EDIT: although I am aware that we shouldn't advertise games on the noticeboard on a "First come, First served" basis, the nature of this system means its better to hash out character creation rather than submitting a character sheet.
Meaning this posting is "First come, First served" based on whoever posts first in this thread, sorry guys.
Title: Night by Gaslight
Game: Vampire: The Requiem (Second Edition)
Player count: 4. 2 spaces are already reserved, leaving 2 left.
Timezone: Any (Please be mindful, I am located in GMT +0)
Hello, I am looking to run a Victorian Era Vampire: The Requiem 2e game. I already have two players who are part of this community now and I am looking for two more to join
Description
It is 1852. An era of considerable social inequality in London.
Being human in a city without wealth or status required canny survival skills. From a certain point of view, living standards were mired in great atrocities, both social and physical.
There were no protections afforded to children. If you lived till working age (which itself was ill-defined), you were subject to occupational hazards that could easily kill you. Operating machines in textiles mills or being hired in dark, dangerous coal mines. Even when grown as adults, such a generation had no future other than in labor within jobs that made them effectively indentured slaves.
If the hazards of your status and upbringing failed to kill you, then disease and pestilence surely would. Throughout London's history, epidemics and plague has ravaged its society. The city was wracked by near constant cholera epidemics until 1854, when John Snow, a physician, identified that water could be contaminated with the disease. Until then, the city was ravaged on a mass scale by such deadly diseases and maladies.
You are Kindred. In colloquial terms, you are a Vampire, a mortal human that has been turned into a nocturnal, supernatural being. Your form brings many changes to adapt to.
On the one hand, you have achieved immortality, something renaissance scholars and alchemists had been dying to figure out the secret of. Your dead Body courses with 'Vitae', a thicker, more potent version of human blood synthesized by your supernatural biology. By feeding off mortal blood, you can sustain your unlife through predation. In the cover of night, The Blood, as it's sometimes known by, gifts you with superhuman qualities. Super strength, hypnosis, blood sorcery and enhanced senses are some of the most basic examples of its power.
But the Kindred are cursed. Your body is dead; you can never know being mortal again. Food, drink and sex are obvious pleasures that are denied to you; you may try to emulate the act but none will beat the rush you get from feeding and the hunt when feeding. Your body has defeated time but remains the same at each sunset, reverting to the day you were embraced. It is difficult to kill you but weaknesses can be exploited to do so. Fire, sunlight, and staking are the worst of the three and are all painful experiences.
Being a Kindred brings other hazards. Every vampire knows the creeping sensation of 'The Beast', the thing inside each vampires that drives it to slake its bloody thirst. You could be the most rational of mortals at the time of your Vampiric Embrace and could continue to model your life upon that virtue. But The Beast is always there, willing you, driving you to fight or flee, forcing you to frenzy under duress and making you force upon the world the most animalistic of assaults.
You are a predator. You band with other predators in vampiric courts and each vampire tries to carry on the pretend game of civil society, to protect from more numerous humans or other threats to their existence. That is the Masquerade; all vampires must feed. An informed populace who are aware of fanged demi-humans who stalk the shadows are harder to feed on. Ignorance is fundamental to preventing Blood Famines.
Join us. Help tell the story of your night as the damned. What is your Requiem? How do you justify your unlife?
Are you violent and cruel, discarding your humanity to live as a wolf amongst sheep? Or do you cling to your humanity righteously, to what separates you from animals?
Do you seek to reform the way vampire society governs itself? Or do you think you can transcend the condition's weakness and shed your banes?
The All-Night Society in Victorian London awaits
What to expect
Playing a Storyteller System game can be a very different experience. There is no treasure or dungeons; well, at least the sort that you might see in D&D. Violence isn't always the best or first option and monsters are genuinely threatening. A Storyteller System game is set in a dark version of our world, where secrets, supernaturals and horrible things exist alongside human history.
For that reason, there's no immediate goals other than the goals of your characters. But your lives aren't mundane.
As Vampires, you start with an absurd contrast of power and vulnerability. You can perform such extraordinary feats of fancy but you are incinerated by the sun's touch. You can sweet talk people into doing your bidding so easily and yet you fly into murderous rampages if someone happens to say the wrong thing to you.
This game is based in the Chronicles of Darkness system. It is a very story and lore dense system. New players and critics have told me that the games can be very dense in its choice of language or hard to navigate. But some of its best features are, in my opinion:
- All skill or attribute tests, whether extended, opposed or passive, generally follow the most simple of principles. Get together a pool of d10s made up of certain stats, apply modifiers to the pool, roll and look for 8 or above on your dice. Re-roll another d10 for each 10 you get. Any dice that are 8 and above are a success and all you need is a minimum of 1 success in achieving an action.
- The game strikes a nice middle ground between statistics and free-form role-playing. You can think about weird and wonderful builds if you like but equally, the Storyteller and the group have the ability to veto rules or use simplified rules if things end up penalizing the group's play-style.
- Personal choices made by characters. The settings are morally ambiguous; good and evil isn't the focus here. It's all about drama, choice and consequence. What you do and how you do it.
Character creation
You will begin the game as Kindred, with 12 free XP to spend after you've completed character creation. This can be banked or spent immediately before you start the game.
I did use a method called Climbing the Ladder in the corebook which requires you to complete it in order to get the above 12 XP. This is meant to introduce you to the game as a whole, but I have found that its better as a storyteller to give the XP outright and answer more direct questions the player has about the setting rather than telling them to sift through a huge section of purple prose in the book.
Some character sheets are available here, which can be edited and saved using a PDF viewer. The other three pages aren't so important; what matters is the first page and the basic stats.
For generating characters, I'll provide resources to help in the process. It is easy to get lost in making it and Storyteller systems can have a lot of confusing terminology, so I suggest asking as many questions as possible and I'll try to answer them as directly as I can.
The setting is Victorian Era London, 1852. You do not have to be from the United Kingdom; you can be any nationality or race, but keep in mind that I will be striving for a little bit of period appropriate dialogue.
As many often ask about the period and the level of technology, the British didn't typically walk around bearing arms or guns in public as it was largely criminalised after the Napoleonic Wars. As well, anyone possessing one would likely only have more concealable percussion cap pistols, the old fashioned one-shot, prime and reload musket pistols.
Try to think about how your character keeps their unlife going. If they are part of high society, have human servants to cover for them or have businesses that can be run via proxy. Or they could be vagrants or street-rats themselves, who hide amongst gangs or small-time taverns. The most important thing is to remember that your characters are competent but can be vulnerable.
Be extremely careful about making violent or murderous characters. Vampire unlife is extremely treacherous and is full of fickle elders and hierarchies that can easily be scorned. You can play the sociopathic maniac but you will find yourself losing allies over time if you are not careful. There's nothing worse than being cornered when playing Vampire.
GM Style
I try to be technical with Chronicles of Darkness as I like the ruleset, but I do think that story and drama should take priority if brought up. I'm unlikely to be too strict about certain rules except vital ones such as loss of Humanity or Vampiric powers.
I will allow Player v Player in this setting. There is one caveat:
- I need consent from everyone in the group that they wish this to happen.
One vote against PvP from any player is enough to veto any PvP, in any context or situation. Please respect your fellow players if they don't wish to fight for keeps with other characters.
Tone
A game like this is going to be difficult to manage tonally. Please remember that the rules of the site disallow explicit erotic content, both written and graphic, as well as gratuitous violence.
As for everything else, the setting is dark and involves themes of coodependancy, emotional trauma, addiction and some very nightmarish existential situations. Please deal with these elements with maturity and speak up if you do not wish to have certain 'grey area' plots in the game before we start.
On that subject, controversy surrounds these sort of games and the elements they portray. If players begin out of character arguments (as a result of in-game actions) that are abusive, uncivil, defamatory or politically charged towards another player, I will not tolerate it and will warn you before removing you from the game for a repeat offense. If you have a complaint, just calmly tell me in private or to our designated chat room, so that we can deal with it.
I promise to make any of these themes more implicit than explicit, and I will strictly adhere to the site's policies on explicit erotic and violent content, but the setting is about Personal Horror and I can't gloss over that completely.
Frequency of posts and activity
Once the game has started, I will try to post at least once every two days. If there are any delays, I'll keep everyone informed.
Please keep in mind my time-zone is GMT +0.
If you’re going to be gone for a long time, please let the group know in the allocated chat so you don’t keep them waiting.
After a week, I will dummy out your character as a NPC that will aid the group or will do their own thing if you’re absent for too long without a reason.
At two weeks I’ll remove the character from the campaign if you still haven’t gotten in contact with the group.
Meaning this posting is "First come, First served" based on whoever posts first in this thread, sorry guys.
Title: Night by Gaslight
Game: Vampire: The Requiem (Second Edition)
Player count: 4. 2 spaces are already reserved, leaving 2 left.
Timezone: Any (Please be mindful, I am located in GMT +0)
Hello, I am looking to run a Victorian Era Vampire: The Requiem 2e game. I already have two players who are part of this community now and I am looking for two more to join
Description
It is 1852. An era of considerable social inequality in London.
Being human in a city without wealth or status required canny survival skills. From a certain point of view, living standards were mired in great atrocities, both social and physical.
There were no protections afforded to children. If you lived till working age (which itself was ill-defined), you were subject to occupational hazards that could easily kill you. Operating machines in textiles mills or being hired in dark, dangerous coal mines. Even when grown as adults, such a generation had no future other than in labor within jobs that made them effectively indentured slaves.
If the hazards of your status and upbringing failed to kill you, then disease and pestilence surely would. Throughout London's history, epidemics and plague has ravaged its society. The city was wracked by near constant cholera epidemics until 1854, when John Snow, a physician, identified that water could be contaminated with the disease. Until then, the city was ravaged on a mass scale by such deadly diseases and maladies.
You are Kindred. In colloquial terms, you are a Vampire, a mortal human that has been turned into a nocturnal, supernatural being. Your form brings many changes to adapt to.
On the one hand, you have achieved immortality, something renaissance scholars and alchemists had been dying to figure out the secret of. Your dead Body courses with 'Vitae', a thicker, more potent version of human blood synthesized by your supernatural biology. By feeding off mortal blood, you can sustain your unlife through predation. In the cover of night, The Blood, as it's sometimes known by, gifts you with superhuman qualities. Super strength, hypnosis, blood sorcery and enhanced senses are some of the most basic examples of its power.
But the Kindred are cursed. Your body is dead; you can never know being mortal again. Food, drink and sex are obvious pleasures that are denied to you; you may try to emulate the act but none will beat the rush you get from feeding and the hunt when feeding. Your body has defeated time but remains the same at each sunset, reverting to the day you were embraced. It is difficult to kill you but weaknesses can be exploited to do so. Fire, sunlight, and staking are the worst of the three and are all painful experiences.
Being a Kindred brings other hazards. Every vampire knows the creeping sensation of 'The Beast', the thing inside each vampires that drives it to slake its bloody thirst. You could be the most rational of mortals at the time of your Vampiric Embrace and could continue to model your life upon that virtue. But The Beast is always there, willing you, driving you to fight or flee, forcing you to frenzy under duress and making you force upon the world the most animalistic of assaults.
You are a predator. You band with other predators in vampiric courts and each vampire tries to carry on the pretend game of civil society, to protect from more numerous humans or other threats to their existence. That is the Masquerade; all vampires must feed. An informed populace who are aware of fanged demi-humans who stalk the shadows are harder to feed on. Ignorance is fundamental to preventing Blood Famines.
Join us. Help tell the story of your night as the damned. What is your Requiem? How do you justify your unlife?
Are you violent and cruel, discarding your humanity to live as a wolf amongst sheep? Or do you cling to your humanity righteously, to what separates you from animals?
Do you seek to reform the way vampire society governs itself? Or do you think you can transcend the condition's weakness and shed your banes?
The All-Night Society in Victorian London awaits
What to expect
Playing a Storyteller System game can be a very different experience. There is no treasure or dungeons; well, at least the sort that you might see in D&D. Violence isn't always the best or first option and monsters are genuinely threatening. A Storyteller System game is set in a dark version of our world, where secrets, supernaturals and horrible things exist alongside human history.
For that reason, there's no immediate goals other than the goals of your characters. But your lives aren't mundane.
As Vampires, you start with an absurd contrast of power and vulnerability. You can perform such extraordinary feats of fancy but you are incinerated by the sun's touch. You can sweet talk people into doing your bidding so easily and yet you fly into murderous rampages if someone happens to say the wrong thing to you.
This game is based in the Chronicles of Darkness system. It is a very story and lore dense system. New players and critics have told me that the games can be very dense in its choice of language or hard to navigate. But some of its best features are, in my opinion:
- All skill or attribute tests, whether extended, opposed or passive, generally follow the most simple of principles. Get together a pool of d10s made up of certain stats, apply modifiers to the pool, roll and look for 8 or above on your dice. Re-roll another d10 for each 10 you get. Any dice that are 8 and above are a success and all you need is a minimum of 1 success in achieving an action.
- The game strikes a nice middle ground between statistics and free-form role-playing. You can think about weird and wonderful builds if you like but equally, the Storyteller and the group have the ability to veto rules or use simplified rules if things end up penalizing the group's play-style.
- Personal choices made by characters. The settings are morally ambiguous; good and evil isn't the focus here. It's all about drama, choice and consequence. What you do and how you do it.
Character creation
You will begin the game as Kindred, with 12 free XP to spend after you've completed character creation. This can be banked or spent immediately before you start the game.
I did use a method called Climbing the Ladder in the corebook which requires you to complete it in order to get the above 12 XP. This is meant to introduce you to the game as a whole, but I have found that its better as a storyteller to give the XP outright and answer more direct questions the player has about the setting rather than telling them to sift through a huge section of purple prose in the book.
Some character sheets are available here, which can be edited and saved using a PDF viewer. The other three pages aren't so important; what matters is the first page and the basic stats.
For generating characters, I'll provide resources to help in the process. It is easy to get lost in making it and Storyteller systems can have a lot of confusing terminology, so I suggest asking as many questions as possible and I'll try to answer them as directly as I can.
The setting is Victorian Era London, 1852. You do not have to be from the United Kingdom; you can be any nationality or race, but keep in mind that I will be striving for a little bit of period appropriate dialogue.
As many often ask about the period and the level of technology, the British didn't typically walk around bearing arms or guns in public as it was largely criminalised after the Napoleonic Wars. As well, anyone possessing one would likely only have more concealable percussion cap pistols, the old fashioned one-shot, prime and reload musket pistols.
Try to think about how your character keeps their unlife going. If they are part of high society, have human servants to cover for them or have businesses that can be run via proxy. Or they could be vagrants or street-rats themselves, who hide amongst gangs or small-time taverns. The most important thing is to remember that your characters are competent but can be vulnerable.
Be extremely careful about making violent or murderous characters. Vampire unlife is extremely treacherous and is full of fickle elders and hierarchies that can easily be scorned. You can play the sociopathic maniac but you will find yourself losing allies over time if you are not careful. There's nothing worse than being cornered when playing Vampire.
GM Style
I try to be technical with Chronicles of Darkness as I like the ruleset, but I do think that story and drama should take priority if brought up. I'm unlikely to be too strict about certain rules except vital ones such as loss of Humanity or Vampiric powers.
I will allow Player v Player in this setting. There is one caveat:
- I need consent from everyone in the group that they wish this to happen.
One vote against PvP from any player is enough to veto any PvP, in any context or situation. Please respect your fellow players if they don't wish to fight for keeps with other characters.
Tone
A game like this is going to be difficult to manage tonally. Please remember that the rules of the site disallow explicit erotic content, both written and graphic, as well as gratuitous violence.
As for everything else, the setting is dark and involves themes of coodependancy, emotional trauma, addiction and some very nightmarish existential situations. Please deal with these elements with maturity and speak up if you do not wish to have certain 'grey area' plots in the game before we start.
On that subject, controversy surrounds these sort of games and the elements they portray. If players begin out of character arguments (as a result of in-game actions) that are abusive, uncivil, defamatory or politically charged towards another player, I will not tolerate it and will warn you before removing you from the game for a repeat offense. If you have a complaint, just calmly tell me in private or to our designated chat room, so that we can deal with it.
I promise to make any of these themes more implicit than explicit, and I will strictly adhere to the site's policies on explicit erotic and violent content, but the setting is about Personal Horror and I can't gloss over that completely.
Frequency of posts and activity
Once the game has started, I will try to post at least once every two days. If there are any delays, I'll keep everyone informed.
Please keep in mind my time-zone is GMT +0.
If you’re going to be gone for a long time, please let the group know in the allocated chat so you don’t keep them waiting.
After a week, I will dummy out your character as a NPC that will aid the group or will do their own thing if you’re absent for too long without a reason.
At two weeks I’ll remove the character from the campaign if you still haven’t gotten in contact with the group.
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