porcelainseashore

[porcelainseashore]

Hi vampire lovers we're back with another VTM zine! Introducing DollHouse: Sins of the Flesh! A fun and spicy little zine for artists and writers in the style of a fictional porn magazine themed around the discipline of vicissitude!

This is a digital NSFW/18+ zine looking for art and writing. Applications close August 15th, and the deadline for works is September 20th.

Application spots are limited. If you don't make it in feel free to use the tag #Dollhousevtm to join in on the fun and show off your take of the theme!

If you have any questions please feel free to reach out.

Application FAQ Discord

Special thanks to @porcelainseashore @kessinder and @cosmokramerassaugmentation for helping out this time around!

[porcelainseashore]

I Don't Exist When You Don't See Me

This is how it happens:

You're walking through London WC1 - Bloomsbury, Birkbeck, Brunswick, and that's just the Bs. Maybe you're leaving work late; maybe you're putting off going straight home. Maybe you can't face another night of squalling, and sighing, and shit-stirring and swearing and sleeping on the settee in front of something that starts with an S. BS. That's what it is. Complete and utter BS.

You're in a mood. Febrile, and unfaithful. You know you don't want to bring this home with you - it'll be your fault, and you don't want to deal with that either. So you take off your tie and stuff it in your pocket like you're at school again, and you decide you'll walk as far as King's Cross, maybe stop there for a bit to eat. You've already said you'll be home late. Late enough, and maybe they'll all have tired each other out.

You're halfway down Cartwright Gardens when you see her. She's by the statue, doing some sort of street theatre? You slow your pace, because she's pretty - young, and bright, and has tattoos on her thighs that you can half see where the cut of her skirt flicks across them. It's not street theatre. It's magic. You're picked out of the crowd, and she whips a two-pound coin out of your ear, and - thrilling, breathy, unexpected, the stuff of sheer fantasy or late-night private browsing, she whispers: "stick around after the show."

You don't get to King's Cross. You do buy that dinner, and hers too: street food, churros off an older couple with a cart. You don't send that text, to say you'll be home in an hour, or two hours, or three. She laughs at your jokes, slips her hand inside your jacket and tickles you, and you find yourself laughing too. God, that feels good. Just to be... silly, for a change. You'd have been sleeping alone anyway. So you follow her down past the halls and the houses eaten inside-out by the university, to a narrow old house on the corner of Regent Square.

You ask her how she can afford this. House share, she says, and a secondary income, and she winks. You're a corporate go-getter, aren't you? Even if your get up and go has mostly got up and gone, six years after internship. And she's so pretty, and her skirt rides up further when she stretches up to kiss you. Her flat's a bit... bare. More on the walls than on the floor. More books on the shelves than anything else. The furniture's old - antique, but not well cared for, corners cracked and splitting.

You don't, at this point, give a damn.

You'll lie to them, when you get home, sometime after midnight. You'll tell them you walked out, you realised what you were doing, you got your head together and took the night bus home.

You won't tell them how, in the faint reflection on the windowpanes, as the streetlight hit just the right angle, you saw the other woman. She wasn't there, and then she was. She was watching you, dark eyes staring as your magical girl - her name was Sarah, or something like it - worked her way down your shirt buttons.

You felt lips, and fingertips, but they weren't in front of you.

You won't tell them you don't remember anything before you woke up on the night bus, starting awake. Light headed, and empty, and not quite sure if you'd cheated or not, which meant you probably had - but you could tell yourself maybe it wasn't quite real.

Maybe you'll take that one to the grave. Maybe you won't.

[porcelainseashore]

D.D's Late One Year Anniversary on Tumblr posting!

It's been (a month or two over) a year since D.D has been going, so I have pulled myself out from under a rock to share these for you all as ily :) BRUJAH POST It's been a while so I'm a little rusty with these, so I'm sorry if the quality isn't great. Probably should have started with Banu Haqim for alphabetical reasons, but Brujah vibes ✨️ I added a quote from Brujah's commandments, along with some Anarch ones too. Tried gif ones. Eeeeeh... I'm unsure. I threw in a Bonus Bambi themed one because. B a m b i Also; finding ways to mush symbols together really satisfying tbh.

I'll get around to the other clans when I can! Feel free to use with credit <3

Bonus Bambi:

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OC Owen commission for @mcscrambled

[porcelainseashore]

I actually really enjoy the mechanics of the beckoning but I think it should absolutely function as a means of balancing your elders and complicating them as figures in the story as opposed to just Moving them off the board to some orientalist bash off forever.

I don't think paradox/renegade did a good job of announcing that the BECKONING IS GLOBAL NOW!!! THEYR'E DRAWN TO CONFLICTS. and then awkwardly having to re-introduce elders later on bc they're a fundamental piece of the vtm pie. Which is the hierarchy, contention and distinction of elders vs neonates.

I like to think of it as a heavier compulsion on top of their bane severity and their hunger. they are ruled by it. A creature with so much power and experience, and yet sooner or later they come to become beholden to this thing that is mostly inconvenient for most fledglings.

That the beckoning is this compulsion and urge, to really dig deep and be the eldritch ancient beast that's had years to be bent and twisted. That even the most benevolent elder feels the urges to not just brutally take over, but to fully lose themselves in violence. That there's this siren call to be the thing of myth and in doing so, lose their mortal holdings and become a beacon for hunters and even other vampires to put down.

This hunger that has ceased to be sated by mere humans and needs more, needs complication, needs conflict, needs war, needs bloodshed on a level that is not compatible with a second inquisition and surveillance state.

Barely under the trappings of a powerful creature that is held against an urge and must fight it nightly. Relief coming in the cruelty- many of them try to avoid being associated with, diablerie and blood leeching.

I like exploring it with my sabbat elders, that it's so hypocritical, so contentious with their idealogy, and yet they feel the urges to be th very thing they fight against, the ache in their fangs as a neonate might offer kindness freely, or a bleeding fledgling.

[porcelainseashore]

a guy

[porcelainseashore]

On Understanding and Enabling the Hecata

How To Enable A Hecata In Play

You won't believe how easy it is to solve a murder when you can just ask the victim.

OK, you know how the victim died. Now get someone else to believe it. Now get someone else to accept what a Giovanni told them, and not ask "are you being played by those sultry Italians?" Now realise that there is no due process among the Damned, and the Prince doesn't give a shit who really killed Mrs. Mosschild - they will decide who killed Mrs. Mosschild, and their decision is law, and what are you going to do about it, neonate?

In a detective story, "solve the murder" is the ending. In a Vampire chronicle, it's the beginning.

You handle necromancy by not making it the clan's entire hat. The Hecata is a family cult that worships death, and money, and blood - not even necessarily in that order. Your Hecata characters don't have to sully their hands with necromancy at all. I've run a Dunsirn baron with two dots: Ashes to Ashes so the bodies go away, and Fatal Precognition so he knows where the next one's coming from.

You have the option of not taking any Ceremonies at all. Just keep Oblivion as the discipline of weaponised entropy, sickness inflicted, rot unleashed. Ashes to Ashes, Fatal Prediction, Aura of Decay or Touch of Oblivion, Necrotic Plague, Skuld Fulfilled or Withering Spirit. A 1-5 progression, with options, and you can splash in some shadow flavour if you don't like the effect at a given tier. Think chill of the grave rather than spoopy darkness.

But let's say you're gonna go there anyway. Let's talk zombies, first. The zombie horde of pop culture necromancy is trouble waiting to happen - it doesn't technically breach the Masquerade, but it makes a lot of noise and gets people investigating. One zombie, around the house, perhaps ridden by its original spirit, as a weird-ass Retainer who can't get out much? That's workable. Scale it down. Softly, softly.

Now ghosts, the thing that seems to cause most practical problems for Storytellers. Ghosts are, in mechanical terms, a supernatural Retainer (three dots, or even four if you're picking up that one Giovanni Loresheet ability that gives you a bound spectre). They're very hard to detect, they can usually affect the physical world in at least one way, and there's a constant dramatic tension depending on how hard your necromancer is treating them.

Are they Summoning an irregular ally and negotiating with them? Are they Compelling a slave on pain of fetter destruction? Are they Hosting for a power up, or Binding a prisoner? Are they Passion Feasting on a ghostly Herd so they don't have to hurt the living with those wicked chompers? The further you go into Necromantic Ceremonies, the worse a person you have to be. That's the dramatic hook, that's the personal horror that's on the tin.

For mechanics, hit up Cults of the Blood Gods. There are four statblocks and power spreads for ghosts in that book (well, three statblocks: annoyingly, one of them's duplicated). Those are the numbers your Hecata's ghost Retainer has. Finding a use for that Retainer is now on them. Players can lift the burden of narrative too!

You could also hack the Allies background, if you wanted. The two part structure of effectiveness and availability actually works really well for an entity which has to be summoned into the world with a spell and might have its own ghost shit going on. But the Retainer option is the most straightforward, and it shuts down ghostly diversions when you're trying to tell a vampire story.

If It's That Easy, Why Do Folks Hate Them?

Giovanni were, for the longest time, a collection of stereotypes and accusations: mobster incest necrophile lol. There was always more there, but - perhaps that's me seeing what I wanted to see, projecting eighteenth century literature and twelfth century war profiteering in to polish a turd. Doesn't help that the game was often in on the joke (see also, how the Giovanni are framed in Bloodlines, which has been the gateway drug for quite a few players over the years).

Aspects of their setup are a bit silly (there is. no skyscraper. in Venice. fuck sake.) or difficult to Storytell (people always think they have to run a Wraith crossover, and the Revised Clanbook didn't help by leaning into that so heavily).

The Independent clans as a collective tend to be pushed off and forgotten about as either antagonists or service providers, when the "main story" is about Camarilla, Sabbat, maybe Anarchs if you're lucky, and who gets to run the clubhouse and whose club gets to run the city.

People are really squicked out by the necrophilia and incest, and it doesn't help that the rules have leant into it (gangraping a corpse for +1 to necromancy rolls. fuck sake.). Or they're really into it in a way that becomes everyone else's problem, which gives Giovanni players and fans a bad name.

As for the others: Cappadocians are, with the greatest of respect, even worse off than the Giovanni. They're here to go, created so they can be destroyed, everything about their setup feeds into or draws out of grand-scale loopy-loo metaplot ideas, and it's a constant struggle to drag them back down to where your average player character is at. Nagaraja have always been weirdly popular and possibly one of the less stupid bits of the Black Hand. Samedi are definitely also there, one of those concepts that's cool on paper and just... lazy racial profiling in practice?

The Hecata represent an opportunity to cinch all that off and say "hey, this is the Clan of Death now - a sprawling family cult that worships blood, money and death, not even in that order, and is basically the Swiss Bank to the rest of Kindred society. Neutral third party, go-between, handshake across the battlelines." Except it was overseen by a developer who, god love him, is a professional lore spod and can't bear to let anything go, so all that old baggage was dragged forward too and presented as part of the whole rather than what Loresheets should be, strictly optional opt-in references to stuff that doesn't really matter unless you want it to.

[porcelainseashore]

been a while since i posted seb content :D

[porcelainseashore]

Sweet Nyth belongs to @thesixthplaneteer!! This is a companion piece to this drawing of Noa!

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Gretchen by the phenomenal @furiousnotpersonakitten Thank you for this amazing gift, hun! Not only will I stare at it for hours, but I'll treasure it forever 🖤🩷

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gift for @qadiral-asmaimylove! I just adore Esme! She's a total bombshell that can do no wrong

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no offense but how did y'all watch sinners and walk away simping after the horrifically mid white boy when Michael B Jordan is literally right there in three different genres

[porcelainseashore]

Aster and Marigold for Ms. Gael, please and thank you?

Flower Themed OC Questions

Von! My Ravnos sibling! Hello! You have asked and I have provided 🙏

Gael

8. Aster: Is your character considered charming or lacking in social tact?

Ms. Gael isn't exactly into the whole political chess game. In Kindred high society, she's rather out of place and unless the Winters insist that she attends such functions, she'd rather be anywhere else. Her bluntness makes her unassuming and people think they can trust her because she appears frank. This works pretty well when she's picking up food on the road (N.B. Roadside Killer predator type). That's part of Gael's charm.

15. Marigold: Does anyone wish your character harm?

The Winters have many enemies as they have allies, so whoever works for them take these on. Recently, we stopped a very well-organized group of Tremere and their mage or cultist counterparts from taking over and summoning the angel, BeneiHa’Elohim. However, the fight is far from over as the remaining Tremere who fled will certainly come back if we don't strike first. Gael also being connected to the criminal underworld means that although fellow crooks want to do her favors, she needs to uphold her reputation there. Another thing I'd like to point out is that the Winters have basically threatened and forced her to work under them, so technically they aren't benevolent beings.

[porcelainseashore]

Cosmos and daisy for anyone who you haven't done yet

Flower Themed OC Questions

Hi Dov, thanks for the questions! I've allocated them to the OCs that haven't been asked those juicy ones yet :)

René

9. Cosmos: Does your character value order and structure, or prefer a life of chaos?

This is a tough one, but I'd say René leans more towards chaos. As a circus artist, I think he's quite comfortable with spontaneity and improvisation when things don't work out quite the way as planned. Chaos can overwhelm him, but at the same time he sees patterns in it that he can focus on. That said, he and his co-founders do pull their weight when it comes to running the collective they've created.

Sage

15. Daisy: Is your character aware of any evil around them or are they ignorant to any misdeeds or people's true intentions?

Sage's job is a natural hazard, so she's no stranger to such occurrences, which seem to happen more frequently if she's hanging out in the Containment Sector. Sometimes, it can feel like the Oldest House is out to get her, but she knows what she's signed up for and has maneuvered her way around pretty well so far. Lately though, her colleagues have mentioned seeing her in places around the bureau that she doesn't recall being at...

[porcelainseashore]

WIP (Actually) Wednesday

I'm starting the chain of WIPs this week with my yet untitled Sage (Control OC) x Leon Kennedy piece. It's just "stage directions" and dialogue, but here's two parts I've scribbled.

Chunk 1:

Chunk 2:

No pressure tags:

@inquisitornocturn @medeaft @relleytrots @essie-essex @mortifying-macaroni

@vampemoqueen @thesixthplaneteer @kavalyera @qadiral-asmaimylove @findingtarshish