Sabbat As Verb
I didn't play Vampire The Masquerade until about four months ago. I'd bought the V5 corebook a while ago - when I'd been interested in it and expected to meet more goths in my life - and figured I would finally get my seventy bucks' worth.
I was hot off the end of my one month long Sorcerer game, and knew I needed more "story game" experience. I was great at thinking of the most chandleresque plots and intrigues, characters fit to explode with their inner details.
I had a pain point for making them actually work in-game.
V5's camarilla were a turn-off for me. The totalitarian anne-rice brigade seemed too arcane, too much to wrap my head around without memorising the entire faction handbook of how they worked and what they wanted from top to bottom.
What I wanted were grungy, ugly, savage vampires. Monsters from Near Dark, The Addiction, 30 Days of Night.
The Anarchs were my first crack at it. But that game quickly devolved into something too disempowering to be really fun - the focus shifted to a proxy war between different factions in the city's de facto junta, and the players mostly played keep-away from the big players out of fear for their humanity.
My second attempt was with the Sabbat, but V5's vision of the sect as presented suffers from the entire game's terminal weakness. It attempts to incorporate everything "as such", without rewriting what doesn't work. Mutually incoherent ideologies, origins, organs of behaviour, end goals - welded together as a totalising, xenophobic, genocidal vampiric legion of doom.
The worst parts of The Sabbat were on display. An unintelligent example of "evil vampires", fusing everything hypocritical and self defeating about its thirty years of history like Frankenstein & The Monster From Hell, offered nothing useful for running a game.
Worse was that this portrayal was what fan material like Player's Guide To The Sabbat was left to work with. Assuming that every Path - ideologies replacing and scaffolding a vampire's conscience in the absence of humanity - would work together as a united political body, as it always had in past editions, in comparison to the Camarilla as though Best Buy was the main competitor to the Coca Cola corporation.
The Sabbat, as a noun, was starting off on the wrong foot. I had to imagine them as disparate factions united only by what they were doing.
Sabbat
Verb
To move away from Humanity, by use of a Path of Enlightenment.
The Paths
What every follower of a Path wants is to be free from the failures of the vampiric condition. Because being a vampire is lame. If you follow Humanity, this freedom is called Golconda; No Path, or even followers of the same Path, fully agree on Golconda. But they agree that the supernatural is real, and there are forces in the world and outside the world that are hidden from most. The left hand of the World has revealed itself to them, and they cannot turn back.
The exact nature of what it is, or how you get there, is the practical theology that cults and sects are built around.
The Cathari
Being a vampire is your Destiny;
It is not arbitrary. Decided long in advance by powers greater than you could ever imagine, either the spiritual embodiment of cosmic entropy, or Ahriman, or Iblis, or Mara, or all the dukes of hell.
Catharism is "the easiest Path for new vampires" because it asserts that objective, understanble morality is true, and you just need to do the opposite of it. Sin has a legitimate value, because it furthers the greater aims of the universe.
It's an easy moral backbone to transplant into any new lick, because the idea that vampires are inherently evil is an easy assumption to make. But so is the idea that evil, as a universal constant, has value.
Luminaries of this Path tend to drift away from the inherent hedonism of it all, and take on roles like living saints or Bodhisattvas. If you understand that there are greater forces in the cycles of good and evil, death and return, ultimate destiny, isn't it your moral duty to help all conscious beings into fulfilling their role in that cycle?
The Cainites
Being a vampire is your salvation;
Noddism is as close to vampires have to an ethnic religion, because it answers the same basic questions about the vampiric condition that have existed since the beginning.
The myth is captivating; Caine, like prometheus, rejected the will of God and did great things, then terrible things for good reasons, then disappeared until the day of his glorious return, when his children are free of the original sin of the antediluvians.
It makes sense that vampires would believe this!
All the occultism of what vampires are or where they come from has its answer in Caine, and if all vampires could only be more like him they would have fewer problems. Gehenna is the final judgement, and if you just wait until then and avoid the pitfalls of the Antediluvians' curse it will all be worth it.
They are a salvation based faith providing an easy moral framework, and freedom from the yoke of the Elders' idolatrous ancestor cults and power by age instead of wisdom.
The main points of difference between adherents, manifested by their leaders, is what being like Caine actually means. No wonder they dedicate most of their time to the quiet task of untangling some mystical snarl that will unlock more power.
The Unifiers
Being a vampire is not enough;
Every follower of this Path in some way believes that they are the ultimate arbitrer of their unlives. Their reason for being comes from an implacable, indomitable force of will and self discipline, following a code of honour and established hierarchy.
A unifier rejects the idea of spiritual hoodoo, taken on faith. They assert, simply, that the only moral failing is to lose control of oneself. If you are disciplined, you deserve power. If you are reckless, you deserve nothing.
Golconda for them is certainly freedom from the Beast's grip.
Path of Lilith
Being a vampire is a mistake;
I see this Path as the problem child of the group, because it's a heresy that makes good points. and has the mojo to back it up, but goes to a very bad place.
Lillim believe that Caine's curse is, as such, a curse. It's the wrong way to do it.
Lilith was in fact the first vampire, and wished for only peace and harmony for her creations were it not for the terrible Sword of Caine separating them from the Dark Mother's guidance... expounded at length by their religious observances, rituals, and dogma.
They're also the most combative faction in the Sabbat, and millenarianism is almost ubiquitous across its followers. Noddists might believe that the eldest vampires are evil, but Lillim are defined by their active and present commitment to their destruction.
Their leaders are the generals of the Gehenna War, fighting in the final nights since they first started.
Their vision of Golconda is apropos for what is basically a Noddist heresy. Union with, and reflection of, Lilith. To be completely safe in a Garden of their own making is an understandable goal for any vampire.
The Paths all stand apart
You might now understand that most or all of these groups are mutually exclusive. A vampire literally cannot follow more than one Path at a time, because less than total commitment to the Path's ideals leaves too much room for doubt, which fuels The Beast.
The Noddists can't work with the Unifiers because there's no preaching rapture and salvation to angry, single minded skeptics, as the Unifiers can't grapple with the messy vagaries of interpreting stories about Vampire Jesus. The Unifiers can't work with the Cathari because they're too undisciplined and hedonistic, while the Tempters think the Unifiers are too dispassionate and rigid.
And nobody at all can work with The Lillim, because they're vampire dominionists whose vision of utopia involves murdering everyone who tries to stop them, forever.
How I've used it
So far, it's worked great! The Sabbat are a host of scary vampire cults that exert an invisible pressure on everyone in them, not just a bunch of ravening monsters or dumb gehenna fanatics.
Play has structured itself around the rituals and beliefs that govern night to night existence on the Path. Characters refrain or even soliloquise on their Convictions and their implications, moreso than ever happened in my Anarch game.
It's also added amazing texture to the underground in any network of vampires, as the group gets contracted to shore up feuds or fight with rivals with the ubiquitous use of blood sorcery and weirder, darker powers usually unknown or unused by most vampires. The dedication to strange, inhuman codes and norms brings out all the most interesting elements of play that I've experienced in games like Cyberpunk or Blades, as the crucible of this fictional culture cements itself in how the group converses and thinks about their plans.
My current Sabbat chronicle is ending in a few weeks. I'm excited to take a different step into the Cruel Church very soon.