Circle of Crone: Love-Lies-Bleeding ritual

Question

In the Circle of Crone Covenant book, page 36 talks about a ritual to hide black veins caused by diablerie:

Love-Lies-Bleeding

The Amaranth, or Amaranthus, is a beautiful flower with rich crimson petals. This word is also a term for the act of diablerie — an ironic term because the flower was one sacred to the goddess Artemis, representing a symbol of “unwithering immortality.” One of the flower’s nicknames is “Love-Lies-Bleeding,” because the way its flowers droop almost like blood dripping to the ground. Most Kindred, Acolytes included, consider diablerie an unforgivable crime. Some, however, secretly hold the act in high esteem. One sect of Acolytes in particular — a secret society of sorts, whose membership is kept hidden from even those in their own cults — believes that the Amaranth is a beautiful and necessary thing. This sect, calling itself the Lovers of Artemis, believes that the act of diablerie is the truest form of love and protection one can offer another Kindred. By consuming the soul, the soul lives on separate from the Beast. The soul becomes healed. And so, once a year, the members of this sect go out and commit diablerie on those closest to them. Somehow, they’ve concocted a Crúac ritual to keep the black veins from showing in their auras. Some say this ritual was taken from Aztec vampires long ago, and it requires a mixture of blood, honey and the actual Amaranthus flower. (Others say that the ritual requires far worse things, including the sacrifice of mortal children.) Whatever the case, to see the black veins in the diablerists’ auras, a vampire must gain an exceptional success on his Aura Reading roll.

The ritual does not mention how many cruac dots are required to execute it, nor is any duration or fixed cost given. Also, as we're using blood sorcery rules, instead of cruac dots I need to convert the ritual into a theme ritual. So my questions:

1. Which themes would be appropriate and what dots?
2. Should the caster use one of the sacrifices mentioned in the description or would blood suffice? (since in blood sorcery the cost of cruac is blood unlike theban sorceries sacrifices).
3. What is this "Lovers of Artemis" sect? Are they some kind of bloodline with this power being part of their unique discipline, or just a group of cruac mages forming a cult around Artemis? They are not mentioned in any other book.

Answer 1

1. The outcome of this is going to depend largely on the group you are running with and to what end the storyteller wants the ritual to function. If the users thereof are intended to be antagonist characters, its dot value is largely irrelevant, although putting it in the 5-dot range both guarantees that such enemies will be powerful adversaries and that the ability will be largely out of reach of all but your most dedicated player characters. If they are intended to be player characters, it could be a much lower dot value ritual that is simply a closely guarded secret.

2. Again, it depends largely on the nature of the chronicle and how demanding the Storyteller wants it to be. I'd say, personally, that Diablerie should be kept a monstrous and evil act that tarnishes the very soul of the diablerist. As such, concealing the act should, in my opinion, not be a simple matter of spending the appropriate Vitae; instead, it should up the ante on the monstrosity. The ritual could, if you so desired, be completely unique - a "discovery" outside the paradigm of classic Cruac and blood sorcery - and could involve any depraved act that was desired to tie in to Diablerie. The murder of a child would be entirely appropriate as a follow up to the act of consuming a soul (perhaps, if you want to be truly macabre and tie it back to honey, blood and amaranth as suggested in the material, creating a mellified man of the child and consuming the remains could be a sufficiently horrifying twist). Conversely, it could be as simple as a secret Devotion combining, for example, Obfuscate and Majesty. Ultimately, again, it's up to the Storyteller, and intentionally so.

3. Yet again, this could go any which way. There is, to my knowledge, no further information about them in any book in the NWoD line. If it were my chronicle, I would make them a Bloodline, and I would likely create an entire 5 dot discipline chain revolving around Diablerie and the drinking of Vampiric blood. One could look to the Way of the Locust (from the Ordo Dracul book) as an inspiration.

But there are, to my knowledge (which is fairly exhaustive) no further official explanations for any of this.

One thing to keep in mind about the New World of Darkness (especially over the Old World of Darkness) is that they sowed a lot of plot seeds without reaping the proverbial harvest - there are hooks and teasers everywhere, but many of them are never followed up on in any solid way, the better to leave material for storytellers. Consider the God Machine Chronicle: the fiction from the Core Rulebook regarding the God Machine and the Pain Prophet of New Delhi was, perhaps, the fiction most speculated upon and the material most requested for elaboration, but they only recently answered those questions.

New World of Darkness is presented far more as a toolbox than the Old World of Darkness, which was more presented as a series of storylines in which the players were intended to participate.