Die Wächtern



Founded nearly a millennium ago, one of the most established qabals is “the Watchers”, or Die Wächtern. Though most members hail from Europe or North America, the group acts globally, and has dedicated itself to the elimination of the Red Death’s minions wherever they can be found. Like all qabals, it is a secret from the larger populace, but among those who oppose the great Evil, it is perhaps the most well-respected modern qabal.

Its new leader is Professor Abraham van Helsing, said to have won a decisive victory against Dracula himself by organizing a small group of London socialites into a formidable team of vampire hunters. (Two of those vampire hunters, Mina Harker and her husband Jonathan, have become members.) Founded during the First Crusade by Christian knights, the qabal still bases its oaths and codes of conduct on Judeo-Christian dogma, and most members are religious Westerners who see their work as a holy quest. Members are no longer required to be knights as they were in ancient times, but they must be of “exceptional character” and are required to swear a sacred oath to support the qabal and its war against the horrors of the Red Death.

The returning crusaders who established Die Wächtern at the start of the 12th century had seen true evil in the atrocities committed by their fellow crusaders even before they ran afoul of the creatures of the Red Death. They stumbled upon an ancient underground complex, where they discovered a cache of arcane knowledge and supplies brought to the Holy Land by scholars who had fled the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. They believed divine providence had guided them to their find, yet they were soon beset by unholy forces. They nearly died at the hands of the Red Death’s servants, but their survival was the first of many victories to come.

Returning to their homes in Saxony, the knights gathered at a hidden sanctuary south of Leipzig. They began a new, holier war against the evil menace revealed by the forbidden lore they had found. Their covenant challenged each of them to live up to the example of Provocatio, the Defiance, the ancient qabal whose records they had uncovered. For centuries, the Watchers united men and women of faith from various sects of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in their secret war against supernatural evil. Their legacy of undaunted heroism persists to this day, though a catastrophic defeat in the early 1600s all but destroyed the order.

A few qabalists escaped their mysterious attacker (rumored to have been Dracula himself), but they could not preserve the order’s records. A vast arcane library including ancient tomes from the Defiance itself was lost. Few setbacks in the war against the Red Death have been so devastatingly bleak. Yet the few survivors recreated Die Wächtern in Amsterdam, and have assembled a vast new archive of occult knowledge.

Sharing information with the astonishing speed afforded by new technologies such as the telegraph, the modern qabal lives up to its name, creating a web of vigilance that stretches across the civilized world.