What do you think?
Rate this book
Vampire: the Masquerade
Cairo by Night
Ancients in an Ancient City
Older than both of the warring sects combined, Cairo sits perched atop the Nile like a pharaoh upon a throne, but all is not well in the city. Ancient conspiracies play out nightly while the Caitiff prince struggles with the resident Kindreds issues of faith. Cairo hides a myriad of secrets from itself as well as its shadowy denizens.
A Six-Thousand-Year Night
Cairo by Night presents a chronicle setting that focuses on two of Vampires core themes, the Final Nights and the price of eternal unlife. Suitable for characters of any power level, the events of this book will satisfy lovers of epic tales and personal horrors and everything in between. Cairo explores not only the Kindred that players expect to meet, but the others with whom they share the night.
Older than both of the warring sects combined, Cairo sits perched atop the Nile like a pharaoh upon a throne, but all is not well in the city. Ancient conspiracies play out nightly while the Caitiff prince struggles with the resident Kindreds issues of faith. Cairo hides a myriad of secrets from itself as well as its shadowy denizens.
A Six-Thousand-Year Night
Cairo by Night presents a chronicle setting that focuses on two of Vampires core themes, the Final Nights and the price of eternal unlife. Suitable for characters of any power level, the events of this book will satisfy lovers of epic tales and personal horrors and everything in between. Cairo explores not only the Kindred that players expect to meet, but the others with whom they share the night.
120 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2001
33 people want to read
About the author
C.A. Suleiman
31 books9 followersColin A. Suleiman is a writer, game designer, and musician who has worked primarily in dark fantasy and horror for role-playing games and fiction.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 19, 2016
Cairo by Night starts with almost fifty pages of history, and while I was reading it I kept wondering what the author was trying to accomplish. How much was any of this necessary? What is this going to do to provide a hook for the GM to create a game or a plot around? Is this just wasting word count?
Well, the answer is no. Or kind of no. Maybe?
It starts with prehistory, putting the Antediluvians' Second City in Egypt, then goes through the pre-dynastic period and the conflict between Osiris and Set and the creation of the Osirian League, then into the Pharaohs, the Alexandrian conquest of Egypt, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, and so on right through to the present day. There's some notes of vampire influence, but most of it is just mortal history. Which is fair enough because I suspect a lot of people who read this book aren't going to be familiar with Egyptian history in more than the broad strokes--the only reason I recognized much of anything is because I listen to the Egyptian History Podcast, so when the book mentioned names like Menkaure I was at least vaguely familiar with them. It builds on itself over and over and throws lots of presumably unfamiliar names at the reader, and it took me much longer to read than I expected because I kept putting it down to look at other things.
But later on it all pays off. Why is it that that the Caitiff have their own territory in Cairo, nearly unique among Camarilla cities? Because Mukhtar Bey, Prince of Cairo, is a Caitiff. Why is it that Mukhtar Bey is the Prince? Because he was the favored confidant and companion of Antonius--aka Antinous, the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian who drowned in the Nile (except not really!)--until the latter's untimely death at the hands of Lupine hordes in the 15th century. Why was Antonius the Prince of Cairo? Because Agonistes, the former ruler of Babylon-in-Egypt, left and went east on a mission of his own. Why was Agonistes in Egypt? Because he had traveled to Heliopolis to study philosophy and theology. Then you can draw connections back down: Cairo is a stronghold of the True Brujah because Agonistes was True Brujah and left two childer in Cairo, who had childer of their own. Much of the city's recent vampiric history traces back to ancient conflicts, from the Cappadocian Angelique's hatred of the Giovanni to the war between the Gangrel Disciples of Anubis and the Followers of Set. The recent appearance of a 15-generation thin blood with the mark of the moon on her has several factions interested, from the torpid Sleeping Lord in the Dream Court of the Setites to the Tremere to the Ventrue, since the leader of the Ventrue in Cairo secretly works for the Setites.
Mukhtar Bey is gathering Caitiff in Cairo because he has an agreement with the True Brujah Al-Muntaqim to sacrifice them all in the event of Gehenna, which the Prince hopes will spare him from the Antediluvians' wrath and which Al-Muntaqim plans to use to enact a thaumaturgical ritual to give him immense power, allowing him to kill Troile, who he believes killed his sire Agonistes. But Waulkeen, leader of Cairo's Caitiff, wants to depose the prince, because as a Noddist he has reached the inescapable conclusion that a Caitiff Prince is a mark of Gehenna. Antonius actually died due to the actions of the Monitor of Cairo. The Lamia bloodline, which the Giovanni supposedly exterminated, are still alive under the protection of Angelique. The philosopher Ibn Khaldun is a vampire (and a True Brujah) as is the Sultana Shajar al-Durr, who is the leader of the city's Nosferatu. Cairo is full of ancient vampires, which makes sense for a city and a country with such a long history, but there's still enough low-level plots that even generic vampire PCs can get involved in them. It reminds me of what I've heard about [[[[[Chicago by Night]]]], which had a lot of the city's unrest stemming back to the conflict between Helena and Menele but still provided a diverse array of motivations that stemmed from that.
I also really like the power structure in the city. It's much more feudal than the generic Camarilla city described in the Guide to the Camarilla. Rather than a Primogen council and a bunch of individual vampires, Cairo is divided into districts called "khittas," each given over to a particular group: Assamites, Lasombra, Nosferatu, Followers of Set, Ventrue, and Caitiff. And the Tremere, who have territory rights over the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. The Lasombra traditionally have a right to territory due to Sharif al-Lam'a, a well-respected LAsombra elder who died long ago but whose brood still lives in Cairo, and the Assamites have also been a part of its history since the Arabs first arrived in the 7th century. Each khitta is ruled by the head of the Clan located there, and those Clan heads report to Mukhtar. It wasn't until the 20th century that he even insisted anything like a Primogen group, and it's called the "Consultative Council" and doesn't have much real power.
There's more, like the way the different courts of Setites are scheming among themselves, or the conflict between the ibn Ja'far and the Tree of Pearls over the direction of Cairo's Nosferatu, or whether Antara will manage to maintain control of Banu Haqim, or the ancient mummy who lives in the southern City of the Dead and stops all vampires from entering, the archeological expedition to the ancient temple recently found in the western desert headed by the Tremere and the way that the dig staff seemed to vanish mysteriously...
This is pretty much exactly the look at a non-standard Camarilla city I was looking for in the Guide to the Camarilla, and I'm really glad that I read it. I have a bunch of ideas for a game set in Cairo that I never expected I would have had when I was reading about the Alexandrian conquest of Egypt or the succession of caliphates that took over through the centuries.
Well, the answer is no. Or kind of no. Maybe?
It starts with prehistory, putting the Antediluvians' Second City in Egypt, then goes through the pre-dynastic period and the conflict between Osiris and Set and the creation of the Osirian League, then into the Pharaohs, the Alexandrian conquest of Egypt, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, and so on right through to the present day. There's some notes of vampire influence, but most of it is just mortal history. Which is fair enough because I suspect a lot of people who read this book aren't going to be familiar with Egyptian history in more than the broad strokes--the only reason I recognized much of anything is because I listen to the Egyptian History Podcast, so when the book mentioned names like Menkaure I was at least vaguely familiar with them. It builds on itself over and over and throws lots of presumably unfamiliar names at the reader, and it took me much longer to read than I expected because I kept putting it down to look at other things.
But later on it all pays off. Why is it that that the Caitiff have their own territory in Cairo, nearly unique among Camarilla cities? Because Mukhtar Bey, Prince of Cairo, is a Caitiff. Why is it that Mukhtar Bey is the Prince? Because he was the favored confidant and companion of Antonius--aka Antinous, the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian who drowned in the Nile (except not really!)--until the latter's untimely death at the hands of Lupine hordes in the 15th century. Why was Antonius the Prince of Cairo? Because Agonistes, the former ruler of Babylon-in-Egypt, left and went east on a mission of his own. Why was Agonistes in Egypt? Because he had traveled to Heliopolis to study philosophy and theology. Then you can draw connections back down: Cairo is a stronghold of the True Brujah because Agonistes was True Brujah and left two childer in Cairo, who had childer of their own. Much of the city's recent vampiric history traces back to ancient conflicts, from the Cappadocian Angelique's hatred of the Giovanni to the war between the Gangrel Disciples of Anubis and the Followers of Set. The recent appearance of a 15-generation thin blood with the mark of the moon on her has several factions interested, from the torpid Sleeping Lord in the Dream Court of the Setites to the Tremere to the Ventrue, since the leader of the Ventrue in Cairo secretly works for the Setites.
Mukhtar Bey is gathering Caitiff in Cairo because he has an agreement with the True Brujah Al-Muntaqim to sacrifice them all in the event of Gehenna, which the Prince hopes will spare him from the Antediluvians' wrath and which Al-Muntaqim plans to use to enact a thaumaturgical ritual to give him immense power, allowing him to kill Troile, who he believes killed his sire Agonistes. But Waulkeen, leader of Cairo's Caitiff, wants to depose the prince, because as a Noddist he has reached the inescapable conclusion that a Caitiff Prince is a mark of Gehenna. Antonius actually died due to the actions of the Monitor of Cairo. The Lamia bloodline, which the Giovanni supposedly exterminated, are still alive under the protection of Angelique. The philosopher Ibn Khaldun is a vampire (and a True Brujah) as is the Sultana Shajar al-Durr, who is the leader of the city's Nosferatu. Cairo is full of ancient vampires, which makes sense for a city and a country with such a long history, but there's still enough low-level plots that even generic vampire PCs can get involved in them. It reminds me of what I've heard about [[[[[Chicago by Night]]]], which had a lot of the city's unrest stemming back to the conflict between Helena and Menele but still provided a diverse array of motivations that stemmed from that.
I also really like the power structure in the city. It's much more feudal than the generic Camarilla city described in the Guide to the Camarilla. Rather than a Primogen council and a bunch of individual vampires, Cairo is divided into districts called "khittas," each given over to a particular group: Assamites, Lasombra, Nosferatu, Followers of Set, Ventrue, and Caitiff. And the Tremere, who have territory rights over the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. The Lasombra traditionally have a right to territory due to Sharif al-Lam'a, a well-respected LAsombra elder who died long ago but whose brood still lives in Cairo, and the Assamites have also been a part of its history since the Arabs first arrived in the 7th century. Each khitta is ruled by the head of the Clan located there, and those Clan heads report to Mukhtar. It wasn't until the 20th century that he even insisted anything like a Primogen group, and it's called the "Consultative Council" and doesn't have much real power.
There's more, like the way the different courts of Setites are scheming among themselves, or the conflict between the ibn Ja'far and the Tree of Pearls over the direction of Cairo's Nosferatu, or whether Antara will manage to maintain control of Banu Haqim, or the ancient mummy who lives in the southern City of the Dead and stops all vampires from entering, the archeological expedition to the ancient temple recently found in the western desert headed by the Tremere and the way that the dig staff seemed to vanish mysteriously...
This is pretty much exactly the look at a non-standard Camarilla city I was looking for in the Guide to the Camarilla, and I'm really glad that I read it. I have a bunch of ideas for a game set in Cairo that I never expected I would have had when I was reading about the Alexandrian conquest of Egypt or the succession of caliphates that took over through the centuries.
March 9, 2016
Una serie de ideas magníficas cita ejecución no termina de estar a la altura, que es por lo que no le doy cinco estrellas.
Un producto centrado en la Gehena y las Noches Finales, repleto de personajes interesantes y lugares evocadores, donde no hay mapas que te aclaren dónde está cada cosa, ni esquemas de quién se alía o pelea con quien.
Podía haber sido como Chicago, pero se queda cerca.
Un producto centrado en la Gehena y las Noches Finales, repleto de personajes interesantes y lugares evocadores, donde no hay mapas que te aclaren dónde está cada cosa, ni esquemas de quién se alía o pelea con quien.
Podía haber sido como Chicago, pero se queda cerca.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews