Chimerical Realm

You've spent the past few months prepping for an exciting new game. You've purchased various supplements and adventures. You've carefully crafted NPC's and settings, and have done your best to make an exciting and engaging game. What do you do when everything falls apart? When the dice turn against the players? Or one simple plan turns out to be a disaster? When the entire party faces extinction at the hands of a "Total Party Kill?"

Random character creation is pretty antithetical to Vampire , in all honesty. The game values deep and nuanced characters far more than disposable volume, and as such each character, both PC's and NPC's, are meant to be built with care and consideration. Also, the mechanical aspect of character creation is so damn quick that, once a character is conceived, it takes only a few minutes for even a new player to fill out the sheet. Given that, why would I bother with random creation at all? Well, for a few reasons actually. The first is the search for inspiration. Sometimes you want to make a character and don't yet know who this character will be. In the past, I've used some different tools to help me figure out who the character is, using tools like  Central Casting , the "random Preludes" of the Masquerade Players Kit , and the Universal NPC Emulator . All have their virtues, but I wanted to try something different--instead of coming up with a character and...

Inspired by some recent games I've been playing, I'm going to start up a new Actual Play for Vampire: The Masquerade . As I've already posted a few of these, I want to do something slightly different for this play-through. Well, two things. The first, is a something I like to call "Scarlet Vampire," which I detail below. The second is a "random vampire generator," which will require its own post ( here ). Scarlet Vampire, is, essentially a variation on the Solo Urban Adventures rules from  +Kevin Crawford 's excellent OSR game Scarlet Heroes . If you don't have this already, get it. It's a fantastic game on its own, and a wonderful resource for anyone interested in either Solo or OSR style gaming. Pretty much everything Crawford puts out is top notch, and he's one of the best indie developers working right now. What I really enjoy about the rules he created is their ability to allow for failure . Failure is an underappreciated elemen...

The final significant House Rule I'll be implementing for Ravenous is how Out of Clan Disciplines are handled. In Vampire , each Clan of vampires has three "Clan Disciplines"--for example, Brujah have Potence, Celerity, and Presence. There's naturally a desire for players (and, often, characters) to learn more than just their inherent abilities.  Over time, I've become less forgiving of easy access to Out of Clan Disciplines. This is for three interrelated reasons. First, characters rapidly become very similar, taking away from the distinctiveness of each Clan. If everyone has Potence AND Celerity AND Fortitude, then what really makes any of them different? Secondly, most systems/guidelines place a different cost in terms of effort and risk in learning different Disciplines. "Physical" ones are pretty easy, "Common" ones (Dominate, Obfuscate, Presence, etc.) are about average, with only the "Unique" ones requiring special access or ...

Whenever I think I about "experience points," they always strike me as being odd things.  Thanks to video games, they're pretty well baked into the popular concept of Role-Playing Games, even though they're not really required for them. I mean, you have games like Amber or original Traveler that have no Experience. Or games like Fate (where players can adjust skills between sessions) or Call of Cthulhu (where skills are improved as a result of checks and rolls), both of which all for character progression or change without the need for "experience points" per se. But, when it comes to player direct games, XP can be an incredible tool. It allows the players to know what the goals are, to work independently toward those goals, and to make key story decisions on their own term, without requiring the Game Master to define and pace the story. The classic example, of course, is Dungeons & Dragons. In the original game, players gained XP for each Gold Piece t...

As part of my new Ravenous game, I'm implementing a few House Rules. Some are ideas I've been mulling over for Vampire for a while (the Downtime system) while others are more custom for this particular Chronicle ( Experience and Out of Clan Disciplines ).  The first is the Downtime rules. Two things have always bothered me a bit with Vampire. The first is the tendency of the game to fall into a "night by night" kind of situation, where each session flows into the next and adventure piles on adventure and after a year of unlife, the characters have the stats of Elders and the whole city is a smoking ruin behind them. The second (related) is the speed in which characters develop--they start off barely able to load a gun (Firearms 1) and after a few months of play, they're the greatest shooters in the world (Firearms 5).  Which is absurd...each dot represents an exponential increase in ability. Science of 1 is a High School student--and a particularly nerdy o...

In the previous post I talked about the basic rules for the creation of the Sabbat Pack. In this post, I want to look at the individual components that make up the Pack, and the various options available for them. Following the previous ideas, you choose which general kind of Pack you want to be part of, then pick and choose from the Trait. Each has a "default" value for each Trait, based on the type of Pack. There are then various PRO's and CON's that can be choosen to further customize each Trait, hopefully making each Pack unique and distinctive. Vespers/Twilight Territory : Generally, in the least desirable areas for Cainites to live, such the suburbs, residential communities, small outlying town, etc. Base Hunting difficulty is 8 (6 for members)           PRO: Your territory is in a far more central and prestigious location, such as Downtown or a tourist-friendly area known for its vice. Base difficulty of 6 (4 for members)...