#this is one of my spcs for our vampire chronicle

[relleytrots]

D'you have any player-facing or secret ST-eyes-only systems that you like to use for tracking SI exposure in your games? Or (shunting you a soapbox here) for seeding and making good on consequences generally?

So in general, my absolute favourite way to generate The Quencies is Succees At A Cost. "I'll offer you a devil's bargain," to quote the Master, Mr. Carl.

Kick enough Successes at a Cost down the trail and you can have them escalate into something quite spectacular, whatever that turns out to be. The same for Messy Critical consequences. "There's been a Masquerade breach, but I need to work out the details, so it'll be with you in a couple of sessions' time." That sort of thing.

I also like to frame story beats as poison chalices and sadistic choices. Yes, you can have the Dunsirns' help in covering up the assassination attempt on that Baron you murdered, but they want her property, her territory, and you to know exactly who took the fall for you and what that's worth.

What else? Every chronicle needs a character who's talked about more than they are seen. Telegraphy is key, but don't go too hard on it - we don't want players going "we've got a BADASS over here" about them. I think the trick is having other SPCs be afraid of them, or answerable to them, or clearly dependent on them.

In my Glasgow game, Miss Drake the scourge didn't appear very often, but she was mentioned in the context of "what keeps this praxis running?" and "why doesn't anyone hunt in the West End?" Sir Thomas Dunsirn - Big Tam to his family - was the unseen hand of the nocturnal economy and, more to the point, the hand holding Alistair's leash.

There's this horrid old man who somehow gets you to do whatever he wants. You first met him when he physically and psychically assaulted his way into your turf and your crime scene. You owe him your continued liberty. And he has a boss. At that point, player imagination is doing the work.

But while we're here, I'm also going to talk about Nemesis Points. I took these a late-series Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Night Dragon, and I love them. As you quest to find the location of the titular Night Dragon and prevent its resurrection by the cult who worship it, you have various avenues of investigation to pursue, some of which are of course dead ends: you also have various bits of side business, in accordance with custom. Every prevarication, every attempt made, even the successful ones, adds some Nemesis Points to your tally. If you haven't found the Night Dragon's lair by the time you reach a given Nemesis score, Your Adventure Is Over in a sense far greater than "you got mugged by three pirates and died again."

When I was running face to face games, I'd sometimes put one of those spindown - or in this case spin up - life counters from Magic on the table. Whenever my players prevaricated, overthought, faffed about or otherwise didn't make the most of our time together, the die would spin up a little.

I think something like that could adapt to Masquerade cockups very nicely. People love a meter.

I find the Response Algorithm and Institutional Conflict systems in the Anarch and Camarilla books are a bit of a headache, but they're there if you need them. Of course, Second Inquisition also has a chapter explicitly for doing this, for running your SI presence as an active and hostile force with its own goals - almost a solo side game for the ST.

This isn't something I've used - yet - as Wild Roses was very much me finding the transitions I needed to make out of Revised era thinking, and one of those was vampire-focus, less interest in what mortals want and are doing. The SI there was a cool threat that warmed up in the third story when I wanted to raise the stakes and do a cool bank heist opening session, and again when a returning player gave me the opportunity to tell a story about collaborators and how they should die in shame. I had ideas for how they served the vampire story and they were only developed in so far as they did that.

I'm not actually very happy with how I characterised and played my SI characters, and I'd like to do them justice with another outing. One where they actually have a project. It'll be more work for me, but if I'm going to do this Spy vs. Spy chronicle concept justice, I'm going to have to do that work, aren't I?

[informaltorching]

spc asks for vesper!

4. an spc they know of but have yet to meet face to face

8. an spc they respect

10. an spc they might go to if they needed help

4. An SPC they know of but have yet to meet face to face: Basically every single Setite in the chronicle. Vesper avoids them like the plague, despite them being pretty prominent SPCs in our game. However, that may be pretty subject to change since his favorite Ravnos has been fucking around with them for a bit. Which is scary since Vesper knows for a fact that one of them is a methuselah... Vesper also made a deal with Owen to help them kill their sire, who is actually arriving in our chronicle next session... And the other big one he hasn't really met is Amare's sire, who I think will be very interesting to him. He only really knows what she has told him about him (which actually isn't much tbh - probably a good thing, though because then Vesper will get hung up on planning the guy's final death) and odds are they will not get along.

8. An SPC they respect: Vesper actually really respects an SPC called Tors. He is a Lasombra Scourge that is currently the acting Sheriff in our game due to the recent final death of the previous one. The guy's personality is literally just...picture if Vesper was a Lasombra... The guy enjoys being a Scourge because all he wants is to bathe in carnage and be left alone. Every time he shows up somewhere, he is covered in gore and has a cigarette in his mouth and is just like "What do you want?" He punched someone's head clean off last session and everyone at the table lost it laughing at his fucking insane roll. My favorite part of that was him and Vesper just awkwardly looking at each other afterwards. 10. An SPC they might go to if they needed help:

It depends the kind of help, but Vesper usually goes to his sire when he needs something. And I will stress he hates going to her so he must really need it. Vesper is very big on doing everything he possibly can himself / with the coterie before ever contacting another vampire and letting them in on anything. Plus she sometimes likes to rub it in his face when he needs anything. Like, HA. SEE. YOU NEED ME. To which he grumbles...okay fine...I do...sometimes.

[camellia-thea]

I cannot brain properly but I have GOT to know more about amara and dove. tell me anything - @pretend-pretend-vampire

hello!! thank you for the ask! i will ramble about them <3

dove and amara are from a recent vtm 5e game, set in aotearoa. dove is my pc, and amara is a tzimisce spc played by the amazing @balthazarslostlibrary, our storyteller. we're currently on break for life reasons, but i look forward to when we get to play again. this is a (very) long ramble about character choices, meta, and a little bit of narrative.

a little context for dove! she spent sixteen years as a ghoul to a ventrue named rochefort, before being poached from him by an as of yet unknown lasombra. she was abandoned him, but due to having the with a blood bond to him, by way of having both the long bond, and the bond slave flaws. it took several months for the bond to drop away, and so now that's she's finally in her right mind -- after almost 17 years of being bound to someone -- the chronicle began.

dove and amara first met at elysium; dove's first. they wandered the museum hosting the elysium and ended up in the deep sea exhibit! (this is, by the way, a real exhibit in the museum te papa, a part of the exhibit te taiao. it has a colossal squid!) i just think it's super fun that they wandered around with a whole load of wet specimen from the deep. amara invited dove out to its haven, a tattoo parlour.

dove then made a visit on her own, and as a gift, gave amara a set of her ribs.

mechanically, amara is dove's mawla, and i love them a lot.

i think a lot for me that rests about their relationship is how the pair interact with interpersonal relationships.

tzimisce have so much about possession; they are built to have really fucked up views of people and ownership. mechanically, their bane is grounded -- they must rest in a place (be that concrete or more abstract) with things they own and deem theirs. then their compulsion is covetousness. i love that conceptually, beyond dove and amara. vampires leaning into the inhuman way they view their surroundings because of their immortality, their power, their everything.

i didn't intentionally make dove to play off of amara, or tzimisce in general, but i've always had a thing around perception of freedom and identity (look at taralin, my primary d&d pc--it's a theme!), and i wanted to play with the concept of someone who had finally gained a significant amount of power and freedom, and have them struggle to find their feet, and make bad decisions as they figure out who they are. dove was the culmination of a whole load of ideas that i really enjoy playing with. with the lasombra technology issues, her past as someone good with computers isolated her from her skills. an absentee sire, and someone who held a grudge isolated her socially. in addition, making her as a character designed to experience blood bonds, one drink to triple the length of the bond? delicious, and i really wanted to play a character who desperately was grappling for control over her own life while being built to not be in control.

having amara present? a tzimisce on side? honestly made the choice for me; there was never ever going to be a way for that to go smoothly in any capacity, simply because of both character's designs.

someone who never wants to be owned again and a character who cannot help but claim ownership over anything close to it? i wanted to have dove grapple with that.

there's another aspect of it i touch on in anatomy too, which is a character with the ability to entirely remake themselves in whatever image they wish and another who cannot perceive themself at all. dove's loss of identity through being a ghoul, and then that manifesting as someone who cannot ever see herself again? amara has the capacity to gift her control over her body, her reflection, as it were.

i think it also comes down to the fact that dove doesn't know how to not be owned by someone entirely. i don't think she'll ever be able to separate herself from that past.

i think vampires often get stuck in who they were right before they turned. it's the idea of being frozen in time and unable to move past that traumatic event; you died. how could you ever get past that?

and i think that's an aspect of dove too. the feeling that you'll never get past your trauma and for her, it might genuinely be true. but that also might be her own perspective stopping her, i don't think i know, nor do i necessarily think i need to know yet. and dove spent 16 years knowing that she'd die a ghoul, or become a vampire. there was never going to be a different end for her. and so, that's had a massive effect on her decision making.

one of the first things she did was to give herself over to mother russo (the lasombra primogen) and agree to join the cam. her logic was, this gives me protection, this keeps me safe. strength in numbers, and if something goes wrong i'll have allies. but i don't think she wanted to. she wanted to remain autarkis, but she didn't know how to exist without some sort of external direction. being given a task gave her so much relief, even as it made her feel resentment. it's funny, because i as a player hate that dove is cam. i think it's going to completely fuck her over and i think it was the worse option for her. but for her? completely correct and i think it's going to hit hard when she realises she's locked herself back into being at the bottom rung.

i think amara in equal respects represents everything dove desperately wants, and everything she despises. amara has the control dove wants, the respect of the wider community, in as much as it can control its own life and isn't (visibly) beholden to anyone. but, dove knows what amara is. knows what the tzimisce are, and is terrified of that too.

but i also think dove views amara as the closest kindred to trustworthy as she can get. there's a lot of paradoxical thinking in my girl. i, the player, was given the option to have mother russo as my mawla instead of amara, and i hummed and hawed about it a lot before going with my initial instinct (which was definitely motivated in part by my love for tzimisce). but despite how willingly i flung dove at the cam, she felt far more vulnerable with mother russo, (despite being willing to let amara at her rib cage) and she hated that. amara treated dove as a person. that was the real deciding thing on dove's thought process. there was a collection of meta things too (such as wanting to play with possessiveness and dove's control issues.) dove knows what to expect from amara. she knows what it is, and while there are certainly hidden depths, dove thinks that she can at least trust amara to be genuine with the push-pull of a quid pro quo relationship.

and i think part of the really fun thing is at present, dove is completely disenchanted by her coterie. she doesn't want to be there, but they've got a job to complete for the cam. she's a bitch, she looks down on them, and that's driving her to the only person she really thinks is capable, amara. and i think dove will grow to like and respect her coterie, but unfortunately two very well placed frenzies on our gangrel's part has completely lost any potential respect she has for the others. and i think there's a whole load of potential fun things there for dove siding with amara over the coterie, or a push pull situation of dove being places between what the coterie wants and what amara wants. we'll see when we pick up again.

if you want to read more about amara, there is another (much much longer) piece that features him! Te whakawhitiwhiti: The Transformation was written by my storyteller about amara and two of their ghouls. this is set before dove and amara's first meeting, and primarily focuses on one of amara's ghouls, hine, coming into her own, with a lot of fun vampire stuff alongside.

if you have any follow ups, feel free to ask! it's been super fun to ramble about them both here

[notnearlyenoughcaffeine]

Most of my PCs are pretty Normal about relationships, but my SPCs — oh boy. Here's a part of the AU of VTM chronicle I play with my friends, Aisha is the @thethirdvoerman's character, Vera's mine.

“Yeah, I can see why he likes you.”

“And you?”

“What, me?”

Vera decided to play dumb, but Aisha wasn't going to let her. Aisha leaned back on a sofa, tilted her head to the side to show her neck and the golden necklace framing it, and meet Vera's gaze.

“Do you like me?”

Aisha expected Vera to get confused, maybe blush and look away, but to Aisha’s surprise, Vera laughed with relief.

“Oh, sorry, I don't do that. Neither sex nor Kiss. Don't bother. Besides, I’m too old for you.”

Aisha tensed. Did she misjudge her?

“Older than Ambrose?”

“Ha! No, he must've personally known Pontius Pilate. Again, it’s not really about me. Ambrose always makes a choice to get involved with people.”

Aisha heard the unspoken continuation of this thought: “...and I don’t”.

“Why wouldn’t he? All kindred were people once, we are not so different. To feel the need in a company is natural and very… humane. Wouldn’t he become a monster without getting involved with people? Trying to understand them, to love them as they are?”

“There is a dilemma, you see. You have a very good point, but in my experience, getting closer to people, allowing them to like you, love you even, is like… infecting them with a disease. You are putting people in constant danger, because no kindred can truly control themself, and if they say they can, they’re either a liar or a fool — and that’s the innocent case if you are not actively… corrupting them. Like ergot slowly but inevitably destroying wheat from the inside.”

“These thoughts are no different from the thoughts of a person who believes themselves to be the poison in the lives of their loved ones. It doesn’t mean that you have to shut off every connection. It’s our connections and allowing yourself to be open and vulnerable that actually keeps us kind and compassionate. You don’t have to doom yourself to misery and loneliness because you don’t want to harm others. People have free will, and they can decide for themselves if the deal is worth the risk.”

“I’m not lonely”, Vera shook her head. Oh yes, Aisha remembered, the not-boyfriend.

“And you are not afraid to harm your kindred friends?”

The question did the magic trick and made Vera silent, without any hint at the possibility of response. Aisha considered it a win. Aisha took a closer look and discovered the shadow of guilt in Vera’s features, in her posture and slightly lowered head. Little hypocrite hid her belief in vampire supremacy behind hollow concern about hurting humans when she had already hurt another vampire. Charming, truly.

Good morning vtm gang I wanna read more about yalls creatures

What's your vampire's approach to romance/sex? Do they have a partner? How's their relationship looking like? If not, why not? Gimme the teaaaa

[ufochasing]

👁🥀🔮

[ranjxtul]

VTM Rambles: the Lesbian Cinematic Universe

so i run a chronicle set in new orleans and it's part of what my girlfriend and i call the lesbian cinemtic universe which also includes their berlin by night chronicle that i play in. we call it such because i'm sure you can imagine there are so many lesbian characters. and like, i love it because our games are so queer friendly as they're run by trans lesbians and played by other sapphics. all of us are also experienced ttrpg players or storytellers in some other way too so it's very common someone will have someone else crying or freaking out because of the scene they're playing,

I also think the queerness and our experience with storytelling allows us to better explore the themes of vampire, which to me are what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be good. We all have characters, PCs or SPCs alike that re struggling with the darkness of the kindred and human world, in fact I think some way all of them are. i love being able to explore what that means for these people and how they react and cope with the pain of their lives. As creators in these games, we've taken a very human approach to creating these chracters as world of darkness seems to believe that once you're embraced you lose all goodness. it also seems to me they believe tiers of humanity are fixed and unuanced when that is simply not the case so i love playing with what each tier of humanity might mean for each character.

as a storyteller, and a player i interpret the beast as more a figurative manifestation of whatever magic that comes with kindredhood and the blood combined with a person's shadow self and subconscious. i'm personally not a fan of the idea that the beast is an actual entity now living in a kindred' head because of the embrace that sucks the good from you. i think the beast forces the kindred to grapple with the darkest parts of themselves that were already there so the fight for goodness or humanity is internal and intrinsic. to me, this has created such an interesting conflict and even fear in certain characters who want to be kind and humane but are scared to lose that due to age or the world etc.

in these two games, we also have some really interesting themes going through. in berlin, i'd say we're creating a theme of healing generational wounds and in nola i think our theme is becoming learning to hold on to the love and kindness in your life, because it will save you in more ways than one. as a creator whether that be on the storyteller or player side, i'm taking these ideas and running with them. for me, a throughline theme helps tie a story together and helps write the story as it devlops even in an rpg.

additionally, i've found that vtm is a great system to explore heavier topics than you more easily could in dnd or something similar. the central questions of the game lends itself to that. for example, in nola i have a plot that has to do with the second inquistion in the cia and how the prince of the camarilla is currently being trafficked as a part of a deal to hold of the cia which was made knowing one day she'd break. i also think the system is a good way to explore power dynamics in society and tradition. even though our political systems are very different in reality a lot of the messiness and the constructs that create those systems are present in the construction of the camarilla, anarchs, and sabbat- to me this is just another interesting way to explore morality in a game like this.

i am a neuroscientist and enjoy tweaking the poorly written mechanics relating kindred anatomy and physiology. i could make a whole post dedicated to what i've messed with in that regard because it's been a lot. i've altered scarring, disease/immune states, the appearance and visibility of disability, metabolism, and fertility to name a few. most importantly from that list is disability and disease. in both games several characters are autistic or adhd or both. there are vampires who use mobility aids, who are amputees, the nola prince and her wife have hiv, one of my pcs has hEDS and the other has lupus. world of darkness erases disability entirely when talking about the embrace and to me, that's wrong. disability isn't awful or heinous and shouldn't be erased in a low (or high for that matter) fantasy game because it's a part of life for so many people.

lastly in this rant s/o to the people who create with me in the lesbian cinematic unverse @rj-thursday @yelenaslightchangeofplan and andi (who's tumblr i don't know) i love yall and i'm so happy to play these games with you... undercover todd forever