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

Themes help you focus the events and actions of your stories around a single idea. Your
chronicle gains consistency and emotional resonance as the characters see your theme from
different angles. As the chronicle reaches its resolution, you can provide a climax by presenting
the characters with a situation that forces them to answer, once and for all, the questions
raised by the theme.
A chronicle can explore more than one theme. In fact, it’s best not to tie every story too
closely to a single theme, at least in a long chronicle. If you make your theme too omnipresent,
or spoon-feed particular answers to the players’ characters, the chronicle can seem forced
or preachy. You might choose one major theme, but build occasional stories around other
themes. You can also combine themes. For instance, the members of the coterie might hope
to resume as much of their mortal lives as possible, with all the diffi culties that entails, but
fi nd themselves drawn into the Danse Macabre by the need to defend their loved ones from
the machinations of other Kindred. Quite possibly, each character might explore his or her
own theme. You are limited only by how much work you and your players are willing to place
into developing themes.
DRAMA 101
Most roleplaying games could fairly be described as “action-adventure.” Characters pursue
goals and face dangers along the way. It doesn’t much matter whether the game bills itself as
high fantasy, science fi ction, western, wuxia, talking animals, or even horror. The characters
have a problem; they try to solve it.
You can run The Requiem that way, too. The World of Darkness offers characters no
shortage of dangers to get in the way of the characters’ goals, from mortal authorities that
must be kept ignorant to crazed Lupines out to destroy all Kindred. As a Storytelling game,
however, The Requiem was designed with drama in mind. Drama differs from action-adventure
in that characters must make diffi cult decisions. “How do we stop the Lupine?” is
action-adventure. “What should we do about the Lupine? Kill it, hide, try to reason with it,
steer it at our enemies?” is drama.
In drama, there’s no obviously right answer, or it’s one that characters don’t want. For
instance, maybe the characters discover that the witch-hunter who’s destroying the Kindred
is also somebody’s best friend from his mortal days. Do they try to stop him, and maybe kill
him in the process? The hunter is a murderer: He kills mortal retainers as well as their Kindred
masters. On the other hand, he used to be a friend. So do they try to reason with him
and invoke old ties of friendship? That would be a more humane and forgiving approach…
but it would deny justice to the slain mortals, aside from being incredibly dangerous if the
witch-hunter sees his former friend as just another vampire. On top of this, the Prince will
certainly ask hard questions if he learns that the characters have some connection to the
hunter. He might think they planned the murders together.
One simple way to generate drama is to fi gure out what situations the characters least
want to be in — not for reasons of danger, but based on their fears, shames, ambitions and
other emotions. Place the characters in those situations. As the chronicle proceeds, your list
of emotionally taxing situations changes as the characters themselves grow and develop. Old
situations drop off the list as the characters resolve personal issues, and new situations join
the list as the characters make decisions and form new relationships.
A character’s Virtue and Vice provide a shortcut for designing dramatic situations. You
might want to create a situation in which a character must sacrifi ce his cherished Virtue
to uphold some other aspect of his unlife, such as Humanity or a social debt. Less virtuous
characters can fi nd their Vice in confl ict with similar other aspects of character. For
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mind’s chapter eye four: theatre: storytelling requiem