[wodchronicle-journal]

So we’re having a break from mage, so a member of our group can run a vampire campaign over the summer. We finally got to reveal what we’ve been planning since he told us about wanting to run the campaign.

So in like December we started talking about this campaign and the characters we wanted to play, one person mentioned wanting to play a clown who was turned into a nosferatu and now looks permanently like a clown. Later during a chat without the future st we were like “wouldn’t be funny if we were all clowns”. So then we spent the time from December to late May planning our circus.

We have a Lasombra, a nosferatu, a tzimisce (my character, and two gangrel, all of whom preform together. We also share a haven, and a bedroom, and like everything else. It was very funny to tell our st this especially when he ask “how long have you been planning this.”

Best part is there is one member of the coterie who declined our offer to join the clown club so it’s just five clowns and one regular guy.

[creekfiend]

Something I really wish I could concisely communicate to people within the Dog Fancy is how much the self congratulatory "you need a thick skin to show dogs!" statements sound like "YOU CANT BE A PUSSY IF YOU WANNA COLLECT VINTAGE EASY BAKE OVENS" to literally everyone outside the Dog Fancy. Like, oh, you have made your incredibly niche hobby a deeply unpleasant social space to be in? FUCKING WHY. FOR WHAT REASON? YOU WEIRDOS

[thedurvin]

I keep seeing this post with people saying “yeah that’s true in my hobby too”…are there any hobby spaces where it’s not true? Where people come together to have a good time and then do so successfully???

[wodchronicle-journal]

I mean like, I know shittyness exists in the ttrpg hobby (I’ve seen Reddit) but I’ve never actually encountered it in real life. Everyone I’ve ever actually met in the DnD club I run at the library and everyone my online groups are pretty nice. A group or two has fallen apart but no one’s been mean. A bit weird but generally chill, maybe like one or two mildly annoying individuals but you get over it.

[wodchronicle-journal]

Casey is just not having a good time.

So we fight a fire lion the size of an elephant, Casey finally got correspondence four and open a portal to the ocean to let in a bunch of water. Our caveman player turned into a mammoth. We managed to fight our way through the spook house to find our friend (a pc named Zaya) who got into it with the evil mage who kidnapped him. He managed to know the guy out.

Head back to the chantry for questioning, one of the head mages was acting super weird and tried to kill the evil mage on the spot before we could question him. He’s restrained by the other mages in charge. We looked through the evil mages mind and find out he was just a guy who was possessed.

Followed that lead to the college, grabbed some things from there but no dice so we took a nap. Casey visited the dreaming to talk to one of the fae about the demon contract, they gave him the all clear to accept. So now I got a dot in forces.

Went to Casey’s Tzimisce friend, Ace, who gave Zaya some tattoos, told him about shooting the Lasombra. Asked if he could let them know Casey is sorry, he mistook them for the evil mage.

We did need to talk to the Lasombra though, he was our only lead left so we went on a hunt for someone to get us in contact with him. Finally got to that meeting, it was in a church, he’s still angry about the fight but we found out that the evil mage promised to bring his childer back in exchange for Zaya. The childer had been killed by a hunter. Casey looked to see if he can get a sense for what plane they’re on while Zaya tried to look into the Lasombra’s mind.

Casey found out that one passed on to whatever the good afterlife is and three are about to be eaten by oblivion. Zaya botched his roll and triggers a frenzy in the vampire. They lunged, Casey got so alarmed he poof-ed out of building and Zaya staked the Lasombra with a spell. He probes their mind again and finds out that the evil wizard is in fact the older mage from our chantry, the one that tried to kill the possessed guy.

When Casey teleported he went right back to the chantry unaware of the evil wizard, and went to the head of the spirit sphere looking for how to save the childers’ souls. She says it can’t be done but Casey isn’t giving up yet. Zaya called and tried to warm him but he wasn’t listening.

All of this on like an hour of sleep, he picked up like five paradox teleporting and has spent a bunch of willpower so he’s just real tired but he’s committed to saving the Lasombra’s childer. They seemed genuinely distraught about loosing all the vampires they sired and Casey really feels for them seeing as he’s very close with his own family.

Don’t know what to do with the souls once I have them (or one of them don’t know how successful I’ll be). Casey’s going to have to learn to make a body for it, whether like a robot body or like Frankenstein-ing something together.

[wodchronicle-journal]

So interesting development, Casey got offered a pact by the demon tyrant in Marshridge. Not sure what to do about that.

Apparently in exchange for like hanging out with her once a week l get an extra dot in one of my spheres and a piece of property with a node on it.

Not sure how I feel about it. Casey is friends with a group of demons, and the tyrant has been nice so far but I’ll have to look into it more.

Also one pc got kidnapped by a nephandi so we’re going to rescue him with his werewolf boyfriend and his mentor. So far the house he’s in is creepy, somehow nighttime in the middle of the day, and has a shadow vampire in it. Casey shot said shadow vampire and then he tried to stab him right before the session ended. So yeah, Levine is getting to finally participate though so hurray for him.

[lord-soth-dk]

[prophcassandra]

I made a post a while ago about how the reason for the Beckoning happening was at least partially because certain writers at White Wolf were peeved that, in earlier editions of VtM, most players tended to dump most background dots in Generation and start at 8th or 9th gen. This is because most/all of the other backgrounds were kind of roleplay-related and how useful they’d be depended entirely on how much your ST wanted to use them. Generation on the other hand gave a massive, staggering power boost that was also very hard or impossible to achieve in-game in most Chronicles.

I think a lot of potential Storytellers read that and wondered “well how would you convince players to not play a low generation character then? Or convince them to spend background dots on other things?”

So let me give some advice mostly for V20 and before ST, but it should apply mostly to V5 too. When you’re setting up your Chronicle, give your players a list of NPCs that can serve as potential sires. Easygoing, supportive sires are likely to be higher generation, while lower gen sires are more likely to be powerful elders like Primogen, who are going to have high expectations for their childer and present an additional challenge for players. This will not only make your players think about things other than generation for character creation, it’ll make them feel immersed in the story from the beginning rather than feeling like an outside observer. Take it from me; it’s a lot easier to convince players not to play super low generation if you provide cool NPCs and potential plotlines they want to get involved in, even if it requires them to start at a higher generation.

[blodreinyra]

Okay. Serious question. What exactly is Vampire The Masquerade and should I play it.

[wodchronicle-journal]

Vampire the Masquerade was originally a ttrpg made in the 90s about vampires. It has a bunch of clans with their own sets of powers, different sects, a lot of lore (but be cautious the old games get very disturbing and the trigger list for it would be huge).

The masquerade part is referencing the rule all the vampires have about keeping hidden from the humans.

There have been lots of games, books, and other media made with the setting. It’s also apart of the larger World of Darkness setting that has werewolves and mages and fairies as well.

[fun-vtm-ideas]

Tzimisce who asks everyone their pronouns because he heard it was the polite thing to do

[wodchronicle-journal]

So we sent a letter to Troile (yes the antediluvian) last session. We saw on our map of Lilith’s “children” that he was up and about with Moloch, and they made their way to Seattle (very fast mind you).

Seattle is like two hours away from Marshridge so we didn’t like that. We preformed a ritual to bind to notebooks so something written in one can be seen in the other, and sent one their way. And then we wrote a letter in there which basically said “Hey, we know you’ve been asleep awhile so good morning. Your brother Malkav told us you plan to like make a city for vampires so we were just wondering what’s up with that?”

We are aware these are very dangerous npcs but we also can’t just avoid the plot so we’re trying to be chill until we know more. The heads of the traditions in Marshridge know, and now the tyrant of the demons know, so we’ve told some powerful people.

We got some information, we do know that Troile wants to build a city. On a list of 1-10 on how bad for humans that would be they said a 5 basically. That was not attributed to like wanting to harm people specifically but that the city would lack the necessary resources/support to keep it working well enough to avoid that. So right now it doesn’t look like they actively want to cause serious harm they just don’t care if their goal results in that. So there is something there to work with, not as bad as the person who wants to feed the planet to a giant worm.

On another note Casey got some cool gifts for his Tzimisce friend since he was upset last session so that was fun.

[beanjugo]

It’s so weird playing dnd for 6+ hours and then immediately after it’s done wish you were playing more dnd

[wodchronicle-journal]

So i thought I’d talk about some of Casey’s supernatural friends because I’ve mentioned a few of them.

The first person he met was Elizabeth, he used to go to the same college as her. When he first went to the Marshridge chantry they met, she is the head of the virtual adepts there. Elizabeth tried to teach Casey magic since his affinity sphere is correspondence like the adepts, but his practice was too different. They’re still friends though.

The group who’s actually been helping him with his teleportation is a group of demons in Marshridge. There are three he spends time with, Arakiel, Zepar, Beburos. They use portals similarly to how his work so he can practice with them. Casey has probably spent more time with them than anyone else, he’s going to help one explore the land of the dead, and I think another wants to go to space.

Ace is Casey’s best friend. For context, there are a few vampire hunters in the Marshridge chantry and they have a detective board about the vampires of the city. They had Ace’s picture on the board with their shop and it was one of two there. Casey is stupidly curious about everything and wanted to meet a vampire, so yeah, he kinda just showed up to say hi. Ace is the Tzimisce primogen due to technically and while Casey is under the impression he’s only been a vampire for 5 years due to talk in our discord we know he’s a methuselah. So Casey will figure that out eventually. Ace owns a hair salon and does that most nights.

Levine is the current apprentice of the head of the order of Hermes (whose name is Fatimid). Casey dragged him to the end of a fight with an angel and a guy with a lightning sword. Fatimid is on of the vampire hunters and seems to hate them in a more personal way than the other hunter. So Casey is probably going to have to work on getting Levine to be more normal about vampires. But Levine is nice so I think it wouldn’t be too hard once he meets a nice one.

Then there are his fae friends, Villain Bryan and The March in Red (who Casey calls Bryan and Red respectively). He doesn’t know much about either of them yet but we are trying to get them to get together. Bryan leads the changlings and is pretty cool. Set him a letter that’s a paper airplane piloted by tiny plastic cats which are Casey’s familiars. Red is on of the nobility of the true fae and is in charge of that along with his sister. Casey went to visit him in the dreaming last session and was given an address to send letters to so he doesn’t have to visit the dreaming just to tell Red something.

So yeah, Casey has a bunch of supernatural people he talks with.

[bloodgurlz]

can someone explain tremere hate jokes to me like why do we hate the cool blood wizards

[wodchronicle-journal]

The Tremere pissed off a lot of clans in there quest to become vampires. They were originally mages who wanted immortality and thought they could do it by experimenting on vampires, specifically the Tzimisce. A group of like six who became the founders of the Tremere tried a ritual and got turned into vampires, and lost all their real magic as a result. So some vampires don’t even count them as being “real” since they weren’t embraced they “stole” vampirism.

They didn’t become any better after turning. They expanded their experiments to include gangrels and nosferatu, creating gargoyles to be troops in their war with the tzimisce. And just to be generally subservient to them.

They also diablerized the antediluvian of the Salubri to get more credibility for their clan. This is part of the whole usurper title they got. And then proceeded to use propaganda to demonize the only clan you could argue was “kind” as the Salubri powers are based around healing and they did that for humans and vampires. This worked because the Ventrue leader at the time wanted to tremeres’ access to sorcery. None of the clans really like them but their magic makes them useful.

So often with Tremere they’ll be “welcome” in a city/domain because they are useful due to magic and stuff but no one really trusts/like them due to how they got to where they are. But this is all broad strokes vibes obviously.

[wodchronicle-journal]

So the two vampires we went out of our way to avoid fighting, they got jumped by some dumb hunter. Well one got jumped in the hallway of the motel and the other threw himself out the window to escape.

I say dumb hunter cause even if she almost took the one out she still got beat up. Cause she decided to fight them up close and at night.

So yeah, we followed her to see what her deal was. She’s just a dumb teenager who’s mad her mom (who was a hunter npc from my vtm game) got killed hunting a vampire. Not these vampires, a pc who was also in my last game and died in the final fight.

She’s going to be a reaccurring annoyance. We discussed getting her to stop the whole revenge thing but we’ve barely spoken to her so.

The vampire who was seriously injured almost got kidnapped by the hospital. The hospital in Marshridge is used by the technocracy to kidnap supernatural people. His “family”, including Casey’s best friend (a vampire who is the Tzimisce primogen on a technicality), went to keep an eye on him.

We had to rescue him later. John our detective went in and claimed he was in witness protection, while Casey dressed as an emt to play the driver. We pulled it off with a call to our fbi contacts.

[wodchronicle-journal]

So we did our first ritual and Casey hated it. Magic has come to him fairly easily so far, most of his is very intuitive. But this ritual spell was difficult.

For some context, there is a pc that has since been switched for a different pc, but they were into hunting vampires (Casey was not a fan but couldn’t do anything about it). He killed a revenant who to be fair was trying to kidnap him. So self defense but the revenants family wasn’t exactly happy about this. This pc was investigated by the police but they didn’t have any real evidence and had to let him go.

Another pc, John, is a cop and was helping the revenants sister Jane and eventually (mostly due to Jane’s persistent) started dating her. So she’s upset about her brother’s death. And her cousins showed up to investigate, two npcs who I’ve been told are definitely based off characters from the sopranos. Now they’re in town, spending time with Jane and John, and mention that since the cops didn’t look into the suspect pc much they were going to “talk” to his family. This was said in such a suspicious manner that alarm bells went off for everyone.

So we have to stop them, John stalls them by convincing them to go to trivia night at a bar buying us another day to handle it. But we can’t fight them, that would upset John’s girlfriend more. So we have to figure out how to convince them to not go through with their plan.

Our final plan was to cast a memory spell on them. We broke into their hotel room. Casey looked in with correspondence before hand but he doesn’t have spirit so he didn’t see the ghost in the room. So Zaya (another pc) went in, and surprise there is a ghost guarding the place but the ghost wants to be free so he lets Zaya steal what we need as long as he also gets its fetter. Great.

Take it all back and preform a ritual to make them believe that they already interrogated the family. It took forever, we all had to spend a bunch of willpower and quintessence cause the person rolling was not rolling well, and all our characters were exhausted afterwards. So yeah worse casting experience of Casey’s life. He hated that, but hopefully it worked.

We did steal the fetter though so they will be looking for it. Casey took a nap, he has a demesne which in our game has connections to the dreaming so he’s going to go looking for a fae he hasn’t spoken to in awhile.

[wodchronicle-journal]

So after we finish up our VtM campaign my group will be playing mage. Someone else is st-ing so I’ll have a pc this time.

So I’m going to play Casey, he’s a correspondence focused mage. It been like 10+ sessions so I think I finally have his characterization down.

Truth be told I thought we were just playing like average people so Casey is really just a doordash driver who has magic now. Everyone else’s character has something to their backstory (dark backstory, time-travel, nepotism), Casey just kinda stumbled in here but I think it works. Nothing bad has really happened to him but that’s what the chronicle is for.

He has terrible social stats (1 dot in charisma and manipulation) except for appearance where he has 4 dots and captivating as its speciality. Very pretty person but is painfully bad at social interactions. He has 2 dots in strength and stamina, 3 for dexterity. So pretty average there. 4 dots in perception and wits, and two in intelligence. Sees a lot but can have a hard time piecing it together. So yeah, I like him and I think his stats are fun.

As you can see he was never meant to be a social character but because he’s generally the most well adjusted member of the cabal he’s the one most ready to be friendly. 4 in appearance saves him from the awful charisma making him seem creepy, he’s just real awkward, but he’s not winning any rolls with it. If he wants to make friends he’s going to have to work for it.

Oh and he has a 3 in the echoes flaw, basically that means anything that knows about the supernatural can tell Casey’s not just a regular human from across the room. Might be bad in the future but right now it makes it a bit easier to talk to vampires and stuff.

[wodchronicle-journal]

So I completely forgot to use this blog like I wanted and the last time I mentioned my chronicle was the third arc. We’re at trying to get done with the final at this point and I wouldn’t even know where to start.

On of the players is a hound now, set to become sherif when the current one retires to focus on his band.

One player learned some old thaumaturgy abilities I moved up to v5 and now is one of two vampires in the city who can shoot fire out of their hands.

One player drank ravnas blood and sort of became one with a small sentient piece of the antediluvian.

One player has successfully built his cult to about 30ish people, made friends with the lake monster, broke off his friendship with the lake monster (its a long story), and is now trying to get the lake to take a deal from him and his sire.

And one diablerised someone with help from a creepy primogen and is now planning to try and get rid of him by exposing him as a diablerist (cause he is that’s why he sort of nudged her into doing it).

So yeah, thats what they’ve been up to along with figuring out how to deal with the lake monster who’s been pulling strings to increase violent crime all over the surrounding area.

[veepadeep]

Vtm fandom,

Gimme some gutrenching ideas/blurbs about tragedies of some of your embraces- the ocs and kindred that woke up with their life altered forever. Gimme that angst you spin around in your head

[wodchronicle-journal]

My pc Oliver actually like asked to be embraced. He is a doctor and his thought processes was that if he had all the time in the world he could study so many things, watch medicine progress, come up with so much that could help people. Surprise surprise being a vampire sucks, being a Salubri sucks extra, and he’s spent his like 20-30 years as a vampire not really doing much of anything but keeping a back ally clinic afloat cause he’s too paranoid to try and progress. And now he has to live with the fact that his unlife is trash and the only one to blame for that is himself.