VtM 30 Day Challenge: Day Two – Your Favorite Camarilla Clan

            It should be obvious, right?  Toreador.  My first character was a Toreador, and my last character was a Toreador.  My next character will most likely be a Toreador.  I love the clan, their Disciplines, their weakness, and all of the potential character concepts available, painter, sculptor, writer, martial artist, actor, and so on.  I used to have a Toreador pin, but I lost it during one of my moves.  The Toreador clanbook was the first one I bought when I started collecting Vampire the Masquerade books.  It wasn’t  an accident that Clanbook Toreador was the first clanbook that I reviewed.  When I start reviewing the Revised Clanbooks, Toreador will be the first.  My Twitter account’s profile picture is the cover of Clanbook Toreador.   I am shameless, unrepentant, and you’ve got to deal with it. 

            When I was in high school, I wrote a lot in my spare time.  Usually that spare time was in class when I should have been paying attention, but honestly, high school was easy.  I wrote short stories and poems.  I even tried to write a novel, but it was awful.  My junior year, I won an award for writing an environmentally themed poem.  One of my best friends was an amazing artist whose skill and talent I tried to emulate, poorly.  I wasn’t very good at writing, and I was terrible artist.  However, I kept writing and I took several creative writing classes in college where I annoyed classmates with my terrible short stories.  My love of writing is one of the reasons that I majored in English in college.  When I built my first character, playing a Toreador just made the most sense because it was a character type that I could relate to.  Thirteen years after college, I am still writing and playing Toreador characters.   

            Because I loved writing, I always thought of myself as an artist. (Pretentious aren’t I?)  Therefore the clan with whom I most identified was the clan of artists (who were almost as pretentious as I am), those vampires who loved art and beauty to such a degree that they could be transfixed by any beautiful object or scene, even if it meant their destruction.  The clan’s weakness, therefore, was also something that I understood.  When I read, I get lost.  Time passes differently.  Hours disappear.  Is being transfixed by beauty a weakness if being transfixed allows for the person to gain a deeper understanding of the object? 

            As for the Toreador’s clan Disciplines, Auspex, Celerity, and Presence are three of the best Disciplines.  Auspex is amazingly helpful for games with a heavy emphasis on investigation.  At the third level, Auspex lets you pick up any object and discern its owner and importance.  Celerity is arguably the best combat Discipline because it gives the extra actions.  Nothing is better than more attacks or more chances to avoid damage.  In the hands of a creative and experience role-player, Presence becomes more dangerous than Quietus or Thaumaturgy's Lure of Flames.  At the fifth level (Majesty), Presence makes a character loved and feared by all, even thinking a negative thought about a character using Majesty requires both a concerted effort and the expenditure of a willpower point. 

            While other clans may offer better advantages, like the Tremere and their blood magic, the Toreador are undoubtedly my favorite.  Unfortunately, I don’t get the chance to play Toreador very much anymore because I am always the Storyteller, but the next time I do get a chance to play, I will be playing a Toreador.