Tutelage

World of Darkness > Vampire: The Requiem > Tutelage

Overview

Tutelage is a custom which derives from the Second Tradition. The custom decrees that the sins of the childe are the sire's to repay. What this means, in practice, varies from domain to domain but, at the very least, it requires a sire to properly prepare her childer for their role in kindred society.

The first nights

The first nights of a vampire's requiem are heady with power, fraught with danger and, often, a great deal of fear. The first hunger, the first hunt, the first feeding from a mortal's veins, the first stirrings of her beast are often confusing, even horrifying events. Without a sire to guide her a new vampire is prone to make mistakes, endanger the masquerade and even risk her sanity. It is a sire's duty to teach her childe the lessons she must learn in order to avoid revealing her true nature to mortals, to avoid leaving too many bodies behind, and to learn to control her hunger and her beast.

A sire's burden

Some vampires care little about their progeny, abandoning them to their own devices after their embrace. However most Princes ensure that new vampires behave by ensuring the mistakes and missteps of neonates are the responsibility of the sire, who must pay for or be punished for their childer's misdeeds. A sire keeps their childer in line through a combination of fear and guile. Until she chooses to release a neonate, a sire has significant controls, at least under kindred law, over her childer. She may punish them as well as teach them and, considering the nature of kindred, punishments can be severe.

Release

When a sire feels her childe has reached a level of control and knowledge sufficient to keep her reasonably safe and secure within kindred society as a whole, she releases the childe. From this point on, a neonate's actions are her own to answer for. She goes from serving her sire, to serving her own conscience (such as it is).

Some childer chafe under the control of their sire. Some sires keep their childer bound for unreasonable lengths of time, making them little more than servants or even slaves. Some childer have even been known to run away, travel to another domain to be free of their sire's influence. Few sires suffer such insults with good grace and, should they ever cross paths with their errant childer again, will likely take some form of revenge.

If a childe feels she has been unduly kept subservient by her sire, and does not wish to run away, she may petition the Prince for release. This action should not be indulged lightly. A sire has broad rights as well as burdens when it comes to progeny. A Prince will not lightly set aside those rights. But if a childe can prove she has been unreasonably restrained or abused, the Prince may overrule the wishes of the sire and grant the childe release. This, almost inevitably, leads to conflict and ill will between Prince and sire, not to mention between sire and childe. Few Princes will undertake such action without very good reasons which are obvious to all involved, including her court and subjects at large. In extreme cases of abuse, she may even forbid the sire from creating more childer. A Prince who denies such a petition almost certainly condemns the childe to severe punishment at the hands of her sire, for such a petition is a slap in the face and a very public insult to the childe's sire.

You can find out more about Vampire the Requiem here, and buy the Core Rulebook, which goes into much more detail about the traditions, here.