Nineteen groups. Rosters are labelled by relationship, not membership: the people a faction hunted are not the people who belonged to it.
The Original Vampires
c. 1000 · Mystic Falls, then everywhere
Mikael, Esther and their five surviving children, made in a single spell by a grieving mother who wanted her family to be unkillable. They are the source of every vampire who has ever existed and the only ones who cannot be killed by ordinary means.
- Killed only by white oak. A silver dagger dipped in white oak ash puts them to sleep instead — reversible, and Klaus's preferred way of storing his siblings.
- Can compel other vampires, which no ordinary vampire can do. This one asymmetry is where most of their leverage comes from.
- Kill one and their sireline dies too, which makes them functionally invincible for most of the franchise.
- Ended: Finn and Kol die in 2012; Mikael and Esther repeatedly; Klaus and Elijah in 2018; Rebekah takes the cure.
Cast the spell, stayed a witch
The Travelers
c. 100 BC – 2014 · nowhere, permanently
The witches who backed Silas against Qetsiyah and were cursed to wander forever — no home they build survives, no community they form holds. Two thousand years of homelessness aimed at one goal: kill the last two doppelgängers, break the curse, and unmake every kind of magic that is not theirs.
- Their magic draws on the collective will of the Travelers rather than nature or the dead, which Spirit witches consider heresy.
- They possess bodies rather than reincarnate — a Traveler's death is a change of address.
- Their victory in 2014 turns Mystic Falls into a magic-free zone where vampires die of whatever originally killed them.
- Ended: Damon and Elena blow up the Grill with the Travelers inside, killing Markos and themselves — but the anti-magic border survives them, and is only lifted when Kai Parker siphons the spell out of the town.
Were Travelers, before the schism
The doppelgängers they hunted
The Brotherhood of the Five
12th century – 2013 · a living map
Five supernatural hunters created in 1110 by a dying witch descended from Qetsiyah, each carrying a tattoo that grows with every vampire they kill and, when complete, points to Silas's tomb and the cure. She made them for one reason: so somebody would eventually dig him up.
- The mark is invisible to everyone except another potential hunter, which is why Jeremy Gilbert spends a season being marched around a table with his shirt off.
- The Hunter's Curse: kill one of the Five and you hallucinate everyone you have ever killed until you take your own life.
- Alexander, one of the originals, daggered every Mikaelson except Klaus at a dinner in 1114. The daggers do not work on a hybrid; Klaus woke and killed all five of them.
- Ended: Jeremy completes the map, the island is found, Silas is raised, and the brotherhood's purpose expires.
Her line created them, in 1110
The Founders’ Council
1864 – present · Mystic Falls
Five families — Salvatore, Gilbert, Fell, Forbes and Lockwood — organised to hunt vampires, and still meeting a century and a half later while most of their own descendants are vampires, werewolves or witches.
- Vervain in the town's water and drinks blocks compulsion; the Council has been dosing Mystic Falls since 1864.
- The Gilbert device incapacitates every supernatural creature in range — including werewolves, which is how the town found out the Lockwoods were one.
- In 1864 they burned twenty-seven vampires in a church. Emily Bennett sealed twenty-six of them in a tomb instead.
- Ended: functionally dissolved by attrition; Matt Donovan is the last human enforcing anything.
The Gemini Coven
centuries – 2015 · the American West
A witch coven organised around one tradition: every generation produces twins, and at a set age they merge — the stronger absorbs the weaker, who dies, and the survivor leads. They also build prison worlds: a single day, looping forever, occupied by one person.
- Siphoners — Gemini children born with no magic of their own, able only to draw it out of other magical things — are treated as abominations and cast out or imprisoned.
- Prison worlds need an ascendant, a Bennett witch's blood and a celestial event to open, which is why Kai needed Bonnie specifically.
- Every Gemini life is linked to the coven leader's, which is how Kai wipes out the entire coven by winning the Merge and then killing himself.
- Ended: destroyed in 2015. The Merge tradition outlives it by seven years and nearly kills Alaric's daughters.
The Heretics
1863 – 2016 · a 1903 prison world
Six siphoner witches turned into vampires by Lily Salvatore and raised by her as a family. A siphoner vampire is a magic-using vampire with an infinite internal battery — precisely the combination the Gemini built prison worlds to prevent.
- They can cast like witches and heal like vampires, which nothing else in the franchise can do.
- Valerie Tulle was Stefan Salvatore's first love and was carrying his child when Julian beat her.
- Nora and Mary Louise have been together for a century and are the most stable relationship in the arc.
- Ended: the Heretic war empties Mystic Falls entirely; all but Valerie are dead by 2016.
The Nine Covens & the Ancestors
centuries – 2017 · New Orleans
New Orleans witchcraft does not draw on nature or on spirits generally. It draws on the coven's own consecrated dead, buried in the city's cemeteries — and the dead have demands, opinions, and the power to cut a witch off completely.
- The Harvest sacrifices four girls of the coven to renew the connection. Three died; Marcel's vampires took Davina before her throat was cut.
- The Regent speaks for all nine covens. Both Davina and Vincent hold the post and neither wants it.
- The Ancestors torture the dead who displease them. They are not benign, and the show is explicit about it.
- Ended: Davina destroys them entirely, freeing the covens and gutting their power in the same act.
Outsiders who came for the city
The Crescent Wolf Pack
centuries – present · the Louisiana bayou
One of the great werewolf clans, cursed in 1991 on Marcel Gerard's orders — the spell cast by Brynne Deveraux while possessed by Céleste Dubois: locked in wolf form permanently, human only on the night of the full moon, the exact inversion of what a werewolf is.
- Hayley Marshall is Andrea Labonair, the last living heir of the pack's ruling line, raised entirely outside it — she was two years old when the curse was cast.
- The unification ritual — Hayley's marriage to Jackson Kenner — lets the whole pack turn at will and keep their minds, which is the single biggest quality-of-life improvement in werewolf history.
- Moonlight rings, spelled by witches, do the same job for individual wolves.
- The Malraux and North East Atlantic packs are rivals; Keelin is the last of the Malraux.
Ordered the curse, in 1991
Cast it, from inside another witch
The Strix
11th century – present · everywhere with money
A society of elite vampires founded by Elijah Mikaelson and seized by Tristan de Martel, his first sired, after Elijah fled Mikael — nine hundred years of accumulating wealth, influence and members. Marcel Gerard is recruited into it and eventually leads it.
- Elijah founded it with Aya al-Rashid in the 12th century and walked away from it; Tristan inherited it by default.
- Their interest in the Mikaelsons is possession: who is sired to whom, and therefore who owns whom.
- Aya, Tristan's lieutenant, runs the organisation's day-to-day and is more dangerous than he is.
Founded it, then walked away
Augustine
1950s – 2010s · Whitmore College
A secret research society that captured vampires and vivisected them for decades in the name of science. Damon Salvatore was subject 21051 in 1953. Enzo St. John was held for seventy years. It is the franchise's plainest statement of its own thesis: humans are not the safe species.
- Damon escaped in 1958 by leaving Enzo in a burning building, and the bill arrives sixty years later.
- Dr. Wes Maxfield revives the programme in the 2010s and engineers a vampire that feeds on other vampires.
- The Whitmore family funded it for generations, and Damon works through the descendants one at a time.
The Armory
19th century – 2017 · a vault outside Mystic Falls
A secret society and vault run by the St. John family, hoarding supernatural artefacts for over a century — and containing one thing in the basement that nobody should have gone looking for.
- Alaric Saltzman is hired to catalogue it after the three-year time jump, which is how the Salvatore School later gets its library.
- The vault held Sybil. Anyone who goes down there hears her, and anyone who hears her belongs to her.
- Ended: the vault is opened, the sirens get out, and the Armory ceases to matter.
Cade’s Service
before 750 BC – 2017 · Hell
Arcadius — older than the sirens, older than vampires, older than Silas — does not command an army; he keeps a payroll. Two sirens harvest souls for him, and in the last season he recruits Damon and Stefan Salvatore as collectors, sending them to kill people whose deaths would tip a ledger.
- He never lies and never breaks a deal, and everyone who deals with him loses anyway.
- Sirens override compulsion and do not need eye contact, which makes them the only villain the town's standard defences do nothing against.
- Hell has a physical anchor beneath Mystic Falls, which is the only reason it can be destroyed.
- Ended: Stefan kills Cade; Bonnie destroys the dimension; Katherine inherits the throne for about a day.
The Human Faction
centuries – present · New Orleans
The compact that keeps New Orleans from open war has a human seat, held for generations by the O'Connell family and administered through the church. It exists so that someone in the story can say the obvious thing out loud, and so that the city's ordinary people are represented at all.
- Father Kieran O'Connell holds the seat until his death; his niece Camille inherits it.
- The faction has no power and considerable leverage, which is roughly how it works everywhere.
Klaus’s Hybrids
2010–2012 · Mystic Falls
The whole point of breaking the curse: an army of werewolf-vampire hybrids, turned by Klaus, sire-bonded to him and unable to disobey. He wanted them because he did not want to be the only one of himself.
- Hybrids turn at will and without pain, which is why every werewolf initially wants it.
- The sire bond is gratitude, not compulsion — a wolf freed from a lifetime of agony will do anything for the person who freed them.
- Elena's blood is what breaks the bond, which is why Tyler's mass defection is possible.
- Ended: Klaus slaughters most of them; Mikael and the Originals kill the rest.
Killed to make them possible
The Tomb Vampires
1864–2010 · under Fell’s Church
Twenty-six vampires sealed under the church by Emily Bennett instead of burned, desiccating for 145 years under a spell keyed to a comet, and released into a town that had entirely forgotten them.
- They come out starving and 145 years out of date, which the show plays for exactly the right amount of horror.
- Katherine was never among them, which is the discovery that reorganises Damon's entire life.
- Pearl and Anna are the two who try to build ordinary lives, and both are killed by John Gilbert within weeks.
Malivore & the Triad
ancient – 2021 · a golden pit
A pit built by a witch, a vampire and a werewolf — the triad, one of each species — to consume monsters and erase them from the world. Not kill. Erase: everything it takes is forgotten by everyone who ever knew it, and every record goes with it.
- It explains why the first two shows never mentioned dragons or muses: Malivore had eaten them. The gods are the exception — they slept through it instead.
- Landon Kirby and Ryan Clarke are its sons, made as retrieval agents.
- Hope is erased by it for a stretch, including from the memories of everyone who loves her.
- Ended: destroyed by Hope in 2021 — which releases everything it had ever swallowed.
Erased by it, then released
Slept through it in a sarcophagus
The Salvatore School
2018 – present · Mystic Falls
The Salvatore boarding house, converted into a school for young witches, vampires and werewolves. It is Caroline Forbes' idea, Klaus Mikaelson's money and Alaric Saltzman's job, and it is the one genuinely optimistic institution in the entire franchise.
- Cloaked and warded, and presented to the outside world as an ordinary boarding school for gifted students.
- The library is essentially the Armory's collection, run by Dorian Williams.
- Emma Tig is the counsellor, and the first adult in eleven seasons to ask any of these children how they are.
- It survives the franchise, which nothing else does.
The Returned Gods
2021–2022 · after Malivore
When Malivore is destroyed, everything it ever consumed comes back — and an entire pantheon wakes up. The gods were never eaten: they slept through Malivore in sarcophagi, which is why no witch, vampire or Original had ever heard of them.
- Ken slept out Malivore in a sarcophagus rather than be eaten by it, and is the last major antagonist of the franchise.
- Cleo Sowande is a muse — her power is inspiration itself — and joins the school rather than the pantheon.
- Aurora de Martel, turned in the 11th century, returns in the same stretch — freed by Lucien from the wall Klaus entombed her in, not out of Malivore. She dies taking Ken's spear for Hope.
Freed from a wall by Lucien