Adding to the
pantheon of revenants in the annals of roleplaying,
revenant families are families of vampiric
ghouls in
Vampire: The Masquerade, the original
World of Darkness roleplaying game published by
White Wolf Game Studios.
Revenant families have been bred and kept by their vampiric masters for centuries or even millenia, and generations of breeding children from parents with vampiric
vitae in their veins has caused revenants to spontaneously generate vampiric vitae in their systems, thus endowing them with the same supernatural abilities common to ghouls, without the need to feed on vitae from an external source as often, or even at all. Additionally, most revenants are able to learn higher levels of
vampiric Disciplines than other ghouls. Revenants share the same unswerving (though sometimes misguided) loyalty to their masters.
Revenants are most commonly found among the retainers of vampires of Clan Tzimisce, and are especially common in the moldering castles of the voivodes of the Old Country. Most revenant families are Slavic in origin, having names like Bratovitch and Ducheski -- though revenants from other areas, like the Rafastio and Zantosa, do exist. The Zantosas are particularly notable, for they are believed to have guarded the body of the Tzimisce Antediluvian somewhere in the American southeast until 1997.