Wiktionary
n. (plural of antediluvian English)
Wikipedia
Antediluvians is a term used by White Wolf Publishing in their fictional role-playing game set in the World of Darkness, Vampire: The Masquerade, which is now owned and published by Onyx Path Publishing.
According to in-game legends, antediluvians are the vampires of the Third Generation. Supposedly, they were created by Cain's firstborn childer, Enoch, Irad, and Zillah. Game lore holds there to be thirteen of them, and their sins are to blame for God causing the Great Deluge.
From each of these vampires come the thirteen original clans: Assamites, Brujah, Cappadocians, Followers of Set, Gangrel, Lasombra, Malkavians, Nosferatu, Ravnos, Salubri, Toreador, Tzimisce, and Ventrue. The game's lore mentions that each clan's weaknesses comes from a curse Caine set upon the Antediluvian founders of the clan. Apocrypha of the Book of Nod implies that there may be other unknown antediluvians who never sired. There is one clan not mentioned: Clan Tremere. This clan, from in-game lore, was created by a magic user from the House of Hermès called Tremere. After fighting an antediluvian and draining him, he became Kindred (the name other Vampires call their kind, instead of the vulgar name of Vampire) and sired 5 others, who reside in Vienna. It is said that those who are chosen to be "Embraced" are given a chalice with the blood of all 7 Kindred Lords, so as to be loyal to Clan without reservation. There is a rumour that if one of Clan Tremere has failed or has done anything to threaten the Clan or any Kindred in the Clan, that they are "Summoned" to Vienna and a sentence is passed upon them. No one that has been Summoned has ever been heard from again, thus this rumour can not be denied nor confirmed.
Usage examples of "antediluvians".
The Bible agrees with Plato in the statement that these Antediluvians had reached great populousness and wickedness, and that it was on account of their wickedness God resolved to destroy them.
For so long was the life of those antediluvians, that he who lived the shortest time of those whose years are mentioned in Scripture attained to the age of 753 years.
And so through all the generations in which the ages of the antediluvians are given, we find in our versions that almost no one begat a son at the age of 100 or under/or even at the age of 120 or thereabouts.
But in this case, in which during so many consecutive generations 100 years are added in one manuscript where they are not reckoned in the other, and then, after the birth of the son and successor, the years which were wanting are added, it is obvious that the copyist who contrived this arrangement designed to insinuate that the antediluvians lived an excessive number of years only because each year was excessively brief, and that he tried to draw the attention to this fact by his statement of their age of puberty at which they became able to beget children.
And consequently those antediluvians lived more than 900 years, which were years as long as those which afterwards Abraham lived 175 of, and after him his son Isaac 180, and his son Jacob nearly 150, and some time after, Moses 120, and men now seventy or eighty, or not much longer, of which years it is said, "their strength is labor and sorrow.
And from this we may understand that the antediluvians who are mentioned were not the first-born, but those through whom the order of the succeeding generations might be carried on to the patriarch Noah.