[OSSR]Victorian Age Vampire

[erik]

Every now and then can have the threats return home to London, like Skull-Face with REH's Steve Costigan, but generally yeah, going around the world is more interesting. Collecting treasures a la Indiana Jones, having a ship and crew of adventuring smugglers or whatever.

[hyzmarca]

Every now and then can have the threats return home to London, like Skull-Face with REH's Steve Costigan, but generally yeah, going around the world is more interesting. Collecting treasures a la Indiana Jones, having a ship and crew of adventuring smugglers or whatever.

Set it during the Age of Sail and have Vampire Pirates of the Caribbean.

[Username17]

Every now and then can have the threats return home to London, like Skull-Face with REH's Steve Costigan, but generally yeah, going around the world is more interesting. Collecting treasures a la Indiana Jones, having a ship and crew of adventuring smugglers or whatever.

Set it during the Age of Sail and have Vampire Pirates of the Caribbean.

Age of sail stuff is sadly impossible in Vampire: the Masquerade because vampires need to be in light-tight containment during the day. There's nothing unreasonable with having pirate ships where the captain sleeps during the day and a skeleton crew of wild-eyed slaves keeps things running for night attacks. But Age of Sail ships aren't light tight. And if they were light tight, they'd need big fires down below and then they'd burn up and wouldn't be light-tight.

Masquerade vampires take their dislike of sunlight way too far, and it makes a lot of stories you'd want to tell impossible. Especially in historical settings.

-Username17

[Longes]

Every now and then can have the threats return home to London, like Skull-Face with REH's Steve Costigan, but generally yeah, going around the world is more interesting. Collecting treasures a la Indiana Jones, having a ship and crew of adventuring smugglers or whatever.

Set it during the Age of Sail and have Vampire Pirates of the Caribbean.

Age of sail stuff is sadly impossible in Vampire: the Masquerade because vampires need to be in light-tight containment during the day. There's nothing unreasonable with having pirate ships where the captain sleeps during the day and a skeleton crew of wild-eyed slaves keeps things running for night attacks. But Age of Sail ships aren't light tight. And if they were light tight, they'd need big fires down below and then they'd burn up and wouldn't be light-tight.

Masquerade vampires take their dislike of sunlight way too far, and it makes a lot of stories you'd want to tell impossible. Especially in historical settings.

-Username17

That's only the smallest of the problems, the one you can get around of by hauling a cargo of light-tight coffins. The bigger problems are:

1. You can function only at night, meaning that either you and your entire ghoul crew have Auspex, or you have to hang the torches everywhere increasing the fire hazard. And you'd still be unable to spot other ships because you are looking from light into darkness.
2. You are stuck in a confined place with a tiny herd. I hope you didn't want to use any of your Disciplines.

[hyzmarca]

1. You can function only at night, meaning that either you and your entire ghoul crew have Auspex, or you have to hang the torches everywhere increasing the fire hazard. And you'd still be unable to spot other ships because you are looking from light into darkness.

Protean 1. Auspex explicitly doesn't let you see in the dark.

The limited herd issue can, again, be fixed with Settite beer. Beer solves all herd-releated problems for Vampires. Beer good.


As for light,

One solution, if you can call it that, is to convince your ST to let you play a 2nd or 3rd gen and take Fortitutde 10. I don't think any ST will let you do that. But it would be an interesting game.

Another trick, if your ST lets you mix and match game lines, is to get possessed by a Bane Spirit. Freak Legion rules apparently say that Bane Spirits do not influence vampires that they possess. And there is a power called Immunity, which gives you immunity to one thing. A vampire fomor can take Immunity to Sunlight and then it's all good.

Bardo 9 is also a potential solution, though it requires you to be a 4th gen Child of Osiris (or Caittif), or to have at least learned from them.

For a more reasonable solution, available to lower generations, there is The Corpse in the Monster 5, which lets you become a mortal human for a day, but is also extremely expensive so you need a huge supply of blood on hand to try it. And it takes away all of your vampire powers.

Another solution is to achieve Golconda, which doesn't really have any actual rules, but does potentially make you immune to sunlight. You probably wouldn't be able to maintain this state as a pirate due to all the humanity rolls you'll have to make just from doing normal piraty things, though.


Finally, if your ST is willing to fudge the rules for a good game, there is always the Wear A Burqa solution.

[name_here]

The captain could just sleep in a box during the day. And naval night attacks don't require darkvision, though it would help considerably.

[Grek]

If you're Sabbat, you could get a reasonably sized crew of revenants. They make their own vitae.

[Username17]

Protean 1. Auspex explicitly doesn't let you see in the dark.

Vampire: the Masquerade Auspex explicitly does not give you see-in-darkness.
Vampire: the Requiem Auspex explicitly does give you see-in-darkness.

All supplemental material is written by White Wolf authors, which means it is written in reference to their own personal head canon and house rules rather than what is actually written in any particular book. So there's a surprising amount of stuff in Masquerade that assumes that Auspex gives you see-in-darkness and a surprising amount of stuff in Requiem that assumes that it does not.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Protean 1. Auspex explicitly doesn't let you see in the dark.

Vampire: the Masquerade Auspex explicitly does not give you see-in-darkness.
Vampire: the Requiem Auspex explicitly does give you see-in-darkness.

Well, if you're going to go use Requium, you might as well use the Blood and Smoke rules, where a 1 Blood Potency Vampire in a niqāb is immune to sunlight damage.

[Lokey]

I think everything wolverines blood unless otherwise stated. Revenant just means that they can fuel disciplines with their own blood instead of it having to come from a vamp. (They're descendants of ghouls, a human/vamp hybrid.) Ghouls are fine for feeding on, but they compete with each other for attention and can frenzy, need some dominate points to keep that stuff in line, unless you want to throw your starter points towards a ghoul army and not be able to do much else.

[Prak]

The captain could just sleep in a box during the day. And naval night attacks don't require darkvision, though it would help considerably.

The captain could also just have a light-tight cabin that no one is allowed to go into. Other vampire crew would probably reside in coffins in a light-tight smuggling hold.

Also, ships had a fix for the problem of fire below deck-

Deck Prisms

This doesn't help your vampire captain at night, I just wanted to point it out.

[hyzmarca]

I think everything wolverines blood unless otherwise stated. Revenant just means that they can fuel disciplines with their own blood instead of it having to come from a vamp. (They're descendants of ghouls, a human/vamp hybrid.) Ghouls are fine for feeding on, but they compete with each other for attention and can frenzy, need some dominate points to keep that stuff in line, unless you want to throw your starter points towards a ghoul army and not be able to do much else.

Ghouls actually are terrible for feeding on unless you use tricks.

The feeding on Ghouls causes them 1 box of lethal damage per blood point gained. They can then heal this by spending a blood point. But that blood point has to come from somewhere, generally from you, so it's a wash.
You can get around this by using methods to multiply blood points. Efficient Digestion and Typhon's Brew both work. So does Quicken the Mortal's Blood, but your character probably doesn't have Quietus 6. Now, you can totally stack all 3 and turn 1 blood point into 16, but that's really expensive just for making feeding easier.

Using Typhon's Brew alone is generally enough. If you have a few ghouls, and know Akhu 1 (or know someone who does), you can keep your ghouls topped up all the time, at the cost of them being drunk almost all the time.

This also lets you have independent ghoul gangs, who just get drunk all the time, since ghouls who know how to make Typhon's brew have an unlimited source of free vitae so long as they keep chugging.

If I were running a game set in the 70s, I'd have a ghoul fraternity. They'd be on double secret probation.

[Lokey]

Hmm. I can get that they can't soak being a juice bag, but don't they heal a level/day anyway (or two days if lethal...where's that table)? I just spent an embarrassing amount of time on the 3rd ed main book and can't find where it tells you how to get the thing you need to live. Whitewolf wikia wasn't helpful either.

At least dumpster diving books in dnd gets you somewhere, if not unfortunately everywhere. Here we can't even keep our vamps alive without it

ETA: Also the examples were pretty depressing. Wake up, spend blood. Probably roll to keep your humanity then roll not to frenzy. And keep making those rolls no matter what you do until you fail them and become an npc.

Also did see two rules for appearing human. Same blood cost (8 - humanity) but one lasts a scene the other all day.

So look forward to a system deconstruction, but not sure where to start. Guess I'm not entirely sure of their motivation in writing, Anne Rice vamps are made of awesome: kill people all the time, kill the torch wielding mob this eventually brings to your door, mope a bit, move and do it again...at least we know what the Eternal Struggle is: keeping yourself out of torpor or sneaking Herd: infinity onto your sheet. Because you know the first storyline will be about your ghoul at the hospital getting fired

[hyzmarca]

Hmm. I can get that they can't soak being a juice bag, but don't they heal a level/day anyway (or two days if lethal...where's that table)? I just spent an embarrassing amount of time on the 3rd ed main book and can't find where it tells you how to get the thing you need to live. Whitewolf wikia wasn't helpful either.

At least dumpster diving books in dnd gets you somewhere, if not unfortunately everywhere. Here we can't even keep our vamps alive without it

Healing times aren't linear, and depend on how much damage is incurred. One level of lethal damage heals in a day, so one donor can sustain you if you do nothing but wake up every day. But you'll do a lot more than that, most likely.

It takes three days to heal two levels of damage.

Three requires actual medical attention or else it will keep getting worse, and takes a week to heal.

Four requires medical attention and takes a month to heal.

By contrast, a ghoul can deal with four levels of damage with a gallon of settite beer and 12 seconds of rest.

[Mechalich]

Vampires at sea can feed on fish and marine mammals. In a pre-modern context this actually means that food is far more abundant than anywhere else.

In fact, feeding on domestic animals greatly increases the survivability of Vampires in the WoD in any society that could be considered agrarian - and even most pre-modern urban societies which tended to have pigs and stuff running around.

[hyzmarca]

Fisherman vampires? You are, inevitably, going to end up tangling a mermaid in your nets, and that isn't fun for anyone. Unless it's the type of mermaid with the fish part on top.

[Mechalich]

Fisherman vampires? You are, inevitably, going to end up tangling a mermaid in your nets, and that isn't fun for anyone. Unless it's the type of mermaid with the fish part on top.

Technically the oWoD has Vampires who live under the sea full-time - the Mariner sub-clan of the Gangrel - and Mermaids are a type of Fey.

The big risk for any supernatural at sea in the oWoD is that the Rokea manage to notice you (not very likely) and then decide to eat your face (very likely).