through self-discipline. This is represented mechanically by placing several dots in the Gangrel character's Resolve and Compose stats to compensate for their inability to re-roll 10s.
As indicated by their preferred disciplines, Gangrels tend to be more physically oriented than other clans.
Unlike the Gangrel of the Masquerade, Requiem's Gangrel have no ties at all to Werewolves, and are not "in touch with nature" any deeper than being in touch with their inner Beast.
One of the Gangrel's bloodlines is the Bruja, a collection of bikers and thugs loosely based on Vampire: The Masquerade
The symbol of the Gangrel is a stylized brush-stroke rendition of a predator's eye, seemingly made up of various animal parts.
Other appearances
Gangrel was also the ring-name of a wrestler who performed for the World Wrestling Federation in the late 1990s. His gimmick was that of a Gothic Vampire, and his ring entrance included him spitting "blood", which he drank from a golden chalice. After defeating his opponents, Gangrel would often liberally douse them with the same liquid, in a ritual dubbed the "Blood Bath".
The character was seemingly directly based on the role playing game clan, as the Gangrel name was used under license, and with full permission of White Wolf Game Studio.
The Gangrel character was played by wrestler David Heath. After his release from the World Wrestling Federation, Heath was unable to use the Gangrel name, and reverted back to the wrestling name of Vampire Warrior, which he had used prior to his WWF tenure.
References
- The Masquerade (Revised Edition) by White Wolf Game Studio|White Wolf (1998)
Fictional shapeshifters | Vampire: The Dark Ages | Vampire: The Masquerade
"Gangrel (World of Darkness)"