It's the fall of 2004, and LA is a miserable shitheap. You've come here searching for someone after your life burned down, and you doubt you'll even find them.
Then you meet a stranger in a dark bar on a Hollywood backstreet, and come next evening, you're the latest member of whole new world you never even knew existed.
Not just in this rundown room. Not just in this shitty motel.
In LA.
Twenty-eight hundred miles from anything resembling home. No money, no food, no prospects, no plan. You got nothing.
Nothing at all.
A rat crawls across the room. It knows you're there. It sees you watching it. But it still doesn't hurry.
You get the feeling it can tell you're just too tired to chase it. Too tired to react to it. Too tired to do anything but sit on the bed and listen to the rain.
You've been tired a lot lately. And by lately, you mean 'the past five years'.
Cause every day since high school graduation?
Has been shit.
Everything you ever built has crumbled to ash before your very eyes. Every endeavor you ever attempted, failed miserably. Every dream you ever had is dead.
The house is gone. College threw you out without a reason or a word. Friends are missing, or dead, or hate you beyond all rational thought. Family's cracked itself in half. Dad's drinking. Cousins are fighting in court, again. Grandpa's seething at the thought you might inherit anything at all, whatsoever, and most of the family agrees.
You tried to fix it. Everyone knows you did. You aren't stupid or incompetent. You've always been special.
But nothing worked. Nothing got better. In fact, everything only got worse.
Eventually, inevitably, you snapped. You couldn't take it. The pressure, the problems.
The constant failure.
You walked. Just…walked.
Left New York behind, slipped from the city in a haze. You dropped The Big Apple and all the trappings of your life like a rut sack full of weights, and wandered west, towards the setting sun.
You've bounced from place to place, town to town. Doing odd jobs, begging when you needed to. You've slept on bus stop benches and in roadside ditches. You've gone hungry more than once and been broke far more times than that.
You had nothing to your name but the clothes on your back and your trusty…
A horn blares outside, startling you from your thoughts for a moment. You can't bring yourself to actually look outside, however, and you sink deeper into the bed.
It's been months of travel. You left in early January. It's Fall now, several seasons later. But you're finally here.
Living in the City of Angels.
But…Why?
Why did you come all the way out here?
It's not to find a new beginning. You've been burned on that one too many times.
Neither was all of this one big vacation, or attempt at finding yourself.
The reason you came out here is…
It's…
Well…
It's stupid.
It's vague.
It's bound to result in failure.
But you're trying to find someone.
Specifically, you're trying to find her.
You've got no leads. She hasn't dropped a note in all this time. Hell, you don't even know if you want to find her so you can hug her, punch her, or bury her long-dead corpse.
All you know is that you burned out like a lightbulb, and left town in her footsteps, seeking her out all this way on the other side of the country.
But who is she?
[ ] Your Twin Sister. She was a smart cookie, sharp as a whip and curious as a cat. You were thick as thieves, all the years of your life. Then she got sent out to LA by Grandad in order to work on some computer technical thing for a mystery client, and promptly dropped of the face of the earth. Grandad blamed you, of course, despite the fact you weren't even in North America at the time. It didn't make sense, but then, by this point, so many things had gone inexplicably wrong in your life that blaming you for tragedy was simply second nature. In any event, you aren't going to go to your almost-certainly-early grave without even bothering to look for her, so here you are, walking the streets of this smoggy, crime riddled, overly sprawling mess that pretends to hold a candle to NYC. Oh, the joys of having a sibling.
[ ] Your Mother. She dropped you out at much the same age you are now, then left for California with a pocket full of dreams. She was a booming and boisterous woman who wanted to change the world, make it a better place. Think 'Loud, cheerfully violent hippie' and you're in the right ballpark. Dad got a few postcards over the next few months, with the last one coming straight from downtown LA. Then, nothing. Mom and Dad were never married, and were never going to be, but you'd still like to know something about the deadbeat bitch who left your life a mere week after you were both discharged from the maternity ward. Even if it takes the rest of your days to find a single hint of her existence, you're still willing to look. After all, what else were you going to do with your wreck of a life?
[ ] Your Best Friend. She wanted to be an actress. She wanted to be a star. Given how you've heard nothing about her for the past forever and a half, it's safe to say she failed. No letters, no writing, no news. Nothing. Twenty plus years of having each other's backs, of secrets shared and schemes hatched, of tender tears and laughter filled moments, and nothing. You've lost all your other friends but this one, well, losing it stung the most. You need to know how you lost her, how this pillar of your life completely fell away. And if it turns out she hates you too, well. It might well be what causes you to just finally collapse in full.
[ ] Your Crush. Isn't that such a silly reason, to cross the length of a continent? It's not like she liked you back. Hell, she didn't even really know you. You lived in the same area, went to the same school. You were you, of course, and she? She was a cunning and smart and sharp-tonged. Quiet and introverted and more learned than the library of Alexandria; whenever you talked, her inner beauty shone like the sun. (And her outer beauty was nothing to sneeze at either.) But then she fell in with some loonie crowd or something, a group that promised to teach her about occult nonsense that made everyone else roll their eyes. She bought it though, and, after a rigorous vetting process, got accepted into their ranks. Then they sent her off to LA, and nobody, not her friends, not her parents, nobody has heard from her since. Maybe you want to be the knight in shining armor, save the damsel from the evil cult so you can live happily ever after. Maybe you think she's onto something, and you want in on that magic, or, more likely, that sense of fulfillment. Or maybe it's just that you've just lost so much that a one-sided high school crush is the only vaguely positive 'relationship' that you have left. Whatever the reason, she came out here, and you, eventually, followed.
Hello and Welcome to Don't Open It, a VTMB quest.
First off, if this looks familiar, its because i tried to run it a while back on Spacebattles, but life got in the way. So this is a redo.
Second, this quest will be narrative first, mechanics second. So. Keep that in mind.
And lastly, I have never fully run a quest before, so don't blow up if I wind up making mistakes.
Hmm! Seems like the twin sister could've been made into a Nosferatu (tech whiz, maybe contracted to work on Shreknet), mom became a Brujah, best friend was Toreador bait, and fhe crush got recruited into the Tremere. Could be another clan for any of those, of course, and doesn't necessarily mean we'll end up as one of them, but still.
These two options have the most weight of history behind them. Our protagonist loved them dearly and was loved in turn; they were close, making the loss that more keen. Plus, platonic peer relationships appeal to me.
