Players in Mind’s Eye Theatre: Vampire The Masquerade chronicles tend to forget easily that their characters are in the minority. When every other character in the game session is also a vampire, the player has no incentive to remember or care that the world population is overwhelmingly mortal, and that those mortals are important and dangerous. You, the Storyteller, can and should use mortals more prominently in the chronicle, both to reinforce its core themes and to provide strong, interesting story opportunities for your players.
Mortals are too often overlooked or ignored in MET: VTM, except as sources of plot information or blood. They’re seldom either portrayed as individuals or as the very real threat they represent to the characters. This is doubly true in chronicles where all the important action happens at game sessions. And while there is certain inevitability in this—there are only so many hours available in any given game session in which to engage in roleplaying—Storytellers can bring a greater dimension of personal horror to the experience by reminding players about the vital role that mortals play in the chronicle.
Hunt or Be Hunted The very name itself—Mind’s Eye Theatre: Vampire The Masquerade—reminds us that hiding from mortals is a foundational element of the game. Historically, there is a good reason that the Masquerade exists: the First Tradition is intended to preserve and safeguard vampires against mortals, whom most elders consider an enemy far more dangerous than the most aggressive lupine or vengeful ghost. Elders who endured the horrors of the Inquisition remind cocky neonates that the truth is merely simple math: the human population outnumbers vampires by many, many orders of magnitude.
The elders know what happens when mortals decide to hunt vampires: they saw it happen, and they remember the high price they paid for ignoring the threat. The Inquisition, which led directly to the formation of the sects, seems today like an event that could never happen—the organized religions that do acknowledge the existence of the supernatural mostly give it lip service as a way to illustrate what they define as morality and good and bad behavior. Genuine belief in vampires, demons, ghosts, and werewolves as malevolent supernatural entities that should be hunted and destroyed has been until very recently the province of small sub-sects and offshoots larger religious organizations, small private groups, or lone hunters who couldn’t afford to risk institutionalization or incarceration by sharing their convictions with others, and who are therefore more effective if they remain as hidden as their prey.
In the broader sense, individual mortals may pose relatively little threat to a vampire character, but the technology that mortals possess could enable them to locate and wipe out most vampires with shocking efficiency, should they ever discover and share convincing proof of their existence, and it is this possibility that underscores the necessity of constant secrecy. Hunters in Your Chronicle: A new hunter threat emerged during the Nights of Turmoil, striking with shockingly lethal efficiency, and nobody knows whether it was religious or secular in nature (see MET:VTM pages 34-41 for more about these mysterious new hunters and how their activities have forced vampires to once again contemplate the possibility of utter destruction at the hands of mortals).
And today’s hunters are better equipped, better informed, and better resourced than ever before, and they are scoring victories that alarm all but the most foolish or ignorant vampires. Entire domains have been wiped out by these hunters, and their threat is made all the more terrifying by the fact that their origins, motivations, and identities have remained hidden. The most obvious way to emphasize the immediacy and danger that mortals pose to your players’ characters is to run a hunter plot that endangers the veil of secrecy the vampires have constructed around their societies.
Regardless of whether the setting of your chronicle is Camarilla, Sabbat, or Anarch— or something unique—the hunters represent danger that can drive external and internal conflict. Running a hunter plot requires making a few key decisions before setting it in motion:
• Who are the hunters? The MET:VTM core book offers some information on three hunter groups—The Inquisition, The Arcanum, and Project Twilight (see pages 291-293 for details)—that each make worthy adversaries for the characters. Your hunters may be from one of these groups, or they might be mysterious hunters that now threaten vampires everywhere. If you opt to use the latter, you’ll need to give them an identity that works for your chronicle. This Mortal Coil: Making More Out of Mortals in MET: Vampire The Masquerade The hunters aren’t part of any organized faction. Instead they are a small group of city employees—clerks, accountants, data analysts—who have started to notice weird and unsettling patterns and anomalies in zoning law changes, tax payments, street closures, and other seemingly mundane activities. Investigating, they traced one such anomaly to a careless vampire but, realizing that nobody would ever believe them, decided to kill the monster themselves. Now they’re looking for more of these horrible parasites and intend to destroy every one that they can find. The hunters are all professional soldiers of fortune employed by a wealthy patron specifically to hunt down and destroy vampires. Essentially a team of mercenaries, they can rely on their patron’s money and influence to keep them well-equipped and wellinformed; they receive information about a possible vampire threat, requisition the appropriate gear, and conduct a covert operation to find and kill their target. This lone hunter was merely an unlucky victim, someone who had a chance encounter with a vampire and survived the experience. Maybe a vampire fed from him but didn’t succeed in covering up the truth, or possibly he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Sabbat and some Giovanni clashed. Regardless, he is aware of the truth and wants to learn more.
• What do they want? Most hunters want to destroy vampires, and their collective motivation is quite clear. Their desire to wipe out the undead enemy creates direct conflict, and this plot is likely to end in violence. (The motivations of the individual hunters, however, can be varied and interesting in their own right: see The Human Touch, below). A few, like the Arcanum, want to study and understand them. Motivation is key to determining how your plot will begin, and probably where it goes, though once it is in motion, the players will have a strong impact on its outcomes. Hunters who wish to observe and document the supernatural aren’t likely to pose an immediate threat, but their accumulated knowledge can be as devastating as any True Faith-wielding Inquisitor if it falls into the wrong hands. The hunters won’t stand for it. They simply cannot bear to sit idly by while the vampires leech the very life from the city. They feel that they are duty-bound to fight these things, even at the risk of their own lives. And they wake up terrified every day that their families or friends might accidentally encounter one of the undead and become its next meal—or, worse, that the vampires might learn who the hunters are and target their families deliberately. Several years ago, a vampire murdered the only child of a wealthy investor residing in the city. Maybe it was a feeding gone bad, or perhaps it was deliberate killing. Regardless, the investor didn’t believe the police or coroner’s reports, and she’s spent a lot of her money and time tracking down the real cause of her son’s death. Now that she has finally discovered the vampires responsible, she’s financing a small but very lethal group of dedicated hunters to seek out and destroy them. The hunter wants desperately to find a vampire for his own very selfish reason: immortality. Convinced that all the stories about living forever are true, he will do absolutely anything to preserve his youth and good looks forever. Bribery, arson, murder—all are acceptable if he can convince a vampire to make him immortal.
• What do they know? The plot has to start someplace. A good method of initiating a hunter plot is to first decide on the above two points early in the chronicle, and then wait for an opportunity to present itself. And it will: even the most tactically-minded players and their characters make the occasional mistake that risks the rules of secrecy, and sometimes random chance or bad luck results in an error. Maybe the hunters have an operative or two in your chronicle’s city, and they regularly monitor the TV, radio, print, and online news for activity that might point to the presence of vampires. Or maybe they have their own Allies, Contacts, and Influences in the city that can provide them with information that launches an investigation into possible vampire activity. Once they have a place to start, the hunters can begin their work. The hunters know more about the vampires’ local activities than they do about vampires. Thanks to good investigative research, they have a handful of names, a few of the properties the vampires own, a half dozen of the places where they like to hunt, and perhaps one or two of their significant influences. But they have yet to penetrate any of the deeper secrets of the undead—they don’t know about clans or generations, for example, or about disciplines. They presume that vampires can do some of the things they’ve seen in movies or TV, but they haven’t yet verified any of it through firsthand experience. But they will. The hunters possess a lot of detailed information about a very few specific vampires. Names, havens, preferred hunting grounds, vehicles, maybe even the name of their clans. They have evidence of some common vampiric powers (probably Dominate, Celerity, Potence, and Fortitude) and are prepared for them. While they guess or assume that their targets are not the only vampires in the world, they don’t know anything about greater vampire society, yet. The hunter knows almost nothing about vampires yet, except that they exist, and that they can sometimes be found in a few specific locations in the city. For more help with the basics of plot construction, see Chapter 8 of the MET: VTM core book. Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Human Touch Vampires do not exist solely among their own kind, but it might often seem that way. An MET:VTM game session represents part of a single evening in the characters’ eternal existences, and when the characters aren’t interacting directly with one another, the chances are very high that they are interacting with mortals. Many of these mortals will be known personally to the characters and even helping them achieve their goals: Allies, Contacts, Influences, and some Retainers are all mortals, and they are not mindless automatons. They have their own thoughts, hopes, aspirations, dreams, and fears, and while they may do a character’s bidding, they usually have lives outside that function—lives that their vampire associates impact in usually negative ways. These people may suspect or even know the true nature of the vampires in their lives, but most of them will say nothing, either because it’s too dangerous or too advantageous to keep silent about it. When mortals are encountered at all during an evening’s play, too often it’s generic, undifferentiated sources of power fuel or plot information during hastily-narrated side scenes. The most important thing about these scenes, to both player and Storyteller, is to conclude them quickly so everyone can get back to the “real” game. And that’s understandable; the demands of managing a MET:VTM game session don’t leave the Storyteller with much opportunity to explore the details of every interaction with mortal NPCs. And that’s a shame, because each of the people who represent backgrounds—the criminals and cops, the socialites and social workers, and everyone in between—is a story waiting to be told. Fortunately you can infuse these side scenes with a bit of verisimilitude that will remind players (and their characters) that their mortal associates aren’t mindless robots. The more detail that you provide for mortals, the more genuine they’ll seem to your players. Mortal NPCs who seem to have real personalities, hopes, fears, and idiosyncrasies feel more like people than cardboard cutouts who are standing around just to feed the characters the next plot clue. Every mortal who represents a background, meal, or threat has a motivation. This shouldn’t be confused with Archetype, which is a foundational character trait related to the Willpower refresh mechanic; it’s merely a shorthand for what makes an NPC tick, and helps to make your side scenes more believable. It has no mechanical effect. Take 30 seconds before starting any side scenes and decide what that motivation is, and make it the foundation of that NPC’s interactions. Some examples:
• Addiction – The mortal NPC is hooked on drugs, vitae, or an emotional experience, and will do anything to satisfy this craving. The vampire represents a means of obtaining his next fix. Rodrigo is an ambitious young attorney who has a bad cocaine habit. He’s been buying his coke from Lewis, a ghoul who serves Callie, a Brujah neonate. Lewis cut Rodrigo off because the lawyer can’t pay this week. Donnie loves the Kiss. He’s been a meal twice now, and he can’t wait to give up his blood again. The physical pleasure, the emotional high: it’s all he craves now, and he’ll do anything to experience it again. Maria served her domitor Timothy, an academicallyminded Kindred, for several years. Now he’s missing, maybe dead, and without his blood she’ll revert to a normal mortal again. But worse, she misses the sense of purpose being in Timothy’s employ once gave her. She needs to feel that again, to give her life meaning.
• Vengeance – A thirst for revenge against a rival drives this mortal relentlessly. She sees the vampire as a means of pursuing her vengeance. Only the vampire has enough Influence to help Samuel crush the rival industrialist who is threatening to destroy his small business. The pack of near-savage vampire warriors who hang out sometimes at the old freight yard are exactly the kind of threat that Wilson needs to make sure the cops don’t come near his meth lab again. Giving up some of her blood in exchange for a favor that only a vampire can provide seems to Karen like a small price to pay. Next week she plans to ask Theobald if he can make sure that her ex-boyfriend pays for cheating on her.
• Reward – This mortal is motivated primarily by the rewards available to him. He views the vampire as a source of gain: praise, money, material possessions, advancement, power. Anne has been working hard toward promotion all year, but it went to a coworker who has some kind of dirt on the boss. She’s willing to spill all the company secrets if she can move up the corporate ladder. Greg is jealous of his sister’s new Jaguar and wants a cool new care of his own. But he can’t afford it, or that new set of premium golf clubs he’s been coveting. Or a motorcycle, he’d really like one of those. And a boat. Maybe it’s time he called that dude his brother is always telling him about, the weird, pale guy who always seems to have a lot of cash to loan at low interest. One kind word from Robert is all that Eric needs to stay motivated for an entire week. Just one pat one the back, one compliment, one nod of approval, and Eric is ready to do or die for his domitor. And he wants all the other ghouls in the haven to know it.
• Curiosity – The lives (and unlives) of others are endlessly fascinating to this person, and she often makes poor decisions when her curiosity gets the better of her. Who is more fascinating than a genuine vampire? Otto has always gotten his kicks from observing other people. He’s got a huge collection of digital photos that he’s taken of his neighbors doing everything from washing their cars to having dinner. Now he’s found the most interesting voyeuristic opportunity ever: a vampire! He cannot wait to rush home from work every night to take more photos of the extraordinary creature living in his own neighborhood. Leslie can’t remember when her burning curiosity wasn’t getting her into trouble. That’s how she ended up in jail that one time, and how she’s suffered through more bad blind dates than any person ought to ever endure, and how she managed to find herself becoming a willing member of a vampire’s herd. Bertrand is a biologist at the top of his game, but he’s been intensely bored at his research firm for a couple of years. It’s been a long time since he’s had a genuine challenge. Now one has dropped into his lap completely by accident: a vampire. The creature must be studied, of course, and preferably detained so that proper experiments may be performed. And what’s wrong with that? It’s not like a vampire is a person, after all. Storytellers blessed with enough available time can also bring the mortal world to life during downtime. The core book’s section on Downtime Actions (see MET:VTM pages 307-308) covers the mechanics of how a character’s downtime happens, but these actions can be further enhanced by describing some of the mortals the characters encounter during the period of time between games. Few Storytellers have the time needed to make every downtime action into a new mini-story, and that’s not necessary to achieve the desired contrast between vampires and mortals. Any of these downtime actions can lead to subplots or even full plots when they involve descriptions of mortals.
• Crafting – While building or repairing things is often a solitary activity, the materials or supplies the vampire employs have to come from somewhere. Sometimes, they come directly from mortals who sell or provide them, maybe for a price or in return for a favor.
• Feeding – The most obvious chance to contrast a vampire with a mortal is the simple but terrible necessity of obtaining fresh blood on a regular basis. Avoid the temptation to allow players to think of feeding merely as a way to “power up” their characters—every feeding activity can be a means of reinforcing the game’s main themes, and not merely a tactical activity in service to intra-character competition. Try making a feeding action more meaningful for at least one player every month by describing from who they fed, and what happened. The vessel resists, violently. He kicks, punches, bites, screams, and begs for mercy, not for himself but for his children who depend on him. “Don’t do this! Darcy and Bobby need me!” Your pack is licking its fingers and going through the wallets of your slaughtered victims, looking for a little cash, when they find an FBI badge and ID card. Oops…. As the last thread of the victim’s life is cut by the feeding, she breathes a single, whispered word: the name of the vampire’s clan. What the hell did you just do?
• Investigation – Snooping often involves employing a character’s backgrounds to dig up clues, and that almost always means that mortals will be involved. Allies and Contacts might want something from the vampire in exchange for their information, leading to opportunities to illustrate the individuality of mortals in the vampire’s personal story. “Yes, I can definitely trace the owner of that warehouse. I’ll look at the last bill of sale and work up a portfolio of information for you. But I won’t be able to get around to it until that street gang stops selling crack in front of my mother’s apartment. You can take care of that, right?” “The guns are being smuggled into the city through the docks, but not in regular freight shipments. I could find out more for you, if you want, but I’ll need some cash for bribes. And a thousand dollars for my trouble. I got two kids in college, that gets expensive.” “No, I don’t think I can get that done by tomorrow night. But I know who can! He owes me a favor. And to cash that in, I will also need a favor, from you; let me borrow your limo and driver next Saturday night, okay? I want my date to be impressed!”
• Patrolling – While the intent of this downtime action is to spot trouble, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the character wanders the streets solo, observing silently. Interacting with the mortal population can be an important part of securing a territory. Asking questions, making small talk, and showing an interest in the nightly lives of the local people can help the vampire recognize when something is amiss later. Magda has been hustling on the corner for months. She knows exactly who spray-painted “Eat salt, Brujah dirtbag!” on the side of your building. She doesn’t know what it means, of course, but she can finger the little hoodlums for you. Oscar runs a junkyard that specializes in the disposal of abandoned, wrecked, and unwanted automobiles. His loves his pet Rottweiler more than life itself, and together they see and know everything that happens north of the river. The only thing that Wilbur doesn’t remember is who he is. And he doesn’t much care about that—all he cares about is where his next meal is coming from and where he’ll sleep tonight. Apart from that, his eyes and memory are sharp, and nobody ever pays attention to the homeless. Human Nature: Humanity as Drama Players frequently imagine that their vampire characters are better than mortals. And in some ways this is true: in a direct comparison of capabilities, vampires have powers that few mortals can withstand, and they have access to decades or even centuries of experience. This thinking tends to encourage players to devalue or even forget about mortals except as elements of the game’s tactical side. The Humanity system is a powerful reminder to players that there are significant downsides to being a vampire. Re-read the Humanity section in the MET: VTM core book (pages 299-307) before proceeding; it cannot be emphasized often or strongly enough that how vampires cope with the Beast is vital to how the game lands emotionally with the players. Kevin Millard (see “Roleplaying by the Numbers,” page 18) pulls back the curtain on the design philosophy behind the Humanity system, providing invaluable insight into why it exists and why it functions as it does. Previous morality systems (both in LARP and in more traditional tabletop versions of the game) have attempted to represent two separate ideas: the struggle between a vampire and her Beast and whether or not the vampire is a good or bad person. While both of these are important, it is difficult to represent both of these ideas with the same mechanic. After considering the most important aspects for mechanical design, we decided to focus almost entirely on representing the struggle to keep the Beast at bay, and allow players to determine whether their character is “good or evil.” After all, the fight against a vampire’s Beast is not a true indicator of good and evil; a good person can be forced to do bad things (feeding the Beast each time), and an evil person can use intermediaries or find political methods to commit her schemes without directly strengthening her Beast. This struggle is one of the central themes of Vampire: The Masquerade. In design, we center on this struggle with the Beast because it is an abstract concept, a semi-self-willed creature that acts outside of the character (player’s) intention. Conversely, the concept of being a good or bad person is something we can all easily understand, and is entirely in the control of the player. In previous systems, there were plateaus where the mechanics of the struggle against the Beast no longer mattered; a character’s actions no longer provoked the Beast, and the player could all but ignore the danger of wassail. The system mechanically encouraged a character to drop to Humanity 2, where they would no longer have to deal with this aspect of the vampiric condition. In our design team’s opinion, there should be no such plateaus. A vampire’s struggle with her Beast should always be a major consideration of her unlife, and we chose to reflect this ideal in the MET: VTM morality mechanics. In order to heighten drama and provide tangible risks (and consequences), most systems have a certain amount of randomness within their mechanical design. However, hinging huge, persona-changing (and possibly ultimately destructive) moments on a single test can make a game feel arbitrary, and losses seem anticlimactic. Instead, the Studios team built a system where a character must deal with morality and the Beast in a form of give-and-take, letting the character risk herself and feed the Beast in small ways, but knowing when to slow down or stop before risking permanent morality loss. This further encourages a player to act out the Beast’s current strength as it grows stronger over the course of a night, lending to better all-night roleplay. When a vampire commits a sin, she makes her Beast stronger, rousing it from dormancy. An awake and alert Beast has a better capacity to take control of a vampire’s actions. Before a character commits sins, her Beast is asleep and there is no chance the vampire will frenzy. Every time the vampire sins within a single night, her Beast gets more powerful. A character’s odds of frenzy go up, and you get closer to a permanent loss of morality. Vampires can feel their Beast rousing, and they know how strong it is within them due to their actions. This means that a vampire must carefully plan out her sins, avoiding those that will cause a permanent loss, and actively working to restrain the Beast’s rage over the course of a night. Gaining Beast traits can cause a character to change her desired actions during a game. The character may have to avoid killing a hated enemy—for today—because she already has Beast traits, and does not wish to risk further loss of morality. On the other hand, the vampire can make longer-term plans to kill her enemy on a night when she is not inflicted with Beast traits (or has prepared some way to soothe the Beast despite the killing). These “Beast management” strategies are part of vampiric life; they are a fundamental consideration for a character living night to night with a ravening, hungry, enraged spirit permanently infecting her soul Consider the vampire character who has gained 3 Beast traits; situations that were dealt with easily when she had only 1 or even 2 Beast traits become much more challenging. Let’s presume the vampire started the night’s game session with 1 Beast trait and gained 2 more over the course of the evening, and she decides to leave to avoid being tempted into actions that might risk gaining even more. On her way down the street to her car, she runs into a street gang of mortal thugs—a common enough occurrence in this part of town, and usually not a serious issue, but now it’s a big problem because her Beast is closer to the surface. If the gang attacks and inflicts just 2 or more points of damage on her, she must attempt to resist a rage frenzy. If she fails to resist, things will quickly get ugly. The same vampire who has gained 4 Beast traits can barely interact with mortals at all; she must attempt to resist frenzy if she so much as sees mortals—she can’t even walk down the street outside her haven without risking losing control completely! Before the vampire can return to her haven where her ghoul retainer is waiting patiently to carry out her wishes, she must first deal with her Beast traits and regain some measure of her eroding Humanity. Using mortals in this manner helps reinforce the idea that Humanity is a precious and vital aspect of every vampire character. The Beast whispers in the vampire’s head and heart every moment of every night, and without other voices—mortal voices—present to offer a contrast, the vampire may forget that the Beast is waiting to devour the unwary and unwise. Conclusion Mortals make a richer, stronger, and more memorable chronicle, not only because they make formidable antagonists and provide good sources of stories, but also because they help secure the vampires’ precious grip on their Humanity. Whenever your players seem to be treating mortals as a mere inconvenience (something they can use, abuse, and forget) it’s time to remind they by building mortals more firmly into your story. Don’t let the characters forget that they, too, were once mortals. Jason Carl has been managing game projects and properties for a couple of decades: at Wizards of the Coast, Microsoft Game Studios, and Young & Rubicam Group. He’s also been a contributing writer to Mind’s Eye Theatre books, including Laws of the Night Revised, Laws of the Night Camarilla Guide, and Laws of the Hunt, as well as Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition. Although he oversees book development for the Studios team, there is no truth to the rumor that he has approved a new Brujah clan flaw that requires the aid of an inflatable [redacted by the Ventrue Council].
Originally published in Mind’s Eye Theatre: Storyteller Secrets by By Night Studios. Presented here under Resources for chronicles and live play.