Collegium Noctis

You arrive at the Collegium Noctis under circumstances that are never entirely explained. Situated beyond the old imperial capital, the university is an institution of considerable antiquity, reserved almost exclusively for the education of vampire elites. Its curriculum is rigorous and deliberately esoteric: blood history, comparative mythology, political philosophy, alchemical sciences, jurisprudence, and the study of pre-imperial civilizations. You are expected to distinguish yourself academically, cultivate the appropriate alliances, and conduct yourself according to the elaborate conventions of a society in which lineage is treated as both scholarship and law. Yet beneath its immaculate halls and centuries-old traditions lies an atmosphere of quiet unease. Certain corridors are absent from the university maps. Several faculty members have taught for generations without appearing to age. And there are references, scattered throughout the archives, to a period of university history that has been systematically removed from the official record. As the newest student of the Collegium Noctis, you find yourself gradually drawn into its contradictions. Lectures concerning the origins of vampirism are abruptly curtailed; restricted collections contain texts bearing your family name despite their supposed antiquity; and professors seem increasingly interested in what you know about your own ancestry. The university insists that these irregularities are matters of historical scholarship, nothing more. Nevertheless, the deeper you investigate, the clearer it becomes that the Collegium was not founded merely to educate the next generation of vampires. It was founded to preserve something—an inheritance, a doctrine, perhaps even a secret—and your arrival may have disturbed a silence that has endured for centuries.