#vtr

[contac]

#video production #VTR #vhs #gif #buttons

[thewoods-have-eyes]

My guy literally has one hobby and that is posing in front of lightning

Anywhow heres the finished piece of the wip i posted a few days ago

#decided for lore purposes the either make him a vetrue or tzimisce #havent decided yet hmm #anyway hes mad at his sire #who isnt #my artwrok #myart #original character #vampire the masquerade #vtm #vampire the requiem #vtr #vampire character

[awakenedsalamander]

Here’s some Chronicles of Darkness thoughts for you.

So, Vampire: The Requiem (particularly in its first edition) gets a lot of flak for being kind of a watered down Vampire: The Masquerade. Whereas the other Chronicles of Darkness games really do reimagine their concepts— I mean, compare both Changeling games some time— Requiem struggles more to differentiate itself from its older sibling.

However, its second edition makes a really cool change, in my opinion.

So one of the defending aspects of Masquerade is, well, the Masquerade. Not just the notion that the supernatural hides from the mortal and mundane— that’s standard urban fantasy/horror. No, in Masquerade, that hiding is given focus as a delicate, brutal conspiracy. Part of the identity of that game is how perilous the position of the Kindred is, and how they are just beneath mortal scrutiny they are. It’s why it’s the name of the game.

Requiem… plays it a little differently, at least in 2E. They still have the Masquerade, they even still call it that, but it works in a really interesting way. See, one of the themes of Requiem is just how inhuman vampires are— and that’s a theme in Masquerade, too, but in VTM the focus is on monstrousness by way of immortality.

To lose your Humanity stat in Masquerade, you normally have to behave with deliberately cruelty, or at least reckless negligence, toward the wellbeing of others. Your Hunger makes you a monster, because it drives you to evil. It’s good stuff, I’ve written about it before!

But in Requiem, one of the ways you can lose Humanity is through— and this is a quote— “Surviving something that would hospitalize a human.” The reason being, well, humans can’t do that, not normally. But a vampire? Well, it can be hit by a truck, beaten and stabbed, hell, even shot in the head, and can walk it all off, with a bit of luck. Requiem takes the stance that, cool as that might be, it isn’t *human* in any sense. A lot of the ways you can lose Humanity in Requiem really do revolve around being inhuman in the most literal sense, in addition to being inhumane.

So what does that have to do with the Masquerade?

Well, here’s the thing about monsters: People are scared of them.

We love them too, sure. They’re enthralling, they’re fascinating, they’re impressive. That’s how the vampire lures you in. But when it wants you to go away? That’s what fear is for.

The Masquerade in Requiem is not a network of elders conspiring to silence mortal media institutions. It doesn’t need to be. All it has to be is the hesitance to knock on the apartment door of that sketchy neighbor during daylight hours, the impulse to rush home rather than linger when walking by that alley, the refusal to speak about what could be seen out of the bus window last night, if you looked closely enough.

To quote the book:

This is not about vampires needing to quake and hide, but about the fear humans have of what is hidden from them — just past the truth of Santa Claus and all the horrible adult revelations — the fear that if they shake even the most mundane structure, crawling things will fall out.

(V:TR 2E, p. 60, emphasis mine.)

And well, as much as I love the labyrinthine plots and schemes of VTM, something about VTR’s notion of what hiding from mortals really is sticks with me.

I’ve never really felt like some shadowy vampire puppet master is pulling strings to keep me from finding out about him, you know?But that there might be something horrible down there in the dark, that sends me racing up the stairs, even though I should know better… That I’ve felt.

#cofd #chronicles of darkness #vampire the masquerade #vampire the requiem #vtr

[grauline]

batch of portraits for @creativebiter, who commissioned me to draw her entire vampire the requiem coterie ! thank you so much for trusting me with your gorgeous crew 🦇🖤

#vampire the requiem #vtr #v

[crownedinmarigolds]

The effervescent Mihai who belongs to the captivating @thewoods-have-eyes!! I LOVE their Nosferatu art, had reached out, and now I adore them and the ground they walk on. Thank you so much for the artwork! I need to draw this mad scientist EVEN MORE! I actually need to as this has been sitting in my drafts for forever and I need to do something much better for you than these sketches!

Bonus art of Ralph absolutely wrecking the plan: (BTW I goofed, these two are actually the same height)

#mihai #thewoods-have-eyes #art trade #not my oc #my art #ralph #nosferatu #vampire the masquerade #vampire the requiem #vtr #vtm #vtm oc #vtr oc #world of darkness #chronicles of darkness

[48glowsquids]

Little VtR madness incoming. Bear with me, the brainrot is big and I'm already in 4 campaigns or so.

Introducing Moira (Mira/Μοίρα), my unhinged Nosferatu character. She's a very stupid and gothic cardiac surgeon (or was).

#my art #illustration #sketchbook #sketch #watercolors #original art #original character #vtr #vampire the requiem #vtm #vampire the masquerade #wod #world of darkness #nosferatu

[vamptoll]

Reading feudal political histories so that my vampire the requiem social organizations are a delightfully ironic mirror of dynamics that no player will be able to pick up on

#I suppose this is why you only play with graduate students #vampire the requiem #vampire the masquerade #vtm #vtr #wod #i cant lie I do those readings for fun #and trying to tie that into my prince setup is just fun

[strawblina]

couldn't sleep, hyperfixated on drawing my new vampire character as Ophelia

(her whole vibe is kinda like...decadence has the root word decay, and my brain apparently defaulted to: Ophelia?)

#artist #artists on tumblr #digital artist #oc artist #dndoc #digital painting #vampire theme #vampire the masquerade #vampire the requiem #vampirism #vampire #vtm #vtm oc #vtr #toreador #ophelia #ophelia shakespeare #ophelia John Everett Millais #John Everett Millais

[gorbalsvampire]

More Humane Than Human - Humanity as degeneration vs. Humanity as detachment

I wanted to repost the Requiem readthrough review before I got into this, because it started as one of those "Requiem vs. Masquerade which is better" conversations. In rules terms I think V5 has iterated successfully on Requiem - there's probably about the same density of actual rules there but V5 makes a better fist of hiving some of them off into advanced/optional/discretionary territory - but Requiem innovates hard in terms of ideas about how vampires and vampirism work, introducing things like the Predator's Taint and Lashing Out and, crucially, Touchstones.

Touchstones give the lie to the "V5 does rules better" claim. I have never liked how V5 does them. The notion of tying an individual vampire to a person, place or artefact is nothing new. Those of us who are Old, or retro-curious, may recall Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, in which Brujah himbo protagonist Christof is told he needs an "anchor" for his Humanity and selects Anezka, the nun who nursed him back to health and who he's been having less than holy thoughts about ever since he woke up. Christof is told, by his mentor Wilhelm, that choosing a person as his "anchor" is a dangerous call - but his mind is made up and, not to spoil a twenty-five-year-old game, it turns out to be for the best for both of them... as long as he's kept his Humanity up, anyway.

So, Touchstones in the context of Masquerade are nothing new to me - in fact I was quite surprised when the full TTRPG didn't have rules for them. But! Touchstones in V5 are a bit different. Instead of one, there are many: instead of humanity in general, each of the vampire's Convictions has a named person attached to it.

The problem - and this isn't just me, it's something that's come up in all the V5 games I've played or hosted - is that viable characters have two or three Convictions. Coming up with two or three Touchstones at character generation, before you have a feel for who this person is and how you're going to play them and what their routine looks like, has not worked for anyone I've played the game with. One might work - most of us can ideate a relationship with one other person before we start playing - but three seems to stretch the limited sense of a starting character's identity too thin.

Rules As Written, of course, a Touchstone doesn't have to be someone significant to the story. They can just be someone your character saw every day, or sees every night, or notices every time they pass by. But... that's bullshit. That is not a "hang a key element of your personal ethic and capacity for self care on this person" relationship. I can see the story beat of "this person isn't there any more and you're morally shook by it" working once, maybe, but still, permanently altering your character's relationship with the Beast is kind of an integral function of the game. It feels like that hat should be hung on a sturdier hook - a full-on fleshed-out SPC. Like in Requiem, where you get one Touchstone.

Also, Humanity works differently, at its most fundamental level, and this exposes a key difference between the two games - one where I think Requiem is strides ahead. @awakenedsalamander touched on this talking about the differences in the concept of the Masquerade between the two games, but I want to go deeper on it.

In Masquerade, Humanity is about degeneration - it's the Downward Spiral, an almost inevitable drift from Man to Beast with exceptions being so rare they're practically mythical. It's about becoming worse, with all the moral judgment that implies, about committing acts that appear on a Hierarchy of Sins.

(At least, it is in V20. V5 abolishing that in favour of chronicle specific Tenets and character specific Convictions is really smart. I didn't grasp how it was meant to work from the corebook - it took the Player's Guide to spell it out to me - but now that I grok it, I love the tension between the Tenets that forbid and govern a character's actions and the Convictions that excuse and forgive those actions.)

In Requiem, Humanity is detachment. It's about the state of being a vampire slowly and inexorably reminding you over and over that you're not human any more, drifting further and further away from what you were and into the all-night society of predators. It's quantified in terms of Breaking Points - roughly grouped by significance and severity, these experiences hammer home that you're dead, you're dead, you're dead and out of this world. It's less "I did a bad thing" and more "I experienced something that no human ever should" like walking off a stab wound or being reminded you're a hundred years old and still act like you're twenty. When you hit a Breaking Point, you roll a number of dice - how many is a function of how serious and hard to avoid confronting the Breaking Point is - to avoid losing Humanity.

Now. In the past I've met quite a few players who don't really want to engage with the morality play aspects of Masquerade. Whether that's "we want to speedrun to Humanity 4 so we can play the game 'properly' without having to pretend we regret doing all the things RPG protagonists do" or "we think it's kinda stupid the way low Humanity says you may no longer create art or have sex without 'faking it' and let's interrogate what the developers think 'sex' is, shall we?" doesn't really matter. Maybe you want to play on the theme of post-humanity rather than be wrist-slapped for trying to do main character stuff. I don't blame you.

I think it should be possible to wholesale lift the Requiem system of detachment, rolled for at Breaking Points and mitigated by a singular Touchstone who can be a more developed character, or a place, or an object, and slot that into V5 replacing Tenets, Convictions and Stains.

That gives you a version of Humanity that's more permissive and less frontloaded, allows you to go deep on one hook instead of ideating sets of pairs before you even know who your character is. It also divorces functions of sexuality and creativity from being a good person - in the Requiem model, vampires fuck, and make art, and low Humanity expresses more in how they do it than whether or not they can.

(Although - there'd need to be some finesse around Oblivion, since I think the Discipline's theme of entropy inducing personal decay still works in the detachment model - maybe keep Stains as an additional lever, a function of Messy Criticals and dangerous Disciplines, and have Breaking Points inflict Stains instead of automatically triggering rolls...)

Important note on this idea: this does NOT exempt you from having a conversation about what's off limits in Session 0. It's easy to miss this in the V5 core book, but Chronicle Tenets aren't a safety tool. Chronicle Tenets are the moral rules that are going to come up A LOT in play, they define what your coterie collectively accepts as Doing A Bad Thing, to be excused for personal reasons (i.e. Convictions). An actual out of character trigger, an aspect of the World of Darkness with which a real live person who exists does not wish to engage, is a line or a veil - something we either don't include, or don't narrate explicitly. It's not something we build into one of the game's mechanical loops and ensure will come up. That would be... the absolute opposite of safe.

Whadda we think?

#vtm #vtr #vampire the masquerade #vampire the requiem #meta #house rules #humanity #// this took a lot longer than I expected - I either have long covid or my arthritis levelled up over this winter...

[teallinum]

The Prince of Venice Marco (Gangrel) and my PC young vampire Felice (Daeva)

She’s hitting on him, he’s drinking her blood and seems to really liking her

We’ll see where this path will lead Felice

#original character #oc #my art #vtr #vampire the requiem #oc: felice #oc: marco #cofd #chronicles of darkness #vampires #ttrpg art

[aryburn-trains]

Vermont Rail System's White River Junction to Norwich, Vermont, Polar Express train has Santa boarding the train for the trip back south to White River as VRS' Conductor Bob Popovach performs the safety duties. December 15, 2013

#polar express #vtr #vermont rail system #2013 #white river junction #norwich #trains #passenger train #history #vermont

[narstyteeth]

A cursed straight haired Jen ?!

#my art #chronicles of darkness #VtR #vampire the requiem #VtM #gangrel #carthian #oc: Jen #NIN

[laurentlemonke]

VTR

#luxander🦈 #noidea #tunaz #vtr #oc #original character #sketchbook #traditional artist #traditional art #ohuhumarkers #oc art #oc artwork #art #artwork #illustration #my art #nirvana #murdoc is god #graphic tee #klunk's hand is backward #i messed up #don't worry about it #oc band #band oc #musician

[awakenedsalamander]

Vampire: The Requiem 2E making the preternatural mad insight of the Malkavians something that is just an inherent thing in the Blood that can emerge in any Clan is a change I think about A Lot.

I really love Clan Malkavian in Masquerade, don’t get me wrong, but the idea that any vampire can, through unknown means, develop Malkavia is very interesting.

I don’t know if I like it as a change, but as I say, I think about it a bunch.

#vtr #vtm #vampire the requiem #vampire the masquerade

[destinyapostasy]

Vampire update: Jaz from the 20’s themed Elysium from our last session. She’s gonna have her hands full pretty soon, her sire will be waking up from a trauma induced torpor and Jaz took on all political responsibility over her which I’m sure won’t have any major repercussions in any way. ☺️

#vampire the requiem #jazdia kovarski #vtr #ventrue #my art tag

[48glowsquids]

🔴

Look at my character and my friend's character smooching.

#my art #illustration #sketchbook #sketch #watercolors #vampire the requiem #vtr #world of darkness #wod #vampires #nosferatu #deava