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“Nicholas tried to show me,
but I didn’t understand him back then.
I’m starting to get it, now.
I figure that, with another thirty years of school
and finished doctorates in psychology and chemistry,
I’ll be ready to change
my Blood and follow his lead.
Then I’ll understand what he was trying to tell me.”
— Alexander Florescu,
The Ordo Dracul is a covenant, at it's heart, of academics. They care about politics when politics would affect their studies. They care about religion on an individual basis, as their moral compasses align. Above all though, they care about their academic field. Take the cut-throat-back-biting professor seeking tenure and give him fangs, then you have the Ordo Dracul. Take the egotistical math post-grad who is convinced that his equation is superior to anothers' and give him a beast that rallies at insults. Each Dragon has his field of study, his pet project and he guards it jealously. The Ordo Dracul typically houses the best tutors of the Kindred world, but these same tutors are often egotistical and purposefully difficult to learn under. After all, if you don't want to work for knowledge, then maybe you should just be stupid.
Philosphies
Nothing is permanent
- The underlying principle of the Ordo Dracul is that change exists. Vampires are not the static creatures that every other covenant would say they are. Vampires, like the world around them, change. The Kindred who join the Ordo Dracul realize that every change presents a learning experience. Any thing that alters the world as you know it, offers the ability to observe the effects of that change and propose hypothesis, then investigate those hypothesis to form conclusions. Like all good scientists and academics, the Dragons realize that you learn as much from bad things as you do from good.
Change must have a purpose
- The members of the Ordo Dracul are not heedless fanatics, upsetting the apple cart just to see how many apples tumble off. They recognize that any experiment, any proposed change, must have a purpose. In order to truly leave behind the limitations of the vampiric state, the members of the Ordo Dracul must truly understand the changes they intend to undergo. They must understand the problem they're confronted with, the design of their experimentation, and the results of that experiment. And if they don't understand the results, then they must devise more experimentation until they do.
Ordo Dracul in the Hold
Every Dragon in the Tomesha Valley has either come from the Academy in San Francisco originally or at some point attended that Academy. The Academy in San Francisco is the single authority for the Ordo Dracul in the entire Southwest Region. It's not unusual for Ordo to travel from San Francisco to set up independent laboratories in other cities, but no other city posses the sheer number of Ordo Dracul necessary to have a working Academy - and The Academy would not have it any other way. Ultimately every Dragon reports to The Academy for their progress, or lack thereof.
Since every Dragon in the Tomesha Valley has at some point attended The Academy for it's education, the Ordo Dracul are a very incestuous group. They often correspond across cities and share as much gossip as they do discoveries of scientific value. There's more than one long-term antagonism between academics of differing prospective that takes place between the lines of otherwise polite letters regarding scientific progress. However, because each Dragon has attended The Academy, they start with more-or-less the same basic grasp of scientific principles. Each year The Academy has a Caucus and each Dragon is encouraged to attend. It's little surprise that those who regularly attend Caucuses move faster and higher in the covenant than those who prefer isolation in their laboratories.
On a city level, outside of San Francisco there's no covenant-power for the Ordo Dracul. Dragons who reside in other cities often find it necessary to attend Elysium and participate in the night-to-night politics of the Requiem, even if they'd secretly rather be in their lab. Even the most reluctant academic realizes that science, and therefore progress, requires mundane necessities like funding and research specimens. It's perhaps ironic that for a covenant that prides itself on learning, that those who put politics ahead of academics often progress faster in both city and covenant. In the city, the Ordo Dracul are willing to work with any one and overlook most any thing in order to obtain what is necessary for their research to continue. Moreover, without the Requiem's politics the truly valuable things an Ordo Dracul seeks - like possession of a Crucible - is completely out of the question.
Teachings of The Academy
The Academy teaches a strict scientific method, although often Kindred create their own variations once they set up independent laboratories. Rarely though do they whole-scale disregard their academic foundation. The Academy teaches that every successful experiment must have these components:
- A purpose - What is this experiment designed to find out?
- A hypothesis - What do you think will happen?
- An experiment - How will you test this hypothesis?
- A result - What happened when you performed the experiment?
The Academy often encourages members to write up their reports and send them to colleagues in other cities, so that they can be reproduced.
The Caucus
The Caucus, held once a year, is a big deal. There are often more Dragons wishing to present than there is time to listen, due to this there is quite a bit internal jockeying amongst Dragons for the privilege of main presenter at a Caucus. Of course, a Dragon who wishes such an honor should be sure that his work is of superior quality. There's nothing more humiliating than speaking in front of your peers and being stumped by a slave's question.
Ordo Dracul Titles
(This has been modified from the book in order to suit our game)
Slave
- All Slaves in the Tomesha Valley spend at least a few years at The Academy. There are some who take individual apprenticeships under particularly powerful, but reclusive, academics who possess independent labs but in order to learn their first Coil the Slave must still complete The Academy's Chrysalis preparation course.
Kogaion
- The Kogaion makes the decision on who gets to visit nests in the Tomesha Valley. He often appoints individual Guardians to look over particularly important nests and often in cities where there is only one Dragon, that Dragon gets the dubious pleasure of automatically becoming a Guardian. Often times this puts them in a politically sticky position.
Convener
- It's the Convener who makes the ultimate decisions on who presents their research at a Caucus and as such the Convener has a unique ability to determine with a few pen strokes what Kindred is most likely to advance. On rare occasion, a particularly unprepared Dragon has been requested by the Convener to present his research - it's almost always due to another academic seeking to humiliate the presenter.
Other positions exist, of course, but they're exclusively within the confines of San Francisco.