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In the context of White Wolf Game Studio's Vampire: The Masquerade books and role-playing games, diablerie takes place when a vampire drinks all the blood of another vampire, generally in order to increase his/her own powers.
The strength of vampirical powers is often correlated with the vampire's generation, i. e. the generational distance between the original vampire Cain and the vampire, where Cain was the first generation, his sons were the second, etc. (in The Masquerade, most players are 12th or 13th generation). On each successive generation these powers become more and more diluted. By committing diablerie, a vampire can absorb those purer powers from a vampire of an earlier generation, effectively decreasing his/her own generation (the victim, of course, experiences the definitive death in the process).
Diablerie is explicitly forbidden by the vampiric tradition. In the past, the Assamite clan devoted its energies to diablerie in order to gain power, until the Tremere placed a magic curse on them, by virtue of which Assamites became physically harmed by the act of drinking vampire blood. This curse remains in the present, but the Assamites have found a way to circumvent it by indirect means. It must be noted that diablerie was not unknown to the Tremere (the clan's founder committed diablerie on Saulot, the Antediluvian founder of clan Salubri).
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