Mister Vampire OOC

[echoVanguard]

...getting these people to work together is going to be kind of tricky. Two of the three has no affiliations with any major faction, and one of them has no significant supernatural affiliations whatsoever.

As an IMR character, J-Rock has probably handled a few supernatural cases by now and has most likely gotten at least a minor reputation as a go-to PI for cases where something is "off". He might get roped in as a security consultant by Michael Silmoore, or have an existing case cross the paths of one of Silmoore's operations, potentially simultaneously with the other PCs. Private investigators typically get cases that either the clients don't want the cops involved in, or cases that the cops won't touch (or have already closed), so really any sort of situation can be relevant.

Easy example: a Cauchemar Communist recently had a friend go missing, and suspects Syndicate involvement, but the other members of the cell aren't interested in finding out what happened as the decedent was fairly unliked. Some of the potential witnesses include an actor hopeful and a local criminal of interest belonging to the Ulmi family.

echo

[Omegonthesane]

Thanks to CartLife and how Nezumi abilities and theme are all around hiding in the corners - and how they have Red Taped - I'm thinking some kind of illegal immigrant who originally showed up having lost everything back home to the event that made him a Nezumi. Presumably he made friends with the people who did the most to let him avoid being documented before fully wrapping his head around political affiliations.

[Whipstitch]

That is a pretty cool character concept.

Thanks. I've long liked the Reborn in theory, but I usually struggle with coming up with something that's both familiar enough to be evocative to other people but also vague enough that I don't feel like I'm basically begging the group to help me re-enact some bad fanfiction.

Anyway, I'm going to add some mundane items that my character always plans on keeping around in some form another to the end of his sheet, and I would also like to inquire about trading out one of his current Resources for a Destiny. I'd like it to be a pristine black sombrero cordobés that prevents the wearer from suffering overstimulation penalties that may result from gunfire. So, for example, my character could use it to fire his guns while using Supernatural Senses, but would still be vulnerable to overstimulation from exposure to mace, flashbangs, ecstasy or the bite of a Strigoi. Lemme know if that's acceptable, and if so, what rating to price it at.

As for how we get together, one of the nice things about being an Ulmian is that the supernatural community is small, and many of them have special financial needs, like say, planning around immortality/aliases/being an international wolf-man of mystery. So, perhaps when Grek's family transferred him his assets a Ulmian CPA or laywers were involved. Likewise, the Ulmians are a full-blown mafia family, but compared to the Hashashin or the Rolnicy they're at least the sort of work-a-day evil a copper can understand.* Compared to many Ash Walkers or Hollow Ones, Romero would be a relatively pleasant underworld contact for J-Rock to deal with. As far as worldview goes, Romero wants power, and he envisions using it to make things more stable in LA like they were back in Houston. If that ends up meaning he has to roll up some sleeves and solve other people's problems, he's fine with that. It is, after all, the Family business, and oftentimes it pays pretty damn well.


*Uh, well, aside from the necromancy fueled protection rackets, anyway.

[Grek]

So since Adel's backstory places his family in Huston and Romero's backstory places him as coming from Huston, it seems very likely that the two of them could have met because of Ulmian lawyers. So let's go with that.

[Chamomile]

Looks like the Ulmian's got connections.

and I would also like to inquire about trading out one of his current Resources for a Destiny. I'd like it to be a pristine black sombrero cordobés that prevents the wearer from suffering overstimulation penalties that may result from gunfire. So, for example, my character could use it to fire his guns while using Supernatural Senses, but would still be vulnerable to overstimulation from exposure to mace, flashbangs, ecstasy or the bite of a Strigoi. Lemme know if that's acceptable, and if so, what rating to price it at.

That's fine, and doesn't seem like it would be more than Destiny 1. It's a neat trick that lets you be a sniper with handguns, but considering it's only useful to people who have Supernatural Senses it doesn't strike me as being more useful than having attack dogs you can sic on someone whenever. It also strikes me as being about on par with "an enchanted sword," but that's hard to judge because "an enchanted sword" is so goddamned vague.

[Grek]

And to also confirm: A magic box with a large and uncontrolled Swarm in it is Rating 3 Destiny? I figure it's about as impressive as a single nuclear weapon or a Poltergeist in a bottle.

[Chamomile]

The comparison to a poltergeist in a bottle seems about accurate. They're both similarly dangerous and supernatural things in containers.

[Whipstitch]

Cool, rejiggered my resources then. I also took a couple taboos and swapped disloyal out for temperamental. Actually, wait, I forgot about Oppressed Minority, I'll take that instead, if there's no objections. I can totes understand if people'd rather keep the discrimination largely aimed at fictional groups like rat people, so lemme know if it's a problem.

[Chamomile]

Personally I am entirely okay with real world issues being reflected in a game which takes place in what is basically the real world.

[Omegonthesane]

Rules query as I plan to stat around it in part:

Advanced Names of the Blasphemies lets you know the name of anyone you see an accurate picture of; does that mean you can tell when someone is in disguise by the way you don't magically know their name?

[Whipstitch]

Personally I am entirely okay with real world issues being reflected in a game which takes place in what is basically the real world.

Yeah, I wasn't given too worried given that this is the Den, but I learned back in college that race related qualities sometimes get treated as a license to carpetbomb every single in-game conversation with slurs or start up inane "Is group X really being oppressed?" arguments.

[Chamomile]

You are not required to believe that hispanics are an oppressed minority in the real world to play Mister Vampire. You are, however, required to accept that they are an oppressed minority within the gameworld. If this really does bother anyone, remember that the gameworld also includes vampires and stuff, and is not necessarily a strictly accurate interpretation of reality.

Advanced Names of the Blasphemies lets you know the name of anyone you see an accurate picture of; does that mean you can tell when someone is in disguise by the way you don't magically know their name?

This seems like it was probably an unintentional quirk of the rules, and yet I can't see any reason why not.

[Prak]

I would think that it wouldn't work if they were disguised as someone specific. Yes, this probably results in a lot of people in AS disguising themselves as their great aunt thrice removed.

So, Bitter Fruit states that "Doses with other effects can also be produced, but if the requisite number of hits is not achieved the resulting product is merely a standard damaging poison with a strength equal to the actual hits achieved." I was hoping that my character basically moved to LA to be a fixer and pusher, so would it be possible that they use Bitter Fruits to make MDMA Cookies and Ecstasy Apples?

[Chamomile]

The three examples listed are hardly drugs, but it is explicitly mentioned that Advanced and Elder Coil of Thorns each come with their own expanded list of Bitter Fruit recipes. What is not listed is what those recipes actually are. So I'm going to make some stuff up for the Advanced Coil of Thorns Bitter Fruit recipes:

As a 2-hit recipe, something induces the Overstimulation condition (and is thus basically the same as the Strigoi's Bite/Tongue of the Serpent effect, and is what you would use for ecstasy apples).

A 1-hit recipe which induces Stimulation (and is therefore basically a magic caffeine pill). The effects last for 1 hour, but the effect is doubled for each net hit.

As a 4-hit recipe, the paralytic promised by the core description. This immediately reduces someone's Agility to 0. They regain one Agility every minute (like a Delay 3 DoT except it grants an Agility point rather than dealing damage). Net hits while brewing the recipe increase the Delay of recovery by 1 each.

As a 2-hit recipe, Anesthetic. Lasts for 30 minutes. Each net hit doubles the duration.

As a 3-hit recipe, something which induces terrible pain. As an immediate side effect, it causes Agony. It also deals 1 virtual damage per net hit on Delay 5. The effects wear off after half an hour. Like the virtual damage from pain drops, the pain caused by this brew never wraps around into Lethal damage, however if a character takes a Terminal wound from the brew, they will go into shock and are in exactly as much danger as they would be from any other Terminal wound.

All of this stuff is very loosely guesstimated. Feedback is appreciated, because I have probably messed something or other up, possibly including some foundational concept related to how DoTs even work.

[Prak]

It seems to have been written such that, given a trip to the farmer's market, or a garden, and a kitchen, you can make practically any disposable substance. Some aren't even magical- you have to actually take special care for fruit to not become alcohol, and the main forms of caffeine intake are literally plants and water. Others are strictly magical, the mentioned red wood pasta, or the ability to distill a handful of peppers into vegan gluten free plastic explosive. All that remains is for a player to say "I can probably do that with Bitter Fruit. Hey Mister Cavern, how many hits do I need?"

[Grek]

E: Moved this post to the After Sundown changes/V2 thread.

[Chamomile]

The only reference to being able to create things arbitrarily is explicitly referring to actual food. Certainly you should be able to make stuff that's like ecstasy with Bitter Fruit, but there's no indication that you can make whatever you want with Bitter Fruit. So far as I can tell, the fix Grek posted in the AS tweaks thread should work.

If you want to make actual literal ecstasy, taking a few points in a background (I can't think of what skill might be relevant) is not only on much more solid ground rules-wise, it is also much easier, seeing as how Bitter Fruit explicitly requires power points whereas backgrounds do not.

[Omegonthesane]

I would think that it wouldn't work if they were disguised as someone specific. Yes, this probably results in a lot of people in AS disguising themselves as their great aunt thrice removed.

So long as their disguise is indeed an accurate depiction of their great aunt thrice removed.

Alternately / additionally, it is customary for anonymous parties to dress as Brad Pitt a previously established obvious pseudonym at gatherings.

[Prak]

That's fair, Cham. And probably roughly one of the thing backgrounds were intended to do, aside from the mentioned "give people stuff to talk about."

So, yeah, all I've got at the moment is that my character basically became really bored living in a supposedly exciting state capital where nothing really happens, and semester after semester floundering in college, and so on a lark, taking a friend's half-joking suggestion, started making and selling drugs. They started with the softer party drugs, pimping their wares at the rare rave, and the more common night club or house party, then moved out to LA and set up shop selling in larger quantities.

I need to work out their specific origin story, ie, how they became a Dryad, but that's the basics.

[Whipstitch]

After taking a closer look at what other people took for backgrounds and skills I re-jiggered my backgrounds and specialties to make Marco a bit more focused on white collar crime and dealing with bureaucracies.

Also, I want to keep a poncho with a Fistful of Dollars style hidden armor plate in the trunk of my car. I'm thinking it'd have flak jacket stats but be too heavy and outré to really make sense as every day wear. Is that kosher?

[Prak]

Whipstitch, I love the image I just got, of Marco being a white collar worker who's great at his job, never makes trouble goes to meetings and all that, pillar of his workplace...
...but he wears a fucking poncho all the time over his work clothes and all his colleagues were too afraid to say anything about it.

[Whipstitch]

his life is basically a whirlwind of murder and tps reports, yes

[Chamomile]

Also, I want to keep a poncho with a Fistful of Dollars style hidden armor plate in the trunk of my car. I'm thinking it'd have flak jacket stats but be too heavy and outré to really make sense as every day wear. Is that kosher?

Sounds about right. Although if it's just the one plate, it won't do anything for bullets that come from behind.

[Whipstitch]

Might as well go two plates then, unless that's going to start bringing penalties, although in that case I guess he could just wear some dyneema under there instead.

[Omegonthesane]

Character sheet first draft ready. Cauchemar Nezumi bruiser..

Flavour text:

Long story short? 2000 was not kind to Andrus Poder. Really, few years before it were, but that was the year it came to a head. Given his prior... activities... he'd expected someone from the firm might hunt him down, that he might need to move again, but he wasn't expecting it to be rats. Their bite took his wife, Carolina, and her unborn child; what it did to him was... well, 'different' is indisputable.

For a while he tried to stick to business as usual. His therapist initially mistook his new Master Passion: Rage for natural frustration at having been dealt a bad hand, and it took him a while to distinguish his new Tongue of Beasts for his old affection for animals, but the issues with bureaucracy got worse, and with them the stress. He dropped out of his job as a bus driver, unable to take all the people and the delays in payment and acknowledgement, and instead went into business as an unregistered cabbie... which was kind of a mistake, as a move to avoid stress. Sure there were less people at a given time, but he couldn't repeat a route the same way as before, and it felt like the authorities started actually going through his workload once he went off the books.

Finally, some guy pulled a knife on him on the way back from the shops. Rather than take a breath and hand him a wallet, rather than insult his ancestry and make a break, Andrus... he doesn't remember the details but it ended up with him taking a few deep breaths over a barely recognisable corpse.

He shed a few tears over it, but ultimately decided to throw the body in a woodchipper and dispose of the results. It was a few months before he Frenzied again; this time, he did so in a pub, but more importantly in the presence of a gate to the Dark Reflection. There was no question of wood-chipping all the bodies this time, so he headed to the ritually cursed mirror in the men's loo, and jumped through.

In some ways Limbo was simpler for Andrus. Yes, it was nightmarish visions all around, but there was no need to fill out tax returns or deal with people - and Andrus soon realised he (and presumably his particular strain of Nezumi) had the Patience of the Mountains, so he didn't even need to seek food. Of course, no one can hide forever; within the year a Baali had found him... but within a year he'd reached LA's Dark Reflection, and the Baali who found him happened to be a Cauchemar specialising in the Progress of Glass. A vacancy was mentioned, a pact was made, and Andrus was allowed back into the mortal realm circa 2003.

The last ten years haven't been nearly so cruel - he knows what's going on now, and can act accordingly. Indeed, much of his present skill set has been gained through these days, As it happens, the Cauchemar were quite willing to take him on, give him enough jobs to pay the cheapest rent the city offered, and allowed him to just dive into the sewers for a month when it all got too much. With the exception of the occasional stress-relieving pre-arranged execution Andrus hasn't brutally killed anyone since moving to LA, so all in all, everything's gone better than expected.

Crunch, which I can't help but suspect I botched somewhere:

Attributes:
Physical 4
Strength 2
Agility 4
Mental 5+2
Intuition 5
Logic 4
Social 2+1
Willpower 4
Charisma 1
Edge 3
Potency 1; Power 13/13


Physical 24+2 + 2 Specs
Combat 6, Drive 6 [Navigation], Stealth 6 [Shadowing], Perception 4, Larceny 4
Non-standard vehicles: Oversized [semis & buses], articulated vehicles, emergency vehicles, motor boats, construction equipment, armoured vehicles, light aircraft, agricultural vehicles (I had tractors in mind but didn't feel it was worth another spec if a thresher came up)

Social 14 + 2 specs
Animal Ken 2, Empathy 6 [Action Anticipation], Persuasion 6 [Acting]

Technical 19+1
Operations 6 [Piloting], Rigging 4 [Repairs], Research 6 [Datamining], Medicine 4 [First Aid]

Backgrounds: Vehicles 6; Biology 6; Bar Scene 6; Hell Mouths 5; Limbo Politics 3; Map of LA 3; Occasional Catholic 3; SVR 3

Resources:
Contacts 3 (Andrus has dirt on several people-smuggling rings and is quite happy to help their operations for cash)
Languages 2 (Polish, Russian, American. Which of these is his mother tongue is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Destiny 2 (The notes of Dr Steve Morituri, being a stack of lever-arch files of isnane scribblings and cryptic writings left by the previous occupant of Andrus' bedsit which, when deciphered, contained instructions for becoming a Baali and performing Infernal Sorcery. As a Nezumi, Andrus has no use for the former and plenty for the latter.)
Assets 1 (A bigmcfuckenlargehuge number of literal gutter rats, all of them even less effectual on their own than his Animal Form)
Finance 1 (Down payments for upwards of a decade on a cheap terrible bedsit)
Secrets 2 (A slightly-more-safe-than-being-found-by-mobsters house in the Dark Reflection)

Obligations:
Addiction 1 (Smoker)
Enemies 2 (While Andrus' defection from the SVR is very much a cold case at this point, he'd still rather stay ahead of them)

Motivations
Master Passion: Rage. Andrus never really recovered from the circumstances that made him a lycanthrope, and is adamant in blaming everyone and everything else for his misfortune; anything that reminds him of his married life, or any hint of disrespect, can potentially set him off. Given that this list includes children and buses, he's often quite frustrated, and carries a stress ball wherever he goes.
Driving Passion: Andrus feels like he hasn't led a meaningful life since becoming a Nezumi, and wants to change that. Of course, the only pattern he knows for doing that involves becoming a husband and father again, and even if he wasn't specifically a wererat that would come with all the rage triggers ever, so he tries not to think about it. [Also, I took Aimless, so his DP is flavour text.]
Ethics: Solidarity Ethics as described
Ideology - Honors: pulling your weight (given the chance), keeping your word, women who dress sexy, looking out for others, sweating the details
Ideology - Despises: slacking, unsolicited criticism, hurting women, betrayal, provocations

Advantages and Disadvantages
Red Taped (Nezumi), Feared by Children, Infectious Mood, Aimless, Temperamental, Loyalty, Time Sense, Direction Sense, Fighting Finesse

Powers:
Core Discipline: Beast Form, Tongue of Beasts
Nezumi Basic Powers: Abyss of the Body, Hide From Notice, Learn the Heart's Pain, Revive the Flesh
Strain Basic Power: Patience of the Mountains
Andrus Basic Powers: Poison Heart
Nezumi Advanced Powers: Hide in Plain Sight, The Beckoning
Andrus Advanced Powers: Banishment, Holistic Ventriloquism