TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
White Wolf's World of Darkness
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I'm going to call this out as a thoughtful answer. They looked in the book, thought about it, and provided some possibilities.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Also, interesting. They're releasing details about Changeling 2e stuff, including a new Freehold with four unique courts:
Tumbledown Market [Changeling: The Lost]
Opinions?
Edit: Also, DriveThru is having a Christmas in July sale, check it out. Is the first Dark Eras good? Worth $18?
Tumbledown Market [Changeling: The Lost]
Opinions?
Edit: Also, DriveThru is having a Christmas in July sale, check it out. Is the first Dark Eras good? Worth $18?
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These Courts mostly seem to be incentivized towards acting against their supposed purposes.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Oh? Can you elaborate?
They get rewarded for preventing people from directly compensating them or being able to get in contact with them, gaining an advantage from finding the individual and taking compensation from them at an undisclosed time at a later date.
The best thing they could do is trap as many people in as many unfair deals as possible and help the ones that screwed them over.
Not as straight-forward as the others but it's advantageous for them to never make long-term deals and to settle things as soon as possible.
While making and keeping as many promises as they can, but only if they can resolve them immediately because any promise that can't be resolved now is as good as broken.
Mostly I'm just surprised that these guys haven't all been shanked in their sleep, it's advantageous for them hide or destroy the evidence for any and all wrong-doing regardless of circumstances.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
Well, some of this seems iffy. I'm not sure about the bold part, though the first example is right.
There'd need to be some sanity clause with, "You can't intentionally make it so that others can't repay your debts by hiding."
I'm also not sure what you mean by 'as good as broken.'
That said, with the last one, they sound a little like Winter, but without the parts that actually make them a viable group.
******
Note, let me clarify this by saying that I don't approve of the general "Harvest Court" idea, or at least it seems kinda bizarre to me, but I'm just trying to take it where it stands for the moment.
- Location
- America
- Pronouns
- He/Him
@MJ12 Commando, It's been a while since you posted this but looking back at it I was wondering, how would you cost these as a starting background?
Edit: It's kinda important because without knowing what each level of Investments gives you, you won't know what to roll for this:
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
I have an idea, maybe, for a sort of VTR Shardy thing, maybe? We'll see whether I ever actually make it, but if so, look forward to articles/something coming out within the next 2-3 weeks. 
Also, the Ordeal Keepers are *weird*.
Also, the Ordeal Keepers are *weird*.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
I'm certainly interested in hearing more; Vampire: the Requiem was never my favorite gameline, but it did have some things I liked, especially in the bloodline supplement books.I have an idea, maybe, for a sort of VTR Shardy thing, maybe? We'll see whether I ever actually make it, but if so, look forward to articles/something coming out within the next 2-3 weeks.
Also, the Ordeal Keepers are *weird*.
VTR Shard--Sundered Nights
- Pronouns
- They/Them
VTR: Sundered Nights
The vampires in this room were the first, best hope for a government in this city. It was a thought that made Po' Richard's heart sink as he tapped his fingers against the desk.
"You can call it whatever you want," a Gangrel said, his beard long. He looked old, but he'd only been around for six months. Even in a city like this, that was new. "It's still tyranny. It's still the rule of a few bastards over all the rest."
"And if you don't govern wisely, then what? How do we depose whoever winds up in charge?" a fat, hard-eyed woman asked, glaring at the Mekhet's in the corner, perched on a desk, glaring at everyone as if they were one loud noise from feasting.
Po' Richard wasn't going to speak yet, he was just going to listen. They needed to work together. There were strange things going on in the city, and the Kindred, the people of the dark night, they needed to, just this once, stand together.
But he thought about the Metalsmiths and the God's Botherers and his own Lance Corp, and knew that none of them would accept the other.
The city was doomed.
The Sundered Night:
Tonight there will probably not be tomorrow night. You're a parasite, a monster, and if you live to be ten years old, you beat not merely the average, but a startling number of your peers. Vampires squat, collecting and then losing knowledge and power, parasites on the neck of a beast, society, far bigger and stronger than any individual bloodsucker.
To call themselves princes of darkness is a delusion, for they live street by street, moment by moment, and form organizations, societies, families that all fall apart. For a bloodsucker is subtle, but a bloodsucker is also cruel, and there are many who would say that vampire culture was an oxymoron.
The world is a series of questions, and nobody has the answers. There are no ancient vampires who saw the fall of Rome, at least none that any of the kindred would like to meet, and there are no secret conspiracies that run the world.
Hell, there are few conspiracies that even run the life of vampires in a single city, and instead there is just the constant struggle: what was once a human being, reduced down to a single instinct. Feed. Survive. They are the same thing, and the costs, the price you pay for every night, knowing that you'll likely to die before you get old, pile up at your feet.
The truly innocent die within weeks, perhaps months, but the guilty drag on and on.
And only the real monsters last a century.
But the Kindred, for all that they are not human, for all that they are broken, do try to form something. They study, they experiment, they question the meaning of life and death, and they do so knowing that even more than among the living "It too shall pass."
These are not the nights where the masters of the universe drink deep in the secrets of the world. These are the nights of a scared predator surrounded by dangerous prey, the nights where your best friend and your worst enemy change with every night.
What is this:
The idea is simple enough. This is meant to be a low fantasy sort of take or alternate shard (in a way) on the Vampire the Requiem experience. That is to say, whereas Elders are rare in the normal V:TR, in this version, they're practically mythical, and meeting one is about what one would feel if you met some legendary monster: not awe, but absolute terror.
In this world, not only do most vampires die before they would in life, as is the norm, but most vampires have lifespans that even a terminal cancer patient would balk at. If you last a decade, you are a seasoned and grizzled veteran of what passes for the society of the Damned, one that possesses great wisdom that should be listened to… or simply stolen.
This fragmentation also means that the Clans as some distinct entity isn't quite the same. There are less vampires, and bloodlines are more central, and even two who are "Mekhet" do not really share as much as they might in other sources. Instead, Sire and friends, and enemies, those are what matters, for there are no Covenants in the universal, world-wide way that one might speak of the Ordo, and most cities do not have Courts and Princes, though a few do, through hard work and effort that might well collapse within decades.
Thus, what it is to be a vampire is something constantly discovered, disputed, and lost. It is hard to define what the mechanical impact of this is, but as I'll be getting to, there's not a simple list of all of the Disciplines, and knowledge such as the impact of Humanity on various aspects of the vampiric life are, even more than these abstractions were in the main game, unknown.
So mechanically, I could imagine playing the power level down a little bit, but I'm going to try to, for the most part, focus on the thematics, which is what spawned this. The idea of playing each of the Covenants instead as a general set of *trends* among vampires, trends that see themselves expressed in dozens or hundreds of different organizations, some of which might even include elements of different trends in different ways, and none of which regard themselves as being "Invictus" in the same way.
In part this is inspired by a look at how to play a low-level vampire game in one of the VTR books, but I hope that I'm treading some new ground in detailing a less simplistic way than I believed it presented of taking the Covenants.
Another inspiration was the Factions of the Mage: The Awakening Orders. At least in theory, these are trends more than groups, and as I'm going to do, I'll be doing a write-up of such a trend, and then I'll give an example organization that fits squarely within it.
Hopefully this will inspire others.
Themes:
After the end: "It's the end of the world every day, for someone."--Margaret Atwood
The Embrace is an end, but without the comfortable beginning. There is no fully formed social structure, even one corrupt and weighted so that the young die and the old survive. Everything one has can be lost, and one clings to it as if there was nothing else. A vampire might not have a sire to even tell him that garlic is not death, or that he can enter a church without bursting into flames. And even if he does, that sire might be all that he knows for some time, for while there are dozens of vampires in any large city, they often miss each other, and even more often hide.
Human knowledge is gained standing on the shoulders of giants, or perhaps like a beach washing up more and more debris until at last it builds something up, but vampires wash themselves away constantly. They do not, by and large, know a great deal about centuries past any more than they can say they know where they will be in a single decade.
The life of a vampire is almost post-apocalyptic, going through and discovering things that vampires a thousand years ago discovered and then lost, digging through the remains of this and that old vampire (old being Ancilla or more) for some understanding that, you ultimately discover, even he lacks.
The Danse Macabe marches on, with no evidence that there was a time when vampires were truly reunited. There is no golden age in the past, nor in the future, and yet the world of the undead lives in devastation, without start or end.
--You think you're going to kill someone. Joseph was almost a century old, and one of the wisest vampires around. The oldest in the city, and old enough that sometimes other vampires came from other cities seeking what he knew. And a bunch of angry Neonates burned him alive, found out his weaknesses and made him pay for it. Everything was lost, including his deep knowledge of ancient vampire lore that he learned from his Sire, who could at least trace his ancestry back to the 18th century. Now it's all gone, and it'll never come back: perhaps you should teach them a lesson, and then sift through the ashes.
With friends like these: In a world where all else has fallen apart, one's friends, one's enemies, one's Sire and family and the groups that one joins are everything. And yet one isn't spoiled for choice. One cannot choose one's Sire, and a person who waits for a good, honest, loyal vampire friend might as well live their short unlife alone.
You have to compromise, and deal with the fact that everyone around you, perhaps including yourself, is imperfect and broken. You stick to the loyalties you've made, and hope that they don't turn out to be a problem. For night by night, minute by minute, friends and enemies shift rapidly without any warning.
It is better to be in an abusive relationship than in no relationship at all, a vampire might agree. It is better to have a dozen friends that you hate, but that share the same hobby as you, then just one true friend.
It is a broken way to live, but don't tell me you forgot, silly? You're already dead.
--You don't much like him, but he's the only vampire you've met that hasn't tried to attack you, or seduce you, and the only one that truly tries to learn what you are. You share your ideas on the nature of fire and sun, and he talks about his study of what he calls "Ghouls." One day you walk into his study and he has a photo, and needs help. He's trapped a human, and wishes to study the effect of torture and blood-loss on the blood-bonding and ghouling process. It is someone you know, and you object to it strenuously. He smiles and nods. The next day, he has three photos, and he, concern in his eyes, sure that he's done the right thing, asks whether you know any of them. He's all you have: you tell him no, and you help him. At least it's not a friend of yours that dies that night.
--They're rich assholes, even if they went to the same college as you, but what's the choice? There's the Escatic Children, who are these crazy, party-hard anarchists, and there's God's Rosary, and you're Catholic which means they think that you are Satan's handmaiden. So the Brotherhood of Blood (what a stupid name, you think for the fifteenth time) are the only people you can trust. It is the kind of thought that makes a man want to walk out into the sun.
--She's done you right for three months straight. She used to be a prostitute, and she now helps lure them to a spot. She calls it a "Feeding Frenzy" and says the only rule is that no girl can die. That's it. You're starving, and if you don't eat tonight, you'll probably die, but something feels wrong tonight, unlike every other night you've gone here. It's like a taste in the air, but you know if you hunt yourself, there's plenty of ways that things can go wrong, especially since for some odd reason your tastes are too specific. You have no choice… you have to trust her, but you know you shouldn't.
Shards of Humanity: Congratulations, you cannot hold down most jobs. Congratulations, your best friends and lovers are both the only thing that keeps you sane, and the tastiest treat of all. Congratulations, you must kill and destroy to survive, and if you can't, then to bad. You're thrown out into a world that is all too human and all too inhuman at the same time. The turnover means that the culture is constantly shifting, and if you don't keep up, then that's that, and vampires exist with all of their human prejudices intact, because there is not enough of a real sense of what some wag might call vampire nationalism. Your city apes humanity in a cracked funhouse mirror sort of way, and yet it is a community founded on exploitation and destruction, one that turns against itself just when it should work together.
You have to hold on to every piece of humanity, because nobody else will help you do so. But the grudges from before the grave drag you beyond it, and every human pettiness and misery can be found alongside every inhuman misery imaginable, all of them crowding out the best wishes, the hopes and dreams of those who are truly Damned.
--This group has a parliament. That group consists entirely of businessmen on the stock exchange. This third group is made of the fans of this one grunge-rocker who all died in a single mass-embrace ritual or something like that. They don't take non-fans. And you lost your job after a week of not showing up. You lost your wife after your hunger overwhelmed you. You eat rats and crouch in the corner of a neighbor's garage, waiting for him to go to sleep. A year ago, she said she wanted to try to get pregnant. A year ago you dreamed of a family. Now you're glad you never bothered.
A Dark World: Vampires have no more knowledge of the universe in the dark than a ghost might of what truly happens to a soul once it dies. They're ignorant. Many would be shocked to learn that ghosts exist, and would be baffled and terrified of a spirit, except for those who live by their knowledge of spirits. If mortal wizards exist who use vitae and blood magic, they might well know more about the nature of this dark world than a vampire does, and yet the vampire is powerful, the vampire is dangerous, but the vampire is also terrified.
The world doesn't make sense, and peek around a dark corner and you'll see something that seems impossible. You'll learn not to look on the right nights, and to try not to hear the screams of strange beings in the night. Some of them are vampires. But some of them might not be.
And even if one speaks of vampires, what did you truly know of what vampires are or what they can become? When a rumor comes around about a so-called "Elder" every vampire hides in terror, for there are dark stories of what such rare monsters--and to survive centuries you cannot leave anything human behind--are capable of. They aren't part of society any more than the monsters of human myths were.
(This is an invitation to introduce dark little question marks. Strange monsters that might share an origin with vampires and be the spawn of any number of myths, or blood cultists, or Vitae-Wielding Thaumaturges who ape the power of vampires but are, ironically, quite likely more knowledgeable in some ways despite their power. You don't have to, of course, and all of this is optional. What isn't all that optional with the feeling of this Shard is the feeling that you don't know anything, that you're stuck in a world and that you did not, in fact, read the whole rulebook. It's an open invitation, in other words, for the ST to get creative and fuck with the player's assumptions that they understand the World of Darkness, because this is a Shard where that understanding is ultimately a threat to the mood that I'm kinda trying to go for.)
--It screams at you. You wished you'd never killed her, because now she follows you. You can see her out of the corner of your eye. She throws things around in your presence, she hates you and yet she needs you, and you're scared to say that you don't always hate the company. What you do hate is the guilt. And if you kill again, will you have yet another such 'friend' to stalk you?
--The humans fell to their ground and worshipped her. She blinked, confused and yet oddly gratified. She was a god to them, some dark goddess of blood and power, and it felt good, it felt great. So what if they wanted her to kill a few other vampires, and those people in power who belittled this sad little cult. And so what if the leader of the cult eyes her as one might a particularly worthy sacrifice. She might be dead in a year, so she might as well enjoy herself now.
--You did not know a vampire could do that. Is it some bloodline? Can you copy it? Can you understand it? You might not get a chance to ask any of those things if it kills you here. "Please," you beg, "show me how you… did that."
********
A/N: Alright, so here we go. This is the first of many things. Starting with ten different articles. Which means this might take a long, long while, but I hope even just this document helps or interests some people. Please leave comments, feedback is vital for something like this.
The vampires in this room were the first, best hope for a government in this city. It was a thought that made Po' Richard's heart sink as he tapped his fingers against the desk.
"You can call it whatever you want," a Gangrel said, his beard long. He looked old, but he'd only been around for six months. Even in a city like this, that was new. "It's still tyranny. It's still the rule of a few bastards over all the rest."
"And if you don't govern wisely, then what? How do we depose whoever winds up in charge?" a fat, hard-eyed woman asked, glaring at the Mekhet's in the corner, perched on a desk, glaring at everyone as if they were one loud noise from feasting.
Po' Richard wasn't going to speak yet, he was just going to listen. They needed to work together. There were strange things going on in the city, and the Kindred, the people of the dark night, they needed to, just this once, stand together.
But he thought about the Metalsmiths and the God's Botherers and his own Lance Corp, and knew that none of them would accept the other.
The city was doomed.
The Sundered Night:
Tonight there will probably not be tomorrow night. You're a parasite, a monster, and if you live to be ten years old, you beat not merely the average, but a startling number of your peers. Vampires squat, collecting and then losing knowledge and power, parasites on the neck of a beast, society, far bigger and stronger than any individual bloodsucker.
To call themselves princes of darkness is a delusion, for they live street by street, moment by moment, and form organizations, societies, families that all fall apart. For a bloodsucker is subtle, but a bloodsucker is also cruel, and there are many who would say that vampire culture was an oxymoron.
The world is a series of questions, and nobody has the answers. There are no ancient vampires who saw the fall of Rome, at least none that any of the kindred would like to meet, and there are no secret conspiracies that run the world.
Hell, there are few conspiracies that even run the life of vampires in a single city, and instead there is just the constant struggle: what was once a human being, reduced down to a single instinct. Feed. Survive. They are the same thing, and the costs, the price you pay for every night, knowing that you'll likely to die before you get old, pile up at your feet.
The truly innocent die within weeks, perhaps months, but the guilty drag on and on.
And only the real monsters last a century.
But the Kindred, for all that they are not human, for all that they are broken, do try to form something. They study, they experiment, they question the meaning of life and death, and they do so knowing that even more than among the living "It too shall pass."
These are not the nights where the masters of the universe drink deep in the secrets of the world. These are the nights of a scared predator surrounded by dangerous prey, the nights where your best friend and your worst enemy change with every night.
What is this:
The idea is simple enough. This is meant to be a low fantasy sort of take or alternate shard (in a way) on the Vampire the Requiem experience. That is to say, whereas Elders are rare in the normal V:TR, in this version, they're practically mythical, and meeting one is about what one would feel if you met some legendary monster: not awe, but absolute terror.
In this world, not only do most vampires die before they would in life, as is the norm, but most vampires have lifespans that even a terminal cancer patient would balk at. If you last a decade, you are a seasoned and grizzled veteran of what passes for the society of the Damned, one that possesses great wisdom that should be listened to… or simply stolen.
This fragmentation also means that the Clans as some distinct entity isn't quite the same. There are less vampires, and bloodlines are more central, and even two who are "Mekhet" do not really share as much as they might in other sources. Instead, Sire and friends, and enemies, those are what matters, for there are no Covenants in the universal, world-wide way that one might speak of the Ordo, and most cities do not have Courts and Princes, though a few do, through hard work and effort that might well collapse within decades.
Thus, what it is to be a vampire is something constantly discovered, disputed, and lost. It is hard to define what the mechanical impact of this is, but as I'll be getting to, there's not a simple list of all of the Disciplines, and knowledge such as the impact of Humanity on various aspects of the vampiric life are, even more than these abstractions were in the main game, unknown.
So mechanically, I could imagine playing the power level down a little bit, but I'm going to try to, for the most part, focus on the thematics, which is what spawned this. The idea of playing each of the Covenants instead as a general set of *trends* among vampires, trends that see themselves expressed in dozens or hundreds of different organizations, some of which might even include elements of different trends in different ways, and none of which regard themselves as being "Invictus" in the same way.
In part this is inspired by a look at how to play a low-level vampire game in one of the VTR books, but I hope that I'm treading some new ground in detailing a less simplistic way than I believed it presented of taking the Covenants.
Another inspiration was the Factions of the Mage: The Awakening Orders. At least in theory, these are trends more than groups, and as I'm going to do, I'll be doing a write-up of such a trend, and then I'll give an example organization that fits squarely within it.
Hopefully this will inspire others.
Themes:
After the end: "It's the end of the world every day, for someone."--Margaret Atwood
The Embrace is an end, but without the comfortable beginning. There is no fully formed social structure, even one corrupt and weighted so that the young die and the old survive. Everything one has can be lost, and one clings to it as if there was nothing else. A vampire might not have a sire to even tell him that garlic is not death, or that he can enter a church without bursting into flames. And even if he does, that sire might be all that he knows for some time, for while there are dozens of vampires in any large city, they often miss each other, and even more often hide.
Human knowledge is gained standing on the shoulders of giants, or perhaps like a beach washing up more and more debris until at last it builds something up, but vampires wash themselves away constantly. They do not, by and large, know a great deal about centuries past any more than they can say they know where they will be in a single decade.
The life of a vampire is almost post-apocalyptic, going through and discovering things that vampires a thousand years ago discovered and then lost, digging through the remains of this and that old vampire (old being Ancilla or more) for some understanding that, you ultimately discover, even he lacks.
The Danse Macabe marches on, with no evidence that there was a time when vampires were truly reunited. There is no golden age in the past, nor in the future, and yet the world of the undead lives in devastation, without start or end.
--You think you're going to kill someone. Joseph was almost a century old, and one of the wisest vampires around. The oldest in the city, and old enough that sometimes other vampires came from other cities seeking what he knew. And a bunch of angry Neonates burned him alive, found out his weaknesses and made him pay for it. Everything was lost, including his deep knowledge of ancient vampire lore that he learned from his Sire, who could at least trace his ancestry back to the 18th century. Now it's all gone, and it'll never come back: perhaps you should teach them a lesson, and then sift through the ashes.
With friends like these: In a world where all else has fallen apart, one's friends, one's enemies, one's Sire and family and the groups that one joins are everything. And yet one isn't spoiled for choice. One cannot choose one's Sire, and a person who waits for a good, honest, loyal vampire friend might as well live their short unlife alone.
You have to compromise, and deal with the fact that everyone around you, perhaps including yourself, is imperfect and broken. You stick to the loyalties you've made, and hope that they don't turn out to be a problem. For night by night, minute by minute, friends and enemies shift rapidly without any warning.
It is better to be in an abusive relationship than in no relationship at all, a vampire might agree. It is better to have a dozen friends that you hate, but that share the same hobby as you, then just one true friend.
It is a broken way to live, but don't tell me you forgot, silly? You're already dead.
--You don't much like him, but he's the only vampire you've met that hasn't tried to attack you, or seduce you, and the only one that truly tries to learn what you are. You share your ideas on the nature of fire and sun, and he talks about his study of what he calls "Ghouls." One day you walk into his study and he has a photo, and needs help. He's trapped a human, and wishes to study the effect of torture and blood-loss on the blood-bonding and ghouling process. It is someone you know, and you object to it strenuously. He smiles and nods. The next day, he has three photos, and he, concern in his eyes, sure that he's done the right thing, asks whether you know any of them. He's all you have: you tell him no, and you help him. At least it's not a friend of yours that dies that night.
--They're rich assholes, even if they went to the same college as you, but what's the choice? There's the Escatic Children, who are these crazy, party-hard anarchists, and there's God's Rosary, and you're Catholic which means they think that you are Satan's handmaiden. So the Brotherhood of Blood (what a stupid name, you think for the fifteenth time) are the only people you can trust. It is the kind of thought that makes a man want to walk out into the sun.
--She's done you right for three months straight. She used to be a prostitute, and she now helps lure them to a spot. She calls it a "Feeding Frenzy" and says the only rule is that no girl can die. That's it. You're starving, and if you don't eat tonight, you'll probably die, but something feels wrong tonight, unlike every other night you've gone here. It's like a taste in the air, but you know if you hunt yourself, there's plenty of ways that things can go wrong, especially since for some odd reason your tastes are too specific. You have no choice… you have to trust her, but you know you shouldn't.
Shards of Humanity: Congratulations, you cannot hold down most jobs. Congratulations, your best friends and lovers are both the only thing that keeps you sane, and the tastiest treat of all. Congratulations, you must kill and destroy to survive, and if you can't, then to bad. You're thrown out into a world that is all too human and all too inhuman at the same time. The turnover means that the culture is constantly shifting, and if you don't keep up, then that's that, and vampires exist with all of their human prejudices intact, because there is not enough of a real sense of what some wag might call vampire nationalism. Your city apes humanity in a cracked funhouse mirror sort of way, and yet it is a community founded on exploitation and destruction, one that turns against itself just when it should work together.
You have to hold on to every piece of humanity, because nobody else will help you do so. But the grudges from before the grave drag you beyond it, and every human pettiness and misery can be found alongside every inhuman misery imaginable, all of them crowding out the best wishes, the hopes and dreams of those who are truly Damned.
--This group has a parliament. That group consists entirely of businessmen on the stock exchange. This third group is made of the fans of this one grunge-rocker who all died in a single mass-embrace ritual or something like that. They don't take non-fans. And you lost your job after a week of not showing up. You lost your wife after your hunger overwhelmed you. You eat rats and crouch in the corner of a neighbor's garage, waiting for him to go to sleep. A year ago, she said she wanted to try to get pregnant. A year ago you dreamed of a family. Now you're glad you never bothered.
A Dark World: Vampires have no more knowledge of the universe in the dark than a ghost might of what truly happens to a soul once it dies. They're ignorant. Many would be shocked to learn that ghosts exist, and would be baffled and terrified of a spirit, except for those who live by their knowledge of spirits. If mortal wizards exist who use vitae and blood magic, they might well know more about the nature of this dark world than a vampire does, and yet the vampire is powerful, the vampire is dangerous, but the vampire is also terrified.
The world doesn't make sense, and peek around a dark corner and you'll see something that seems impossible. You'll learn not to look on the right nights, and to try not to hear the screams of strange beings in the night. Some of them are vampires. But some of them might not be.
And even if one speaks of vampires, what did you truly know of what vampires are or what they can become? When a rumor comes around about a so-called "Elder" every vampire hides in terror, for there are dark stories of what such rare monsters--and to survive centuries you cannot leave anything human behind--are capable of. They aren't part of society any more than the monsters of human myths were.
(This is an invitation to introduce dark little question marks. Strange monsters that might share an origin with vampires and be the spawn of any number of myths, or blood cultists, or Vitae-Wielding Thaumaturges who ape the power of vampires but are, ironically, quite likely more knowledgeable in some ways despite their power. You don't have to, of course, and all of this is optional. What isn't all that optional with the feeling of this Shard is the feeling that you don't know anything, that you're stuck in a world and that you did not, in fact, read the whole rulebook. It's an open invitation, in other words, for the ST to get creative and fuck with the player's assumptions that they understand the World of Darkness, because this is a Shard where that understanding is ultimately a threat to the mood that I'm kinda trying to go for.)
--It screams at you. You wished you'd never killed her, because now she follows you. You can see her out of the corner of your eye. She throws things around in your presence, she hates you and yet she needs you, and you're scared to say that you don't always hate the company. What you do hate is the guilt. And if you kill again, will you have yet another such 'friend' to stalk you?
--The humans fell to their ground and worshipped her. She blinked, confused and yet oddly gratified. She was a god to them, some dark goddess of blood and power, and it felt good, it felt great. So what if they wanted her to kill a few other vampires, and those people in power who belittled this sad little cult. And so what if the leader of the cult eyes her as one might a particularly worthy sacrifice. She might be dead in a year, so she might as well enjoy herself now.
--You did not know a vampire could do that. Is it some bloodline? Can you copy it? Can you understand it? You might not get a chance to ask any of those things if it kills you here. "Please," you beg, "show me how you… did that."
********
A/N: Alright, so here we go. This is the first of many things. Starting with ten different articles. Which means this might take a long, long while, but I hope even just this document helps or interests some people. Please leave comments, feedback is vital for something like this.
Krazyfan1
Worrying for the future.
- Location
- Australia
Neat.
I keep on imagining a Post apocalypse Changing breed story.
the apocalypse came and went, and humanity is still around and rebuilding with surprising effectiveness, with more consideration towards the enviromnent.
they might be back to where they were in a few years, , but surprisingly the actions of the Wyrm seem delayed, less effective than before.
Gaia has survived, as have the other gods and spirits sans Anansa, the majority of them greatly weakened but regaining strength.
all the Breeds had to work together to survive, and now they stand with no clue how to proceed.
what now?
do they continue to work together?
go back to as it was before?
could things change for the better?
who knows, they certainly don't...
Basically, all the Chainging breeds are allies now, but between the young ones who wish to continue or the old ones that prefer the way it was (particularly among the Rokea)
I keep on imagining a Post apocalypse Changing breed story.
the apocalypse came and went, and humanity is still around and rebuilding with surprising effectiveness, with more consideration towards the enviromnent.
they might be back to where they were in a few years, , but surprisingly the actions of the Wyrm seem delayed, less effective than before.
Gaia has survived, as have the other gods and spirits sans Anansa, the majority of them greatly weakened but regaining strength.
all the Breeds had to work together to survive, and now they stand with no clue how to proceed.
what now?
do they continue to work together?
go back to as it was before?
could things change for the better?
who knows, they certainly don't...
Basically, all the Chainging breeds are allies now, but between the young ones who wish to continue or the old ones that prefer the way it was (particularly among the Rokea)
- Pronouns
- They/Them
So, around fifteen people liked it. Why? What parts did you like? Which parts would you like to see more of, or see clarified?
Those who didn't, what about it turned you off of being interested in it? Etc, etc.
I mean, I know this isn't a thread that always has feedback, but!
Those who didn't, what about it turned you off of being interested in it? Etc, etc.
I mean, I know this isn't a thread that always has feedback, but!
Sol Zagato
senseless brute
The vampires here seem more like an epidemic disease, also remind me of vampire society (or lack thereof) from The Laundry series.
The century-old vampire got that way because they're very paranoid, very careful and very competent. Young vamps are a problem, to be discretely exterminated if nearby. The century-old vamp is running the vampire hunter organization, for example. They're not going to mentor you unless you're extremely lucky.
In your model, I just can't see the old ones willingly interacting with the youngsters unless it's to get something they desperately want.
Also, read The Rhesus Chart (Laundry files novel) for a group of young vamps figuring everything out on their own and getting critical things wrong. And said paranoid elders.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I liked the whole "research our past because we die so fast we have no idea what happened 20 years ago", I think it can make for a very cool campaign.
Kind of like Indiana Jones but with fangs and you're not actually searching old places. Also, you're a terrible person.
AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I've never played a Vampire campaign because I would start every session with "Ok. I walk out into the sunlight"
> : P
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Thanks for the feedback so far. When I have time/inspiration, the next update of the chain will be the Invictus Inclination.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
This is actually off-topic, but whatever you think of Mage 2e in general, they actually do talk about Awakening in a way I rather liked. Which is good, because 1e was a fucking mess in actually remembering what Awakening meant.
Edit: 2e didn't have rules, but it doesn't need rules per se.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Yes. nMage 1e has random shit like, "He noticed that she was inching closer to Awakening as a Mage" which makes literally less than no sense with how an Awakening works in M:TAW. People just forget what Awakening is all the time, and it annoys me.
To be fair the actual process can involve a person tripping balls for days as they teeter on the cusp of enlightenment. IIRC the 2e book mentions that at least one person was stuck in his mystery play for several years.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
To not be fair, it wasn't presented anything like that.
1e also had, in some of the books, an unfortunate belief that being the son of a Mage meant you'd definitely become one too. They had, like, Mage families that have an unbroken line of Mages for four generations and shit like that. (The Banisher book was the worst of all in this respect.)
Yeah, some of the writers didn't know what they hell they were doing.
VTR: Sundered NIghts (Shard)--The Invictus Inclination
- Pronouns
- They/Them
VTR: Sundered Nights-- The Invictus Inclination
"You cannot take it with you? Watch me."
Introduction: Power is a common desire, one that is shared by both the living and the undead. But not just power, but control. In a chaotic, confused world, the idea that one is not cursed, but instead has abilities that can allow one to thrive, is something tempting for many vampires, and those vampires who form groups around gaining power and control, not only of their own lives, but the mortal world and, to a large extent, the world of the vampires, can be said to have an Invictus inclination.
And throughout the world there are many organizations of vampires, most short-lived, but some a few centuries old. Among these organizations, most do not stretch beyond a single city, and those that do do so through a network that has far more to do with a support group for the powerful than anything else.
A political organization might be a front for vampire self-help, sending money to some vampires across the country, and yet with a footprint in any one place that is essentially non-existent. Such organizations lack the heft and power that vampires need to survive in a world as hard and dark as the one they inhabit, and yet they do sometimes attract attention and support.
Most organizations are simpler: a few power brokers use their vampiric might to carve out a niche. They use their power over police, or a gang, or simply the wealth they accrue, to provide themselves with that most rare attribute of vampiric life: stability. And once they have obtained that, they seek power, and then more power, and other vampires flock to them, willing to trade quite a bit for the promise of power. Or even the promise of safety.
This, normally, is how the average Invictus-style Covenant begins. There are other origins, and other reasons for beginning it, but in general at least, it sprouts up like fungus around the rich soil of success. An individual vampire rises to power within this group, and begins trying to order it.
This order is not in fact necessarily feudal. What it is, though, is inherently elitist. It is an organization in which one person or a group of people hold the majority of the power, and others work for them. There is no particular hatred for democracy inherent to vampires that have such an inclination, but the power structures they create are inherently hierarchical, and the general pattern is that, rather than create a set of rules and some for of bylaws, the average such Covenant establishes and gains power, and only then either codifies standing custom as their rules, or has to hastily scramble to create some set of rules only when crisis forces them to consider the results of their actions.
Most Invictus Covenants die because they are highly personal in nature. Highly personal, and yet highly competitive. Thus, when a particular power-broker collapses, then so does the organization which only sometimes has an ideological core (though this has changed some in recent nights, see below), and it becomes a bunch of squabbling vampires.
On the best of nights, the most optimistic vampires like this consider the fact that those that survive the fallout gain knowledge of how to manipulate mortal institutions, knowledge that does get passed on to other vampires. Most of it is lost, of course, for the life of a vampire is short and brutal, but over the centuries, some think that in places, something real is getting closer and closer to be built.
Others think that this is folly, that building a sandcastle time and time again when the waves just crash in is the essence of folly.
Yet what choice is there, someone of the Inclination would ask. Cower before their nature? Ape normal humans and reject power and hide somewhere?
The Many Ways to Power: The stereotype is that such vampires are rich assholes who decide that they don't want to be any less rich, or any less assholish, now that they're vampires. They're afraid of the way that becoming a vampire might destroy their lives, and yet they're hopeful that they can trick, cheat, and murder their way to even greater wealth and power. Now, this is a type of person that does have the right mindset, but in fact, the first category is far broader. It is those with power, who seek to keep that power. A Judge that is embraced, or a respected doctor, both have a lot to lose, and if they can turn their mind to what they have to gain, or come to gather power, then they too are this type of member.
Any profession or lifestyle that grants power grants an expectation that this power will continue. The bureaucrat, the banker, and the surgeon all expect something more than cringing and hiding, and so they are all just as likely to find themselves gathering power in the shadows, manipulating their former colleagues to clear the way to everything they ever desired, handed up to them on a silver platter.
But the opposite motivation, in a sense, also drives people. The poor and downtrodden, if put into the right circumstances, decide that with this newfound Majesty, or this or that ability, they can quickly steal and acquire money and more and more power: everything they wanted for, wrapped up in a neat little bow and presented to them. The man who could never get a date says, "Now, I can get what I want" just as the janitor might drain dry the executive who treated him like shit.
The difference between someone who walks the Carthian path and one who joins an organization, or founds an organization, along these Invictus lines can often be mere circumstance and luck, as much as anything else, and often depends on what the other vampires of the area are like.
The final 'type' of Invictus member is simple. There are those who look around at the squabbling of vampires and shake their head. Whether they are a cop who think that the squabbling vampires need to be crushed underneath the kindly boot of police brutality until they submit, or a believer in something a little… less than democracy, or even someone who comes to the rather unfounded belief that vampires are superior and then extrapolates to justify the exploitation of mortals: they exist.
They exist, and they're often the driving force behind those few areas that resemble the quasi-feudal Domains of normal VTR, though these are exceptions to the rules of what such ideologues do. Like those of a more Carthian bent, they want to have some sort of government or control over something, but that is where they tend to part ways, theorizing tyranny and control as the only means by which vampires can survive and thrive.
To those who ask, "Then why aren't we thriving" they say that they need more people to follow them.
Invictus-style organizations can be founded on all sorts of things. A hospital, a sorority, or a corporation as the basis is just as likely, if not more, than some sort of feudal farce. To create such an organization, one has to imagine a few things. First, how it came to be, second, what it runs on, what actions and activities it does that are so important, and third, what it's place in the world is.
Thus, having a type of association can be a useful link. All of the members of a single rich family being embraced by a mad Patriarch works, as does the few Damned members of a popular mortal sorority getting in contact and using their mortal friends (now tools) to influence the area. But then, so can some eccentric billionaire collecting vampiric hanger-ons like he might have once collected trophy wives, staving off his inevitable death.
Moods
--Every eye is on you. They all want to bring you down, and you want to bring them all down. You were a star, a celebrity, an actor, albeit a B-list one, but now that you're a vampire, that's all lost. You have the rolodex, though, you have ways you can use what you have to get power, but when will people start asking questions?
--For all of your delusions about being a master of the universe, about manipulating everyone else, you are vulnerable, you are scared. You know, deep down, that people at the hospital don't buy that you suddenly took ill, and yet you can slip in the shadows and watch the patients. You pick off a few of them to kill, and then control their minds. They change their wills, giving them to mortal patsies you control… and then they die. It's a sweet deal you have going on, but why doesn't it make you feel any better?
--You're in the middle. That means you're the guy in the center of the chain. You shit, and are shit on, as your father would have said. He's dead now. You run errands, you search for victims, and you try to ignore what he would have thought, that his little daughter had joined a gang. A gang that had been hollowed out. The parasite at the center was almost sixty years old: he'd existed back when the Mob was a thing, and he didn't truly understand how to run such an organization beyond the obvious. It's down to people like you to do it. But… why not make a play? If you're going to be in Hell, why not rule?
Characters:
--Jordan wears the face of another boy. It's not hard, really. His mentor has told him that he can get what he wants. He's only sixteen, and he was pretty ugly, sure. But that.. .b… girl! Shouldn't have turned him down. But now that he was a vampire, he was told, he could take what he wanted. So he played her boyfriend perfectly, smiling and trying to dance as well as his clumsy feet could. And then when they got into her car… he drained her dry and left her corpse by the side of the road. What did she matter, really? That was the lesson his Sire wanted him to learn: they were cattle, and he was not.
--Ysmin was quite the fixer, all things considered. She was smart, polite, and powerful. She knew everyone, and everyone in the Night-life, as some called it, knew her. She didn't really believe in the religious antics of some, and she didn't care about the nature of ghouls the way that others did. But if you wanted to find someone, she knew them. And not just blood-bags either. She knew people who would take the bullet holes out of a car without saying anything, she knew people who would bury bodies, for the right price. And she took a cut in the middle, always.
--There's no theory for it, but he's going to make ones. The world as it stands is rotten, but vampires need not bask in their silly delusions that they are people. Not when they can be more. And if they are not human, than the structures that humans delude themselves with are just as unnecessary.
Mechanics:
Now, this was just a thought, but a lot of the Invictus merits in 2e, and possibly 1e, are based on a structure that doesn't exist. I'm not a mechanical maven, really, but I did get an interesting idea on how to portray the advantages of being in an organization that primarily exists to gather and use power to get more power (IE, one that is "Invictus Primary").
Such an Invictus Primary organization has this rough draft of a very simple rule.
Decide what resources they have. These can be Allies, Contacts, Resources[1], Retainers (some of them Ghouls) and so on. Anything that specifically involves social clout and attainment, which means it can also be hiding spots, or access to a Herd.
Then, here comes the part I'd have to play-test. Each Chapter, a player can use the common resources of the organization, essentially asking favors and calling in support, a number of times equal to their Covenant Status (which in this case covers a specific organization, not all "Invictus Primary" organization), and in some way gated off by Status as well, so that a 1-dot member cannot be given five dots of Resources no matter whether it's the first time or the tenth that they've asked for it.
Thus, the higher the Status of the member, the more the organization benefits them in a concrete way. All resources so gained operate as 'normal', for a duration of time that cannot outlast the chapter. If you get access to the Retainer, how long they are seconded depends on a lot of factors that, let me be honest, I'm not 100% sure how to represent mechanically.
Resources are available for one single purchase, or a series of purchases 'adding up' to the total dot value you can afford. Roughly. Again, this part is subject to a lot of change.
As well, of course, you cannot double-dip on some things. Resources are an exception, since the most powerful organizations might have far more than just one individual's wealth on access, usually. Generally, just to make this easy, it's assumed that all resources are open, but at an ST's discretion, based on the plot or other events, they might be in use, as long as this is not used as an excuse to deny the results of the merit dots to the PCs.
If a PC wants an Ally or Contact that does not come on a time-limit and might not be available, they are advised to just buy it themselves. Every Invictus-style vampire has not merely the resources that any organization can get them, but extensive personal resources, though in some cases the two blur together.
[1] If anyone has an idea of how to do organizational resources, feel free to tell me, but for now it's the regular sort.
*******
A/N: And so here we go. The first of the Covenant Leanings sort of system. And yes, I really do want to talk about the mechanics. I'm not *horrible* at mechanics, but advice would be good. I do know that for the way this world is set up, the traditional sort of Invictus Merits don't really work, unless I'm remembering them wrong, because they're mostly based on an established Vampire Community that they can then be rich-bitch top dogs of. Similarly, the Carthians won't be getting their weird Spirit of Democracy Merits, don't you worry.
"You cannot take it with you? Watch me."
Introduction: Power is a common desire, one that is shared by both the living and the undead. But not just power, but control. In a chaotic, confused world, the idea that one is not cursed, but instead has abilities that can allow one to thrive, is something tempting for many vampires, and those vampires who form groups around gaining power and control, not only of their own lives, but the mortal world and, to a large extent, the world of the vampires, can be said to have an Invictus inclination.
And throughout the world there are many organizations of vampires, most short-lived, but some a few centuries old. Among these organizations, most do not stretch beyond a single city, and those that do do so through a network that has far more to do with a support group for the powerful than anything else.
A political organization might be a front for vampire self-help, sending money to some vampires across the country, and yet with a footprint in any one place that is essentially non-existent. Such organizations lack the heft and power that vampires need to survive in a world as hard and dark as the one they inhabit, and yet they do sometimes attract attention and support.
Most organizations are simpler: a few power brokers use their vampiric might to carve out a niche. They use their power over police, or a gang, or simply the wealth they accrue, to provide themselves with that most rare attribute of vampiric life: stability. And once they have obtained that, they seek power, and then more power, and other vampires flock to them, willing to trade quite a bit for the promise of power. Or even the promise of safety.
This, normally, is how the average Invictus-style Covenant begins. There are other origins, and other reasons for beginning it, but in general at least, it sprouts up like fungus around the rich soil of success. An individual vampire rises to power within this group, and begins trying to order it.
This order is not in fact necessarily feudal. What it is, though, is inherently elitist. It is an organization in which one person or a group of people hold the majority of the power, and others work for them. There is no particular hatred for democracy inherent to vampires that have such an inclination, but the power structures they create are inherently hierarchical, and the general pattern is that, rather than create a set of rules and some for of bylaws, the average such Covenant establishes and gains power, and only then either codifies standing custom as their rules, or has to hastily scramble to create some set of rules only when crisis forces them to consider the results of their actions.
Most Invictus Covenants die because they are highly personal in nature. Highly personal, and yet highly competitive. Thus, when a particular power-broker collapses, then so does the organization which only sometimes has an ideological core (though this has changed some in recent nights, see below), and it becomes a bunch of squabbling vampires.
On the best of nights, the most optimistic vampires like this consider the fact that those that survive the fallout gain knowledge of how to manipulate mortal institutions, knowledge that does get passed on to other vampires. Most of it is lost, of course, for the life of a vampire is short and brutal, but over the centuries, some think that in places, something real is getting closer and closer to be built.
Others think that this is folly, that building a sandcastle time and time again when the waves just crash in is the essence of folly.
Yet what choice is there, someone of the Inclination would ask. Cower before their nature? Ape normal humans and reject power and hide somewhere?
The Many Ways to Power: The stereotype is that such vampires are rich assholes who decide that they don't want to be any less rich, or any less assholish, now that they're vampires. They're afraid of the way that becoming a vampire might destroy their lives, and yet they're hopeful that they can trick, cheat, and murder their way to even greater wealth and power. Now, this is a type of person that does have the right mindset, but in fact, the first category is far broader. It is those with power, who seek to keep that power. A Judge that is embraced, or a respected doctor, both have a lot to lose, and if they can turn their mind to what they have to gain, or come to gather power, then they too are this type of member.
Any profession or lifestyle that grants power grants an expectation that this power will continue. The bureaucrat, the banker, and the surgeon all expect something more than cringing and hiding, and so they are all just as likely to find themselves gathering power in the shadows, manipulating their former colleagues to clear the way to everything they ever desired, handed up to them on a silver platter.
But the opposite motivation, in a sense, also drives people. The poor and downtrodden, if put into the right circumstances, decide that with this newfound Majesty, or this or that ability, they can quickly steal and acquire money and more and more power: everything they wanted for, wrapped up in a neat little bow and presented to them. The man who could never get a date says, "Now, I can get what I want" just as the janitor might drain dry the executive who treated him like shit.
The difference between someone who walks the Carthian path and one who joins an organization, or founds an organization, along these Invictus lines can often be mere circumstance and luck, as much as anything else, and often depends on what the other vampires of the area are like.
The final 'type' of Invictus member is simple. There are those who look around at the squabbling of vampires and shake their head. Whether they are a cop who think that the squabbling vampires need to be crushed underneath the kindly boot of police brutality until they submit, or a believer in something a little… less than democracy, or even someone who comes to the rather unfounded belief that vampires are superior and then extrapolates to justify the exploitation of mortals: they exist.
They exist, and they're often the driving force behind those few areas that resemble the quasi-feudal Domains of normal VTR, though these are exceptions to the rules of what such ideologues do. Like those of a more Carthian bent, they want to have some sort of government or control over something, but that is where they tend to part ways, theorizing tyranny and control as the only means by which vampires can survive and thrive.
To those who ask, "Then why aren't we thriving" they say that they need more people to follow them.
Invictus-style organizations can be founded on all sorts of things. A hospital, a sorority, or a corporation as the basis is just as likely, if not more, than some sort of feudal farce. To create such an organization, one has to imagine a few things. First, how it came to be, second, what it runs on, what actions and activities it does that are so important, and third, what it's place in the world is.
Thus, having a type of association can be a useful link. All of the members of a single rich family being embraced by a mad Patriarch works, as does the few Damned members of a popular mortal sorority getting in contact and using their mortal friends (now tools) to influence the area. But then, so can some eccentric billionaire collecting vampiric hanger-ons like he might have once collected trophy wives, staving off his inevitable death.
Moods
--Every eye is on you. They all want to bring you down, and you want to bring them all down. You were a star, a celebrity, an actor, albeit a B-list one, but now that you're a vampire, that's all lost. You have the rolodex, though, you have ways you can use what you have to get power, but when will people start asking questions?
--For all of your delusions about being a master of the universe, about manipulating everyone else, you are vulnerable, you are scared. You know, deep down, that people at the hospital don't buy that you suddenly took ill, and yet you can slip in the shadows and watch the patients. You pick off a few of them to kill, and then control their minds. They change their wills, giving them to mortal patsies you control… and then they die. It's a sweet deal you have going on, but why doesn't it make you feel any better?
--You're in the middle. That means you're the guy in the center of the chain. You shit, and are shit on, as your father would have said. He's dead now. You run errands, you search for victims, and you try to ignore what he would have thought, that his little daughter had joined a gang. A gang that had been hollowed out. The parasite at the center was almost sixty years old: he'd existed back when the Mob was a thing, and he didn't truly understand how to run such an organization beyond the obvious. It's down to people like you to do it. But… why not make a play? If you're going to be in Hell, why not rule?
Characters:
--Jordan wears the face of another boy. It's not hard, really. His mentor has told him that he can get what he wants. He's only sixteen, and he was pretty ugly, sure. But that.. .b… girl! Shouldn't have turned him down. But now that he was a vampire, he was told, he could take what he wanted. So he played her boyfriend perfectly, smiling and trying to dance as well as his clumsy feet could. And then when they got into her car… he drained her dry and left her corpse by the side of the road. What did she matter, really? That was the lesson his Sire wanted him to learn: they were cattle, and he was not.
--Ysmin was quite the fixer, all things considered. She was smart, polite, and powerful. She knew everyone, and everyone in the Night-life, as some called it, knew her. She didn't really believe in the religious antics of some, and she didn't care about the nature of ghouls the way that others did. But if you wanted to find someone, she knew them. And not just blood-bags either. She knew people who would take the bullet holes out of a car without saying anything, she knew people who would bury bodies, for the right price. And she took a cut in the middle, always.
--There's no theory for it, but he's going to make ones. The world as it stands is rotten, but vampires need not bask in their silly delusions that they are people. Not when they can be more. And if they are not human, than the structures that humans delude themselves with are just as unnecessary.
Mechanics:
Now, this was just a thought, but a lot of the Invictus merits in 2e, and possibly 1e, are based on a structure that doesn't exist. I'm not a mechanical maven, really, but I did get an interesting idea on how to portray the advantages of being in an organization that primarily exists to gather and use power to get more power (IE, one that is "Invictus Primary").
Such an Invictus Primary organization has this rough draft of a very simple rule.
Decide what resources they have. These can be Allies, Contacts, Resources[1], Retainers (some of them Ghouls) and so on. Anything that specifically involves social clout and attainment, which means it can also be hiding spots, or access to a Herd.
Then, here comes the part I'd have to play-test. Each Chapter, a player can use the common resources of the organization, essentially asking favors and calling in support, a number of times equal to their Covenant Status (which in this case covers a specific organization, not all "Invictus Primary" organization), and in some way gated off by Status as well, so that a 1-dot member cannot be given five dots of Resources no matter whether it's the first time or the tenth that they've asked for it.
Thus, the higher the Status of the member, the more the organization benefits them in a concrete way. All resources so gained operate as 'normal', for a duration of time that cannot outlast the chapter. If you get access to the Retainer, how long they are seconded depends on a lot of factors that, let me be honest, I'm not 100% sure how to represent mechanically.
Resources are available for one single purchase, or a series of purchases 'adding up' to the total dot value you can afford. Roughly. Again, this part is subject to a lot of change.
As well, of course, you cannot double-dip on some things. Resources are an exception, since the most powerful organizations might have far more than just one individual's wealth on access, usually. Generally, just to make this easy, it's assumed that all resources are open, but at an ST's discretion, based on the plot or other events, they might be in use, as long as this is not used as an excuse to deny the results of the merit dots to the PCs.
If a PC wants an Ally or Contact that does not come on a time-limit and might not be available, they are advised to just buy it themselves. Every Invictus-style vampire has not merely the resources that any organization can get them, but extensive personal resources, though in some cases the two blur together.
[1] If anyone has an idea of how to do organizational resources, feel free to tell me, but for now it's the regular sort.
*******
A/N: And so here we go. The first of the Covenant Leanings sort of system. And yes, I really do want to talk about the mechanics. I'm not *horrible* at mechanics, but advice would be good. I do know that for the way this world is set up, the traditional sort of Invictus Merits don't really work, unless I'm remembering them wrong, because they're mostly based on an established Vampire Community that they can then be rich-bitch top dogs of. Similarly, the Carthians won't be getting their weird Spirit of Democracy Merits, don't you worry.
Krazyfan1
Worrying for the future.
- Location
- Australia
hmm....
would any of these fit in with WoD?
or at least, fit in with a homebrew WoD?
would any of these fit in with WoD?
or at least, fit in with a homebrew WoD?