#gehenna war

[tremere-chantry]

[claretnight]

this gehenna war V5 art by Raquel Cornejo makes me laugh:

It just gives me this:

[badass-at-fandoming]

Beckett's Loresheet from Vampire: the Masquerade - Gehenna War sourcebook, page 157

EDIT: Transcription below the cut

Beckett

According to Kindred cultures that acknowledge the generation model, the fourth generation of vampires was a kind of Cambrian explosion, increasing and solidifying emerging vampiric strains in the previous generation. Sometimes nicknamed methuselah due to their age, most of the known Kindred of such low Generation have been Beckoned or choose to serve in the Gehenna War, but some lie dormant in domains outside its battlefields.

One of the greatest seekers of Kindred lore, most knowledgeable about the resting places and graves of the ancient dead, is the Gangrel Cuthbert Beckett. Where some Kindred scholars are content to theorize from the comfort of their libraries, Beckett has always gone out to look for himself.

As the Gehenna War intensifies, there’s a sudden demand for those with the specialized knowledge to know what the Kindred of various domains are really facing. Beckett is not the only Kindred archaeologist who has suddenly started to receive invitations to the courts of mighty vampire Princes.

One Dot – Bloody Ancestry: You trail a methuselah by tracking their descendants. You own and maintain notes on vampiric ancestry concerning vampires in your region in a physical or digital form. You receive +2 dice bonus to all Occult tests when investigating the ancestry of any vampire.

Two Dots – Dream Interpreter: Sometimes, methuselashs and even older vampires communicate to their progeny through the daysleep. Once per story, when a character or Storyteller tells you a dream, you may make an Intelligence + Occult test at Difficulty 2. On a win, you receive a number of actionable facts from your Storyteller equivalent to one plus the margin of win.

Three Dots – Perks of Youth: From you contact with Beckett, you’ve learned that those with knowledge are targets for manipulation by older Kindred. You’ve developed hardiness to such supernatural manipulations. Once per session, when a vampire of a higher Blood Potency uses a supernatural coercive power on you, you have receive [sic] a two-dice bonus to resist it.

Four Dots – Ancestor Cult’s Favor: You’ve entered the good graces of a cult worshipping a methuselah. Assign six dots in any way you like to the following Backgrounds to represent what they provide you: Influence, Haven, Herd, Resources, Retainers, or Status. You keep these benefits as long as you obey at least one of their requests per story.

Five Dots – Face to Face: If you seek out the Ancients, you risk finding them. Once per story, if facing a methuselah or an elder, you can make an Intelligence + Occult test at a Difficulty of 4. If you succeed, you manage to recollect a detail or an angle that prompts the vampire to answer a single question about their own past or the Kindred of bygone eras truthfully, at least from their own perspective, as long as it doesn’t significantly jeopardize them or their plans.

[neuromancey]

In my idea for a chronicle gehenna has already happened, and the coterie (probably mostly made up of caitiff and thinbloods, as they're central to the whole gehenna plot thing), are tasked with hunting down pre-gehenna information from an old ruin - likely they work for a group tied to one of the factions if they still exist, or DOVECOTE, or something else entirely, and the "pre-gehenna relic" is literally just Beckett lying in torpor for all these years. Maybe the old man saw the beginning of the end of the world and thought, "welp, night-night time," or he'd been PUT into torpor, but either way getting him not to frenzy and eat the team would be a challenge in the beginning.

How he ended up in torpor is obviously revealed later on, but either way I can see this being a literal hell for him. Imagine spending hundreds of years studying the apocalypse only to find out you slept through the fucking thing. And what's worse, he's a historian and has nobody left to tell the story to that would care, other than the weak blooded losers who woke him up from his nap.

I'm writing this on and off but I'm hesitant to actually put it out there since this is my first time writing anything in the last like five years... :p

[scribesofcalamity]

*insert my longest yeahhhhh boiiiiii ever*

[relleytrots]

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.

[hemochromevtm]

So... is this a temporary transformation for the Duskborn? Be a full vampire as long as you're sucking down elderblood every month?

Or do we interpret Kindred and Duskborn as two different types of vampire (We know the full-vampire propaganda machine does), and a Thinblood's change into the elder's clan is permanent where as a Kindred's change is temporary?

[tremere-chantry]