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

developing chapter the one: story society • character of the damned hooks
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• The Stick: Some external threat forces the characters to take action. Typical examples
include the Prince telling the coterie to perform a mission or suffer the consequences. Or
an enemy attacks the characters (physically or by slander, personally or by proxy, or attacks
someone close to the characters). The characters get involved to prevent something worse
from happening to them.
• It’s My Job: The character has a professional obligation to get involved. A Sheriff, Whip
or Scourge doesn’t ask for a motivation when her Prince, Priscus, covenant leader or other
superior gives an assignment. This being the World of Darkness, the job could turn out to be
something quite different than the character initially thought. For instance, does the Invictus
Prince really want the Circle of the Crone Hierophant’s murder solved?
• Curiosity: If a character possesses a special interest in some subject, any event that relates
to that subject might attract the character’s attention. For example, a Circle of the Crone
blood sorcerer might want to investigate strange events that hint of magic at work.
• Personal Connections: Someone close to the character — a mentor, rival, or one of those
mortal friends, relatives, partners and other contacts you made the player defi ne — is already
involved. This person needs help or has attracted attention that extends to the character. The
person might want something from the character, or the character might want something
from the person. For instance, a character might learn that his old girlfriend is deeply in
debt to a loan shark, who now demands that she work as a prostitute, or the character’s sire
draws him into her plot against a rival.
Early in the chronicle, you need to work especially hard to provide hooks for all the characters.
Character One wants to investigate the museum burglary because one of the stolen items
might be magical. Character Two helps because he used to be a cop and still doesn’t like thieves.
Character Three has a contact who works as a museum guard and was injured in the burglary.
The coterie is still new, so the characters might not have very strong reasons to work together. As
the chronicle progresses, the characters probably build up some trust and a sense of obligation
to each other. If the characters don’t especially like each other, they might still accept that they
have to help with each other’s problems and schemes in order to receive help in return.
In the longer term, you need to give characters a reason to care about the challenges that
drive the chronicle as a whole. That was the whole point of negotiating with the players about
their characters and the rough premise of the chronicle. It couldn’t hurt, though, to review
the chronicle now and then and ask yourself how well your stories have drawn the characters
into the overarching plot. Using the “Revolution” sample plot, for instance, if the characters
don’t already loathe the tyrant Prince by the time they meet the revolutionary ancilla, you
haven’t made the Prince’s tyranny matter enough to the characters. Its past time you had the
Prince do something truly vicious to maintain his power at the coterie’s expense.
OPTIONAL RULE: THE PRICE OF BLOOD
The acquisition of blood occupies a great deal of time and attention for vampires.
Most spend years cultivating potential donors or locating areas where a potential
missing person is not going to be noticed. In a Requiem session, a character has traits
that help determine how diffi cult it is to acquire an evening’s meal. Storytellers can use
this optional method, however, to reduce draws and really drive home how harrowing
this activity can be. This method requires some additional planning on the part of the
Storytelling staff, but it can be very rewarding to players and Storytellers alike.
The only props required for this method is an opaque bowl or other container and
some glass or plastic beads of varying colors. The suggested variation should be no
more than four colors; for this example we will use red, purple, green and black. The
beads represent the amount of Vitae available in a given city setting. Each time a