Commonwealth

Five thousand years of evolution have led us to where we are today. With technology at our command, we can realize ideals that ancient vampire societies could never achieve. While others may look to the past or look away into their own delusions, we have built our Commonwealth while looking to the future, reinforcing the collective vision of a union between man and vampire. The city of tomorrow is ours to discover, and with vision and imagination, we will accomplish this grand synthesis. By basking in the light of reason, victory will be ours.

Nickname: Builders, Peasants (derogatory, used by Prima Invicta), Utopians (derogatory, used by Devil's Eye)

History:

The youngest of the major covenants, the Commonwealth might have a comparatively short history, but it is all the more eventful.

While neonate liberation philosophies occasionally occurred throughout history, it was the Enlightenment that brought the first real spark. An unknown vampire, formerly a minion of the Covenant of Thebes, secretly published a pamphlet called Contre Les Vampires Partiarcals in 1779, which soon found an audience amongst disaffected neonates all across Europe, scandalizing the courts of the Prima Invicta. Although he penned it under the false name of Emmanuel Baptiste Carth, the Prima Invicta eventually figured out his identity and informed the Inquisition of the Covenant of Thebes, who were all too happy to exact penance from Carth before his execution at the pyre.

Nevertheless, Carth's pamphlet, which railed against the feudal nature of Kindred society and demanded equal rights for younger vampires, found an enduring audience, and was replicated and translated all over Europe, especially as the First French Revolution began and changed history forever. Despite the best efforts of the established covenants of Europe, they could not stamp out the so-called Carthians, who attempted coups and resistance movements against the elders, often using mortal revolutions and unrest as cover. While they could never really triumph in any area permanently, the disaffected youth slowly formed into a proper covenant, the Carthian Movement.

The Carthian Movement was absolutely dedicated to egalitarianism and democracy among the Kindred. Yet, as the decades passed with few results to show, the group has acquired a gradually stronger undercurrent of fanaticism. This culminated in the disaster of the Paris Commune in 1871, which also saw the end of the final effort of the Carthians to install an egalitarian vampire society.

With the relative moderates weakened by their failures, the hardliner front of the Movement quickly seized control in the years to follow in most Princedoms. However, several cities retained facsimiles of the original Carthian Movement. They argued that the lack of organization and extreme dedication to direct democracy were the causes for the Movement's failure. And that the Movement failed to recognize that vampire society can only be changed if mortal society changes alongside it as well. They envisioned a utopian future where man and vampire might live side by side in cities perfectly suited to the needs of both. Led by a few influential spokesmen and ideologues, they reorganized the Carthian Movement into the Commonwealth by 1884, with a Central Planning Committee headquartered in Paris, which they managed to retain control over until 1923.

The next decade saw the Commonwealth's rapid expansion all across Europe. Using the Prima Invicta's stagnancy, they began massive recruitment drives and seized control of several cities thought peripheral by the covenants. In particular, the Commonwealth invested heavily into infiltrating Russian vampire communities, seeing the inevitable collapse of the Tsarist system as the perfect foundation for their own social experiments. And so, when the Bolsheviks erased the old country, the Commonwealth likewise purged the Prima Invicta and other politically-oriented covenants from Russia. With a new country to serve as their base of operations, the Central Planning Committee moved to Moscow.

In the decades to follow, the Commonwealth integrated heavily with the Soviet Union's government, and not only ended up dominating the USSR by night, but also managed to mostly force other covenants out of the other territories the country occupied and controlled (with several exceptions). Though the other covenants tried hard to resist, the Commonwealth often proved more dedicated, organized and well-connected with the new communist authorities. On the downside, the Commonwealth was now falling victim to what afflicted the Prima Invicta: they were becoming complacent and stagnant due to their own success. This led to the social experiments faltering in intensity, and the Central Planning Committee pushing the deadlines of their utopia further and further into the future.

The collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the end of the USSR was a major disaster for the Commonwealth as they lost much of their influence over the course of a few measly years, and lost many cities to other covenants. However, it was also a very much needed shock treatment for the Commonwealth, and opened fresh avenues and global inroads previously unavailable to them. Thus, after a few years of internal chaos, the Commonwealth once more changed its methods, growing both more insidious and ambitious in the process.

The modern Commonwealth is perhaps not quite as monolithically powerful as it was at its peak, but they have now redoubled their efforts for achieving their ideal future, and took to modern media and technology like a fish to water. Between the Nineties and the 2010s, the Commonwealth has infiltrated many media outlets all across the western world and made significant inroads into the political structures of developing countries as well. Nevertheless, they still must contend with the Prima Invicta and the other covenants for supremacy. Not to mention splinter groups of Carthians who refuse to obey the Commonwealth's leadership.

Ethos

The Commonwealth is defined by its endless collective ambitions. As such, their primary purpose is to create a new reality for both vampires and mankind. They are not content with changing vampire society. They want real change for everyone. They imagine a future where man and vampire can walk arm in arm, content with each other's true nature. While most vampires would scoff at such naivete, the Commonwealth take this ideal of theirs very seriously. It is in fact their end goal to undo the Masquerade eventually, hence their recent focus on infiltrating media outlets. However, they believe that they must first influence society into a state where they would welcome this "coming out" with open arms. Thus, they are ironically the most zealous enforcers of the Masquerade, even when compared to the Prima Invicta, and especially when optics would paint a negative picture of vampires (which is almost always). Furthermore, they also consider most of the other covenants simply too toxic and thus aim to remove them from the board before they go live with the truth.

But it is not enough to be accepted by humanity. The Commonwealth also wants to realize futuristic communities, where amenities and transportation have all been adjusted to vampiric needs. This is typically called their "city of tomorrow." Hence their secondary focus on infiltrating politics, charities and municipalities.

Both goals are facilitated by their many ongoing experiments. Using their vast connections within the USSR, the Commonwealth established several communes using abducted humans. In these walled-off and isolated Siberian towns, humans and vampires were ordered to coexist openly, while the results were recorded and ordinances and rules constantly adjusted to better calibrate social harmony. Some of these communes are still extant, while others ended in catastrophic failure. Nevertheless, the Commonwealth not only believes that they have achieved great progress, they actually started new communes in developing countries and rural North America recently. Compared to the old soviet communes, these ones have been created with most high-tech infrastructural and surveillance technology the Commonwealth could get their hands on. However, the Commonwealth always take extreme pains to hide the existence of these places. For abducted humans, they have to live or die in these towns, and even the most merciful overseers would subject them to very extensive mind scrubbing before even considering letting them leave. The Commonwealth considers this a regrettable but necessary sacrifice, and believes it will all be worth it in the end. You will see.

Membership and Structure

The Commonwealth prefers recruiting those vampires who are either bold visionaries or have personally experienced abuse at the hands of vampiric society. They are also very happy to Embrace anyone who seems enthusiastic and talented, especially if they have a knack for technology or if they are good speakers or planners. Because of these factors, the Commonwealth is one of the more populous covenants.

The Commonwealth is both hierarchical and oddly egalitarian. Their maxims are rule by committee and that everyone is equal. The Commonwealth sees no difference between elders and neonates, and in fact encourages both to act as the other would. This is facilitated by having each vampire in a Commonwealth community regularly share their blood with everyone else, thus creating countless mutual blood bonds. Overseeing one such community is the local committee of City Planners, who are assisted by the Stewards, the dedicated soldiers and internal security forces of the covenant, and the Liasons, dedicated infiltrators of mortal organizations (and as some rumour, other covenants). These committees at least nominally listen and answer to the needs of the local Commonwealth members, but in practice, it greatly depends on the individual City Planners. Each City Planner committee reports to a regional committee appointed (by the CPC) from among the City Planners of the given region, which in turn reports directly to the Central Planning Committee in Moscow (though the idea of retaking Paris from the Prima Invicta King of France and moving the CPC back there is occasionally floated). While the lower committees tend to be an even mixture of older and younger Kindred, the CPC is exclusively made up of the seven most influential elders of the covenant.

Role in Princedoms:

The Commonwealth either rules completely, or is a persecuted outlaw group in any given princedom.