Lavoisiers advice Vampire: the Masquerade, Veins of the Earth and D&D – stopthefud

Unless you get knocked in the head or smoke some pretty heavy stuff, what you read gets embedded in your brainy wrinkles.

In this column I want to take ideas from different gaming publishers, and even from non-gaming media, and reskin them into usable pieces for my game table.

As Lavoisier stated back in 1773, nothing gets lost all mass is stored and thats where ideas come from. Please dont try to reskin stuff for published material thats the worst form of plagiarism.

Jumping straight into the action, I wanna talk about Vampire: the Masquerade, a game that sits apart from D&D and the OSR in general.

V:tM is centered around clans of vampires, all descending from the biblical Caine.

Each clan has a different outlook on unlife, specific powers and flaws. They are enemies and allies of convenience, and specialize in dominating certain areas of mortal life.

You can also import the lingo from V:tM: blood is vitae, the act of creating another vampire is called embracing, and they organize them into three major factions Camarilla, Sabbath and Anarchs.

Frankly, just the fluff on the clans and how they fight each other is a ready-made campaign, even in fantasy settings.

Faction play is a hallmark of good adventure writing, and V:tM has 13 major clans, with plenty of information about them in the web. Hell, ask the goth dude at the FLGS, he probably knows them by heart.

Also, every monster manual has a vampire of sorts. Even Veins of the Earth has a bunch of fossilized vampires, although Id personally split the Aelf-Adal in clans, using V:tM templates.

A given campaign focused on hunting vampires (or being hunted by them) could easily be centered around three or four clans.

If youre making the change from a dungeon crawl into a intrigue and urban crawl game, clan Nosferatu is your obvious choice. All Nosferatu vampires are completely warped and disfigured. They are also the spys of the vampire world, since most of them learm how to turn invisible.

You can place them as an underworld quest giver, or among other creatures known for their hidden knowledge, such as Knotsmen (also Veins of the Earth) or dark dwarves.

Nosferatu are not really allied with anybody, but they may be trying to gain leverage against another clan.

For the second faction Id choose clan Toreador. They specialize in controlling the high society, patronizing the arts and being tortured artist themselves mainly because turning into a vampire kinda dulls artistic sensibilities.

These details are important because they can foreshadow the presence of a Toreador whos buying all that crap that gets hauled from the dungeon? Why the nobles spend their time in all-night banquets while the peasantry disappears in the night? How come the kings architect only comes out at night?

Even the weakness of clan Toreador can put a spin on your regular vampire they get paralyzed when facing exquisite aesthetic beauty, and may even fall in love with mortals. Is the paladin a Charisma 18 baby-faced knight? He might have a surprising advantage against a foe, or become the proteg of an undying monster.

Finally, the third clan Id use is the Lasombra. These vampires are nasty, and the majority of them have erased their humanity long ago. They also have special shadow manipulation powers, and can summon something similar to a Evards Black Tentacles.

However, they are the only vampires with a pretty obvious hindrance: they dont show on mirrors.

Another characteristic of the Lasombra clan is their deep connections with the clergy. If your church is full of high-level clerics with detect evil, you might make them the above ground connection to the Deep Janeen it takes a thousand year old vampire to deal with a timeless decadent monster with a penchant for shadows and architectural depth.

I hope that by this stage the reader noticed that these clans and the dynamic between them is very colourful and detailed, with plenty of elements ripe for the taking.

Happy gaming and keep those stakes sharp!

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Lavoisiers advice Vampire: the Masquerade, Veins of the Earth and D&D - stopthefud

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Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero
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