The Venetian
Dante Giovanni Putanesca is a
wise guy Giovanni vampire who built an Italian-themed hotel and casino in Las Vegas on the strip. Also, no matter how you phrase it, Giovanni family relations sound incestuous as fuck.
Dante came to the attention of his "Great-uncle," Lorenzo Putanesca, who was then visiting Chicago from the old country. Lorenzo was deeply disappointed by the sorry state of the family in America. However, in Dante, Lorenzo saw a spark of dark and terrible potential, enough that he was willing to bestow on the man the Proxy Kiss.
The only thing remotely interesting about the vampire/mob-run hotel casino is that it was erected on the site of the old
Sands Hotel and Casino, and that the ghostly remains of the demolished casino still survive in the Underworld, complete with all the wraiths and specters that are taking refuge in it. This is cool because: 1) it's a haunted hotel/casino, 2) necromancers/others who can step sideways can run around the old casino and pop back into the new casino at odd places. Which to me just screams "Kindred Ocean's 11 plus wraiths," but I understand if that isn't everyone else's cup of tea.
Other than that...uh, yeah, when you're a vampire/mobster running a casino in Vegas, disposing of dead hookers drained of all blood isn't really a thing, I guess? And nobody goes out during the day anyway. It's bright and hot as fuck. Dante's got a suite on the 17th floor, all the ghouled and non-ghouled casino security backing him up, plus a network of wraiths spying on everybody. The only kind of sad-and-pathetic thing is that whatever his vampire powers are, he still can't
get laid feed himself correctly:
He also keeps a moderate stash of Rohypanol and Percodan hidden in the bar so that he can make a loaded drink for a guest he's lured to his suite for a private snack.
The Gatekeeper's Hold
Maximilian is a Nosferatu with claustrophobia, so he doesn't like the traditional sewer-haven.
Seemed so much bigger as a kid.
So, Max's haven is a an unused basement mechanical maintenance room at the Water Treatment Plant. He works as the night manager, using Obfuscate when he has to deal with humans, which is often, and does his part for the Masquerade by controlling the active sewers. Despite have an appearance of Zero and deformities which apparently make it hard for him to talk intelligibly, Max is the most social Nosferatu you've ever met, with a stellar rep and on good terms with everybody.
The day manager, Tony Athlex, knows that Maximilian often sleeps in the mechanical closet, but he was convinced some time ago to look the other way. Tony believes that Maximilian is having some personal trouble at home and that ignoring the existence of the cot is a huge favor he's doing his coworker. Maximilian's ability to persuade Tony so easily springs not only from a well-conceived story, but also from the partial blood bond that Max enforces by mixing his vitae with the coffee he hands to Tony as they change shifts.
Partial blood bond? Seriously? SEAL THE DEAL, MAX. Also it turns out he's "mildly blood-bound" the five plant managers. What the fuck does that mean? You've had three sips of vitae or you haven't.
Other than Max's cot, he has basically no personal effects they care to mention and there's no real reason to raid his crib, and there's no additional security other than the usual for breaking into a public works building.
The House That Fear Built
Harriet Perkins is a Malkavian slumlord.
Blessed with old money, her blue-blooded family, which was now ghouled to her whims, purchased every available mansion that came up for sale, until she owned everything within the cluster of blocks that surrounded her own. The Perkins family then converted all the mansions, save theirs, of course, into smaller apartments in order to support the ghetto that was blossoming around them. Every home they converted devalued the local property further, making it easier to purchase more buildings. For Harriet, the role of slumlord proved profitable both financially and in terms of vitae. Her tenants, mostly North American untouchables, were no more important than cobwebs. When they vanished, few bothered to investigate or even cared.
So, Harriet turned into your reclusive aunt in her decaying five-story Art Nouveau-style apartment mansion in the middle of a slum of her own creation. And she's a hoarder. Because she's a Malkavian. Unlike the rest of these places, this means that her haven is a hoard of antiques that could be sold for much money, but she's so insane that she'll kill anyone that touches her shit. So this is as close as they get to an actual dungeon, but there's only one boss monster (Harriet) and a bunch of minions (Harriet's ghouled family members).
CVN 70, USS Carl Vinson
This is a real-life
Nimitz-class supercarrier. Hiding onboard is Burak, a 900-year old Ottoman Turk (which is kind of weird, because Osman I didn't found the Ottoman state until c. 1299, which should top his age at ~700 in 2003, but let's let that slide) and Assamite fuck-up.
Much to the disappointment of his sire, however, he did not make a good killer.
What, seriously? This is usually a vampire problem that solves itself, as far as not feeding regularly. Anyway, he entered voluntary torpor and woke up in 1800s Ottoman Empire, where he promptly fled for the exciting life of a vampiric sailor. No, seriously.
By the modern age, Burak had come to two conclusions. First, he realized that vampiric society was innately degrading and that it would serve only to erode the morals of anyone who participated in its Jyhad. Second, he saw in the onslaught of pollution, the threat of atomic warfare and the godlessness of the masses that the end of the world was at hand. Faced with those revelations, Burak decided to rely on his earliest lessons as an ascetic. If the world had become corrupt, he decided, then he must withdraw from the world.
Aside from the strong suspicion that we're being trolled here - and the fact that a lot of the vampires in this book are more or less trying to live their unlives by themselves, interacting with "Kindred society" as little as fucking possible - vampires still need to eat, and Burak isn't fishing for his bloody supper. So his "ascetic" life away from the world involves exiling himself to a floating city and preying on US Navy sailors. Which, incidentally, sounds like the set-up to a really fun Hunter campaign. Roll up a marine, Naval airman, deck mechanic, etc. and let's go hunt a vampire monstrosity in the bowels of the nuclear wessel!
Burak feeds at sea by 1) not killing anyone, since that would instantly rouse a massive manhunt, and 2) feeding only on sailors who are on a sleep shift, "the occasional lone engineer in a faraway compartment with the help of Dominate," and of course rats. He doesn't have a set haven, but pretends to be a crewman, carefully keeping to the lower decks.
This type of haven demands no rent, no bills and no background checks, but even then, the price is high. The trick isn't so much maintaining a haven of this sort, as it is letting the haven maintain itself without getting aught. In some ways, it's a consummate exercise of the Masquerade, for nobody can so much as suspect anything. Even a single out-of-place leftover drop of blood or piece of clothing could bring the whole arrangement crashing in ruins.
It's like Hitman meets The Sims. And there's your problem. While a creative concept, this is both completely unworkable from any sort of actual RPG standpoint, and incredibly fucking difficult to work into a campaign. Your PCs are never going to have a US Navy nuclear fucking aircraft carrier as their haven. If they
did, they would only do so by ghouling and/or dominating enough people that they could actually make the goddamn thing work.
The Chattanooga Recreational Center
Dr. Phillip Andrews is a Caitiff whose haven is the local community Rec Center. He lives in a former storage closet. He uses a combination of Dominate and Presence to keep people from asking too many questions and to cloud memories as necessary so he can feed. It's not quite the bottom of Kindred existence, but you can see it from here.
This book sucks. I appreciate the fact that it's trying to be gritty, with all these hard-up vampires pushed to the lonely outskirts by their need to feed and keep secret and shit, but for most of these it comes off as pathetic and for the rest it comes off as kooky. And not really the fun kind of kooky, but the "Jesus, it's 9AM and he's hit the hard stuff" kinda kooky. I'm not saying the World of Darkness wasn't big enough to embrace all these different characters...but what the fuck was the point to all this? Your Player Cainites aren't going to want to spend their unlives like this. For fuck's sake. I can appreciate that they wanted to cover more ground than the stereotype where a vampire is living in their family crypt or the old Transylvanian castle, or a swanky expensive apartment that they get by Dominating Donald Trump or whatever, but...there's nothing here that players will really want, and there's not much fucking here that will make players want to go
to these places and interact with these people. These are boring, uncreative undead motherfuckers.
Why do none of these people have
traps? Or
weapons? Fuck, I have a dozen swords in my house, and I'm not even particularly concerned about home invasion! In the US you can buy guns and even bulletproof vests and riot gear pretty damn easy, and that's before you start trawling the Army Surplus stores. There's a grand total of two vampires in this book with access to blood sorcery, and neither of them have any wards, familiars, or any sort of magical protections. Fuck, one of the first things I do in any game where I'm playing a blood sorcerer is to build a library and ward the shit out of it.
...and that's before you get creative. There should be more home security stuff. DIY traps. Home-made silver bullets. Soundproof rooms where you can bleed a victim dry and keep the blood in a fridge for later. Fuck, a
blood bank. You don't even have to be in the building, you can just be in the sewer and catch all the blood they throw out! Sure, it sounds like shit to rummage through medical waste for used needles and shit, but you know there's some high-Humanity vampire that would see that as a good alternative to chowing down on a living, breathing person.
What this book most emphasizes though? Fuck Kindred society. 90% of the vamps in this book interact with other vampires as little as fucking possible, because it's hard enough to fucking eat and sleep through the day as it is without dealing with that shit. These are not team players; they barely have the ambition to get off their ass every night and go to their jobs. Is this the fucking escape that most players sit down to experience?
Fuck no. This is some lame ass shit. Even the god-damn Sabbat, who are supposed to paint the town red with their dicks just to prove they're
real goddamn Cainites, are sleeping on cots in the basement of a 80-year-old union building. You notice Lestat didn't do that shit.
But of course, that's half the point. This isn't a book about having fun, or helping the player in any meaningful, substantial way. This is a book to remind the emo kids how terrible it is to be one of the Damned, and to list the ways in which the Storyteller can fuck with you if you fail an oral sex check. As much as
Havens of the Damned is about anything other than a little more money in the bank, it's a callous appeal to every player that is so inured to or slightly guilty about their comfy middle-class existence that they can play poor and desperate people with no resources
for fun. It's a book written for college kids whose parents are paying for the dorm room they sleep in. This is the roleplaying game equivalent of slumming, and fuck this book.