Mind's Eye Theatre - Vampire The Requiem.pdf - RoseRed

BLOOD SYMPATHY
On some occasions, Kindred can feel the proximity of their Kindred “relatives” (as specifi ed
by the blood-ties rules) or know what’s happening to them. This normally happens spontaneously,
when a “relative” feels some strong emotion or sensation such as frenzy, a grave wound
or the pleasure of diablerie.
On such occasions, the Storyteller may simply announce that a character or character(s)
have these feelings for the sake of drama, or she can ask a player to draw the character’s Wits
+ Occult. The number of successes tells how much information the character gains from this
fl ash of sensation. Active Heightened Senses (Auspex) adds a +2 bonus to this draw.
Failure: Nothing happens.
Success: The character has a strong feeling of what the other Kindred experiences and has
a general notion of the direction and distance to his relative.
A character can also try to force this psychic awareness of a relative and so learn the other
Kindred’s activities. Doing so costs a point of Willpower, which may not be used to add the +3
bonus to the Wits + Occult draw. A character can also expend a point of Willpower to try to make a
relative know what the character herself feels. The other character’s player draws Wits + Occult, but
the fi rst character has no way of knowing whether the attempt to “transmit” succeeds. The blood
sympathy does not seem to extend further than about 50 miles, or beyond a metropolitan area. This
50-mile limit applies to affecting relatives with Disciplines, too. For example, if a character uses a
far-fl ung Theban Sorcery ritual on a blood relation who’s 500 miles away, she loses the bonus.
The Kindred bless and curse this blood sympathy. If a Kindred sends another vampire to
Final Death or diablerizes him, his victim’s sire, childer or other “relations” might feel it.
The chances are small that any of them will know exactly what happened and who did it, but
would-be murderers (and diablerists…) must consider the possibility. Kindred also sometimes
fret that their relatives might spy on their own moments of strong emotion, be they benign,
criminal or merely shameful. A proud Prince who holds court at the opera might not want
his childe knowing that he breaks down weeping when he hears songs about lost love.
FEEDING
It is the undeniable, dreadful truth of the Kindred condition: Vampires must hunt, and
vampires must feed. In many cases, Storytellers will detail individual hunts themselves. In
other cases, the details of the hunt are less important than the larger story. The Storyteller
must strike a fi ne balance. Too little attention to hunting makes the story little more than a
“dark superheroes” game, in which vampires simply need to recharge their “blood batteries,”
forsaking horror for displays of supernatural power. Too much attention to feeding, however,
can slow the story’s pace to a crawl, derailing it from its plot direction and making it a series
of feeding vignettes in between which other things happen.
Unfortunately, we can offer no perfect solution. Storytellers must fi nd the perfect balance
that suits their troupes’ tastes. To that end, we offer an abstract method by which vampiric
feeding may take place. The system is relatively simple. Have a player describe the method in
which his character wishes to feed, a Narrator determine which test pool applies to the effort,
and then the player makes the draw.
As a rule of thumb, the amount of Vitae a character has at the beginning of a given chapter
is determined by a single card draw, where the ace counts as a one. Add one Vitae to this
draw result for every dot a character has in the Herd Merit. If characters wish to increase
the amount of Vitae they enter play with, they must use the feeding rules presented here.
Needless to say, in no instance can this result in the character having more Vitae than her
Blood Potency allows.
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mind’s chapter eye three: theatre: special requiem rules and systems