Giovanni

The Giovanni are the usurpers of Clan Cappadocian and one of the youngest clans. The Giovanni has historically been both a clan and a family, and more recently a bloodline, due to the formation of Clan Hecata. They Embrace almost exclusively within their family, and are heavily focused on the goals of money and necromantic power.

The Giovanni started as merchants under the name Ioveanus (later anglicized as Jovians) in the Roman Empire. During this time, the family first attempted to call back the dead in what they called Nigrimancy, as business with the dead was not yet stigmatized and ancestor worship was quite common among the Roman population. When Rome fell, the Jovians maintained the independence of their home in Venice and furthered their own researches of what would eventually develop into newer paths of Necromancy, primarily the Sepulchre Path.

 
By the dawn of the 13th century, the Jovian family name had again shifted linguistically, this time to "Giovani", spelled with one N. The family name would come to adopt the more familiar "Giovanni" spelling around or before the 15th century.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Giovanni were riding high. They had expanded the clan into other families (notably the Milliners, della Passaglia, Pisanob, and Ghiberti), seemingly wiped out the last of the Cappadocians and their Lamia protectors, and prepared to rend the Shroud and bring the dead to the living.

By the end of the century, things had gone pear shaped. Mysterious vampires, the Harbingers of Skulls, claimed vengeance on the clan for reasons unknown, the Sixth Great Maelstrom shredded wraith society, and the apocalyptic events of the Week of Nightmares destroyed their spiritual assets.

As the Final Nights ran out, the Giovanni began to wonder if maybe they had made a mistake. Maybe Augustus Giovanni had underestimated the Antediluvians; maybe the dead would become more potent if the Shroud were pulled down. Maybe Caine was real and in the end all of these petty plays and power moves had been nothing but a diversion until Gehenna.

By the late 2010s, Augustus Giovanni was known by some to no longer be in the picture. It is not clear what has happened to him; he may have met his Final Death, been diablerized, or simply gone into hiding. Still, a large host of Wraiths and Spectres once under his control have now been released, exacting revenge on the Giovanni.

In the wake of this, the Giovanni, Harbingers of Skulls, Lamiae, Samedi, Nagaraja, and Cappadocian remnants have merged into a single clan organization called the Hecata. The Second Inquisition took out a huge part of their elders and it is implied the Harbingers got most of the others involved in the Cappadocian genocide.

Curiously, and although it is not widely known, the Giovanni and Hecata are immune to the Beckoning.

In many ways, the Giovanni are a Ghoul family with less visibly disgusting parts. This does not mean the Giovanni are not as warped as the Bratovitch clan; the Giovanni are repulsive and degenerate in a more subtle manner. It is said that younger generations of the Giovanni were found to be very attractive. Some even say they put on the irresistible look of a succubi pre-change. Also, some are known to be shape-shifters.

Effective Giovanni are sadistic Giovanni. Controlling wraiths means acquiring fine control over a variety of psychological levers (understanding Passions and Fetters) and then ruthlessly manipulating these tools to make a spirit do what you want. The Giovanni have been cruel, manipulative, and vicious since before the diablerie of Cappadocius, and it bleeds out into everything else they do. The outer shell of the Giovanni clan, the public face is less visibly cruel and horrid, but only because these vampires are explicitly tasked to deal with the outside world.

The most notorious example of this bleed off is the Giovanni Proxy Kiss. Giovanni make an art out of ghouling, since ghouling is a rite of passage for the Giovanni – ghouling means that the Giovanni is now part of the people who make the family work. Not necessarily a mover and shaker, but something akin to a made man: the Masquerade is pulled back and the truth about vampires is revealed. Giovanni tend to make Proxy Kisses aesthetic efforts, and take a point in pride in producing especially memorable or mind-destroying ones – blood received via fellatio, blasphemous masses and the like are all popular choices. In a similar vein, to be made into one of the undead is a great deal, celebrated in a semi-public event within the family to allow the childe-to-be the last pleasures of the mortal world. The Bacio della Morte, the "Kiss of Death", is conducted in a ritual matter, with the mortal childe wearing its best clothes before disrobing itself before the sire, offering himself to the undead being before him. Afterwards, the fledgling Giovanni is first inducted into the art of feeding in a formal dinner, likely making its first official alliances with its kind.[4]

The sadism and weirdness of Giovanni internal culture is enhanced by its incestuous nature. Giovanni can spend the majority of their lives interacting with nobody except other Giovanni, and the resulting insularity breeds additional problems. The Giovanni are, in particular, arrogant and prone to underestimating the world around them.

The Giovanni are, if anything, severely lapsed Catholics. Due to their practice of Necromancy, they have seen what "the other side" and "life beyond death" really mean, which tends to completely eradicate any faith in a benevolent deity. Giovanni, in a ways similar to the Lasombra Clan, often present the appearance of Catholicism in ritual and Family culture, but have twisted the vestments all around to better fit a vampiric frame. They may attend a certain kind of Mass, where the holy water is blood and the priest a Family elder, but these sorts of ceremonies tend to devolve into orgies, massacres, or other kinds of deviant practices behind closed doors.

The Giovanni relationship to the spirit world means that they have a very casual attitude towards such things as torture, dismemberment, and death. After all, if your victim dies in the chair, you can always yank his spirit back from Hell and get information out of him another way. What the Giovanni are really focused on is efficiency: bribery, seduction, and all other sorts of underhanded means are taught to new members of the Clan as a matter of course. If all other methods fail, then killing off the competition becomes a very viable alternative.

The Giovanni do not Embrace outside of the family; they do not Embrace without permission. Not if they know what is good for them at least. In 1444, Claudius Giovanni Embraced a non-Giovanni peasant girl named Marianna into the clan as a distraction. For 500 years. Marianna was a constant embarrassment for the clan. She is also the only family outsider to have been Embraced and to survive longer than a month.

Recent information from the 20th Anniversary Edition contradicts this hardline stance against Embracing outside the family or its auxiliary families. For example, Lore of the Clans states that it is extremely rare for non-Giovanni who do not belong to one of the satellite families to be Embraced and the chances are slim but "it has happened before and it will happen again".[5] In either case the numbers are very small.

Like everything else in the family, the Embrace is treated as a reward, a promotion for good service. More than any other clan, the Giovanni actively consider factors of generation in the Embrace – being Embraced by a lower-generation clan member is considered a performance bonus.

While not uncommon, it is frowned upon to Embrace another of your own mortal family. This would encourage nepotism, and Giovanni much prefer to have the loyalty of their neonates as divided as possible within the family. When a Giovanni puts one of his own grandsons forward for the Embrace, it is much more likely that a Giovanni from another family branch will execute the deed. Even better for the clan if those Giovanni are rivals – since the neonate now has loyalty to his own grandmother and his own sire, which forces (somewhat) the two elders to avoid plotting against the other, lest the new childe betray either of them.

Clan Curse
The clan weakness of Giovanni causes that they deal more damage than normal when biting a living being, making it difficult to keep people alive after feeding from them.