#st advice

[gorbalsvampire]

Gehenna War

It's pretty neat, yo.

Like Blood-Stained Love, it transforms the core "personal and political" horror of Vampire into another subgenre. Unlike Blood-Stained Love, it has a lot of concrete advice for Storytellers on structuring scenes, assembling pools, building characters to interact with, and making that subgenre work at the table.

An effort has been made, here. There's a little chart in the introduction claiming that Chapters 2 and 3, and the Appendices, will be of use to any action chronicle, be it more high concept or street level, and having read the durn things I think that claim's borne out. I'm gonna talk about those sections first, and later loop back around to the specifically Gehenna War stuff.

Chapter 2 has neat archetypes for characters in various armed conflict roles - generals, spies, intelligencers, recruits, veterans - with recommendations for priority stats rather than statblocks, so these can be flipped for player or Storyteller use. Suggestions for bonus XP amounts if you want more powerful starting characters, and focused specialisations that advise you to focus particular areas of your character sheet - almost like soft classes, or playbooks. A handful of new Merits and Flaws (one of which is getting slammed onto Penny), and a mixed bag of Discipline powers. Bloodform is back? Woo! There are "reroll Rouse checks for raising this one Attribute or using this one Discipline" openers for the Physical Disciplines? Swing and a miss, more filler. There's two incredible new high-end Blood Sorcery rituals (I shall be using both of them very soon), and some funky Thin-Blood Alchemy if you want your Duskborn to join a Methuselah cult.

Then: advice on running Basic Combat, and explicit guidance on the modularity of the Advanced Combat rules, and a few new ones. This is brilliant stuff for new Storytellers, reflective of the demand for the Combat Primer, and it's given me some ideas I didn't have before, and ALSO. VINDICATION. OBSERVE.

One of the things that waters down play over time is if the characters need to build the same dice pool every time for the same task. To avoid this, Storytellers should vary the traits involved according to the situation, to keep things interesting and to curb players trying to optimize their pools.

Leaving aside that awful syntax at the start - "Play becomes predictable if the characters need to build the same dice pool every time they attempt a task" - activate your voice, and dismiss "is" clauses, you cowards! - anyway, leaving that aside, this is how I've been doing things all along and I love that a book explicitly says "do it and don't get hung up on the exact RAW every time."

Car chase mechanics, cute new gear (I like the Scourge Blades, nasty-ass duelling swords that delay vampiric healing). Then it's on to story advice!

Chapter Three does something I wish Blood-Stained Love had done for romance: getting into the structure of action stories, how action interacts with other genre qualifiers (crime, horror, survival, thriller etc.), the escalating role of villains - like, actual formalist thinking about how stories work. We then get some mechanical advice on how to shift the mode of play, how to approach things like Hunger and Frenzy to make them more or less of a factor. It's short, but it's fuckin' GOOD.

Appendix I is all about dice. When you should and shouldn't roll, as opposed to taking half. Grouping those moments into broad types by what they do to the emergent story. How to add variation with tracker rolls or unusual dice pools. How to manage failures on tests and what to offer players to keep the story moving. And, most important of all, how to deal with the Beast, going through each Skill and showing how the Beast impacts a Messy Critical (still a success, remember!) or a Bestial Failure.

You need this Appendix. The corebook needed this appendix. Maybe it took six years of best practice and sharing ideas to get these ideas fully understood. Maybe if there'd been one dev team since the start we might have had this sooner. At least we have it now.

I'll talk about the Gehenna War itself in a follow-up post. That's Chapters One, Four, Five and Six, and Appendix II.

[abi-butmakeitbyler]

WHICH COULD MEAN NOTHING.

The three of them 100% will have scenes together cause that's Finn's hand in the first pic and Maya is wearing the same fit!

[91939art]

🌟patreon | commission us🌟🌟

This Valentine's day, try anew! Loyalty and Will never looked better together 💚🦅

[skinnyisthesolulu]

thinspo 🎀

[catholicsapphic]

“Only God can judge me” actually God can’t judge me either. I’ve placed my unwavering hope in His endless Mercy, therefore constraining Him to show Himself to me as a Merciful Father rather than a Just Judge. Get on with times bro 🙄🙄🙄

[thelastbrookie]

If anyone needs an ana buddy dm me!! i’ve lowk been slipping up lately but i’m down to exchange info just lmk! hope u guys r doing good xoxo 💗🎀

Also a little thinspo 4 u guys!! : ☆

(think about how good you can look by the new year) ❥

[beautiful130s]

what other vitamins should I be taking daily besides this

[emblazons]

"I'm not gonna...fall in love."

STRANGER THINGS SANS VISAGE S03E01 - Suzie, Do You Copy?

[reineydraws]

i have a soft spot for fics where billy sort of ends up adopting el and will alongside max. like, these are the kids that get dibs for rides in the camaro haha.

also im unfortunately not participating bc prev commitments but #harringrove for turkey is happening right now if yall want to donate to the earthquake relief funds for turkey & syria and get some art/fic back from harringrove fans! :) check out the tag if you're interested!!

[auspex]

Oh no I just had an idea for a podcast put me down like a dog

[oxygenisachoice]

This is a genuine question— does anyone have any advice for depicting/stylizing spock?

He’s got such a unique look about him that I feel is hard to capture when transferring him into my art style. This is the best I’ve come up with(after many attempts), but I was wondering if anyone with more experience drawing him than I has any pointers.

[gorbalsvampire]

the world is a vampire (vtm city meta 1/?)

playing the world

So, you ended up as a Storyteller. Maybe you happen to own the rulebooks. Maybe you had the idea. Maybe nobody else in your group will put on their big gender pants and step up. The point is: you've got the 'sponserbilities. Now what?

The charm of being the Storyteller, for me, is getting to build wide rather than deep. Rather than inhabiting one character you get to occupy an entire world, moving it in response to the other players' actions but - and this is one of the big Storyteller Secrets - also in spite of them, and without anything to do with them.

In my experience a real good city and story are dynamic environments. SPCs want things that aren't necessarily anything to do with the PCs; they have Ambitions that they will advance whether the PCs are interfering or not, even whether the PCs are paying attention or not.

That's the secret to playing the world. What the players are interested in is the primary plot - there's no point in dragging them to Your Story - but you still get to do everything. Things can happen that the players only discover later, when their attention turns and they realise there was always something else going on.

choosing your location

There are two wolves inside me.

One abhors the very words "lore" and "canon" and has no interest in living any deeper in the shadows of the "IP holders" than necessary to play. One is obsessed with the World of Darkness and has years of fond memories attached to published material, and is also kinda lazy.

One of the wolves gets to pick my cities, but it's not always the same one. If it's the first wolf, I pick a city that doesn't have a By Night book and might only have one or two lines of attention paid to it. If it's the second, I pick a city that has a good By Night book, or a writeup in one of the gazetteer chapters/books. Glasgow was a first wolf pick; Prague was a second wolf pick.

why did I pick Glasgow?

I wanted to set a story in Scotland, for the Dunsirn connection, and I wasn't going to use Edinburgh because I didn't fancy tangling with The Gentleman's adopted OC. (I can be quite a brat about this, sometimes - it's why I've never run a game in Manchester despite knowing and loving the city.)

Vampire as a game turns on sectarian violence, the conflicts between conspiracies. Vampire as a mode exaggerates real history, setting up the Kindred as influential parasites and predators, moving it but being moved by it. Generally, when I pick a city off its own merits, it's because I've looked at it and gone "oh, that could be vampires."

Glasgow's history is, forgive me, full of lines drawn. Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Independence, Rangers and Celtic. It's really easy to wire and crosswire vampires into those conflicts, and to set up tensions within a clan or sect's power bloc by having its members on different sides of them. Divided loyalties aplenty.

I also have a literary point of reference. I'm a big Iain Banks fan, have been since I read The Wasp Factory at school, and his novels Espedair Street and The Crow Road are mostly and partly set in Glasgow. That helps - if the city isn't somewhere I've ever been I like having a sense of it informed by fiction, a vibe that I can draw down and inflect with Vampire's core concerns.

why did I pick Prague?

Partly, I had Redemption on the brain. (I've always had Redemption on the brain, it's how I came in, it's my Bloodlines.) Statting Christof Romauld for a Reddit thread got me started on the rest of his coterie, then reading Transylvania By Night and seeing how it didn't align with the PC game kept me going. And... OK, I'm not going to lie, the anachronisms were getting to me.

Sometimes, the desire to reach in and do a different job to the authors - not an objectively better one, but one more aligned to my priorities, subjectively better, for me - is too strong. There's a lot of that at work here. The buildings that shouldn't exist yet, the Discipline choice that doesn't make sense in V5, the desire to see if I can make this work - that's it, really, that's why I pick cities with more published material. The urge toward transformative work expresses itself as it will.

other reasons

In the past I've often seen advice to the extent that you should pick a city you know well, maybe the city that YOU live in. I don't think you have to do this, but there's one way in which it undeniably helps: grounding, through little details, through street names and cultural cues that you just know in your bones and don't have to fake. That can be really helpful if you don't want the cognitive load of pretending you're multiple different people and having to sell the sense of a different culture and do that respectfully.

Also, we need to talk about history. Some places are better for vampires at this point or that in their real history - Glasgow of the twentieth century was definitely an easier place to tell a kind of grotty, gangland vampire story than the twenty-first. Since I wanted to use it for V5, and I was bridging through from Revised, I made that part of the story, part of the theme. The city was cleaning up its act, gentrifying even, and the controlling ancillae were being left behind.

I could very easily do a Nineties Camarilla game, or a Victorian Age thing, showing the city in its glory days (for a given value of glory), but if I wanted to do a Dark Ages game, it would be more of a frontier thing, with the PCs the only Cainites in town: the city is too small and too new for much else to work.

[d1collarbonefan]

I've actually had such a horrible day, my parents tried to force me to drink a smoothie (110 cal) after already forcing me to eat breakfast and I started crying so much, so they took my phone and computer.

Little background info, I had my socials taken away because my parents thought tiktok gave me anorexia?? but I'd been using the website on google on my macbook because it didn't track it, but the issue now is they found it along with my net and tumblr, and now I don't have chrome on it anymore and I can't tell how much trouble i'll be in about it. I'm panicked, and idk what to do, because I'm writing this from my school computer. just changed my passwords, but I feel so hopeless and alone.

[want-t0-6e-sk1nny]

Can my body be fucking for real for two seconds bc why tf is my stomach growling like a damn train horn in a quiet class... But you ain't do that shit when I'm alone??

[suburbandecember]

𝐼 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝑏𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑝𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑛 @𝑛𝑎 𝑜𝑟 𝑒𝑑 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑤𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 ℎ𝑒𝑙𝑝 𝑠𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜 𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ 🥹

[thelastbrookie]

Just imagine all of the people who you will shock. Just imagine that one persons face when they see you again. Do it for that feeling. That feeling of being better in every aspect. Better discipline. Better results. 🎀