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

to concentrate on telling stories, and to improvise when the players’ characters do something
you didn’t expect.
PRELUDES
As an introduction to your chronicle, you might want to run a brief, solo story about each
character’s Embrace — a set of preludes. Some Storytellers prefer just to talk over these details
with their players, so they can launch straight into the plot. The Embrace is perhaps the most
important event in a character’s unlife, though. It deserves a little extra attention. A prelude
helps players get to know their characters before the chronicle really begins. It’s a chance to
establish relationships with the Storyteller characters who matter most to each character,
especially the character’s sire, and to fi nd out how the character feels about his Requiem.
It’s also tremendously dramatic. Indeed, you can’t get much more dramatic than your own
death. The Embrace begins in a moment of hot pain and spurting blood as the sire bites
the character. Did the character accept the Embrace willingly, seduced by his sire’s promises?
Did he even ask for it? Or was he taken by force? Whether the character wanted to become a
vampire or not, however, the Kiss quickly turns terror into ecstasy, wiping away any resistance.
As the character’s blood drains away to feed his sire, he feels himself dying, but it’s far too
late to struggle, assuming he could think past the pleasure of the Kiss. He sinks into darkness
and death — as if it were the most perfect sleep. And then…
…he’s back. Back in a body turned cold, with his sire’s blood in his mouth. And he’s so
empty. So hungry. He smells blood in the air, warm blood of the living. Driven by instincts
he cannot yet name, he rises to attack his fi rst prey, to feed for the fi rst time, perhaps to
make his fi rst kill. And then what does he do? By playing out the story of the Embrace and
the character’s fi rst victim, you can show the confl icts and urges that set the Kindred apart
from the kine.
ASSEMBLING THE COTERIE
After launching the characters into their unlives, you need to bring them together into a
coterie. Since The Requiem is so much about the interactions between the characters, you
can’t just have the characters meet in a bar (or an Elysium) and decide to go on an adventure
together. That works just fi ne in some genres, but not here. The characters need some reason
to associate with each other. Establishing this reason could form the subject of the fi rst story
in the chronicle, though you can begin a chronicle with the characters already together. As
with preludes, however, playing out the characters’ meeting can help the players develop
greater insight into their characters and how they interact. It can lay the groundwork for
possible confl icts in the future.
How you bring the characters together depends in part on the type and purpose of the
coterie. Internal factors such as camaraderie, belonging to the same clan or running a business
together can pull together the members of a coterie. External factors such as a common
enemy or a shared duty assigned to them by the Prince can push them together. Some
examples include:
• The Gang’s All Here: The characters knew each other before the Embrace, so they stay
together afterward. This decision does raise the question of why a number of vampires would
choose to sire childer more or less at the same time, and pick a particular group of mortals.
(The Willpower cost of the Embrace almost guarantees that no Kindred would Embrace all
the characters together, though a creative Storyteller can devise a justifi cation for such a deed.)
If the characters form a group with impressive abilities, perhaps a whole faction of Kindred
could agree to recruit them as childer and minions, as in…
320
mind’s chapter eye four: theatre: storytelling requiem