Now Available on STV: Bloodlines: The Ageless

[Yossarian]

I feel stupid for missing this bit. I must have been a victim to the same phenomenon that injects spelling errors into all posts that correct someone elses mistakes.

I see now where the confusion is coming in. This is a good example of "makes sense in my head but not on the page". Yes, the idea is that you get the Linhagem dots instead of the usual bonus if your Merit rating is higher than the default bonus; if the blood sympathy bonus is higher, the Merit just confers a +1 on that normal modifier. I'll clarify that for a future errata release! I swear I remember putting an "instead of" in there somewhere, but I probably cut it without thinking.

[Baaldam]

Hello again, and welcome to our penultimate entry! Let's see what the Higalit are dreaming...

This bloodline probably has the highest concept in the book: they mostly remain asleep, or at least reclusive. Unlike the Malocusians, who can shrug off their homebound curse with enough effort, Higalit are burned even by the light of the moon and any other reflected sunlight. They can withstand their bane with high Humanity, but eventually, no matter how much they maintain the Mask, all burn. Combined with their clan bane (greater penalties on frenzy resistance triggered by sunlight), most are bound to their icy havens. But, they have ways around this! With their own special twists of Twilight Projection (Auspex 5), they can manifest their ephemeral forms in the material realm with a bit of effort, walking the world and taking their fill of it, even in the depths of torpor.

So, this bloodline asks something we don't normally ask of players: have a high-level Discipline to join. You can certainly play a Higalit without Auspex 5, but you can't access their powers straight away. Now, a fifth-dot Discipline isn't nearly as hard to attain as it was in the old experience system, but that's still 6 Experiences at minimum that you've got to attain (assuming you're a starting character who's joined her bloodline and spent all three Discipline dots on Auspex). I thought a lot about this a lot in development, and ultimately I decided I was okay with that. Most bloodlines we've developed are new-character friendly; this one isn't, and I think that's fine. The Higalit are kind of the result of Clan Amari being so bound to the torpor cycle, so I imagine most of their members are those Winter Kings who've had time to ruminate on being frozen solid half the year, even those who are the childer of Dream Wights.

One possible "short alternate path" toward turning ghostly that comes to mind would be combining the Ghost Eater merit from Book of Dead (though Geist 2e has brought updates that might or not have superceded it) with Protean 2-3, though admitedly consuming ghosts to shapeshift into one would make for a quite different mindset and bloodline overall.

All of that said, many of the things going on with the Higalit seem like a very good fit for my own rework of the Annunaki in a "Black Streets of Babylon/Ruins of Ur" mashup Dark Era

In the Dark Eras (Excerpt)

Arthur’s Britannia — 400–500 CE (DE2, p. 86): A peculiar myth is sometimes shared among the Bron bloodline. A fanatical Hedge Knight in search of the Grail supposedly set sail north with his thralls from England’s green shores on a barge of his own construction, believing with all his dead heart that the Christ hid his legacy away in the frozen north beyond the known world. Ice-locked for months, and slowly running out of crewmen to slake his hunger, he eventually came across a gathering of strange beings, intangible yet able to touch the world. These creatures, the “Children of Michael,” helped restock his larders, gifting him a font of blood everlasting. When he returned to Britain, he claimed angels had gifted him the Grail, but by then, the font had indeed run dry. Modern Bron wonder if there’s any truth to this story, and a few think something divine might still be hidden in the northern wastes.

This is a quite delicious morsel of "connecting the dots into strongly mythical - and misinterpreted - images" indeed. The wonders of communication issues.

[Yossarian]

One possible "short alternate path" toward turning ghostly that comes to mind would be combining the Ghost Eater merit from Book of Dead (though Geist 2e has brought updates that might or not have superceded it) with Protean 2-3, though admitedly consuming ghosts to shapeshift into one would make for a quite different mindset and bloodline overall.

Yeah, there are a few ways you could do it without Auspex, but Twilight Projection ultimately felt like the simplest solution, even if it wasn't the fastest. I also didn't want to rework it into an inherent ability, as the effect is a bit too good not to require buy-in, and the Sta-Au already had something similar (albeit more limited).

This is a quite delicious morsel of "connecting the dots into strongly mythical - and misinterpreted - images" indeed. The wonders of communication issues.

Yeah, I really like that one too. There are a lot of little threads you can pull on, and I feel like you could tell a cool story based on it.

[Prince of the Night]

on Blut alchemie? Ideas how massive resources 5 worth of gold would be?

[saibot]

on Blut alchemie? Ideas how massive resources 5 worth of gold would be?

Depends on the karat value of the gold. Whether it is relatively little exceptionally pure gold or loads of impure gold can be determined by the Dilettante when creating it. If you want an exact kg/lbs number, this can't be provided given how intentionally vague the value of Resources is.

But I want to be a bit more helpful than this, so here is what we could deduce. If we go by the values given in First Edition, Resources 5 is roughly worth $50,000/month (I suppose you should consider the lower inflation level of the USD in 2004). Apparently, even just a 1 kg bar of gold is currently sitting at a value of $56,610. In other words, a single 1 kg bar would already relatively neatly match Cash 5.

But again, if you just want to create lots of weight ex nihilo for its own sake, then you can just say so when initiating the Process.

[Teatime]

New Merit: Tethered Dreamer (• to •••••)

Prerequisites: Higalit, Auspex •••••
(snip)
Permanent Impermanence (•): Your character only needs to return to her body while in her Twilight Projection after nights equal to her Merit dots plus one. She must still pay a Vitae at the start of each night, however, or else she falls to torpor as usual.

I went through the other writeups and I have another question. Does the last sentence of Permanent Impermanence mean that using this Merit suppresses the Amari mechanic of Conservation?

[Prince of the Night]

Ideas on how difficult it is for the Adroanzi or Gehemein to take their products to market???

[Yossarian]

I went through the other writeups and I have another question. Does the last sentence of Permanent Impermanence mean that using this Merit suppresses the Amari mechanic of Conservation?

Oooh, good catch. No, it doesn't; that's an oversight on my part, and I'll fix it in the next errata pass.

[Nicolas Milioni]

Yossarian,is there gonna be a Beneath the Skin Reference on the final version of the book? y'know,Aztec Empire in this late days. Lots of opportunity for blood to be had

[Yossarian]

Yossarian,is there gonna be a Beneath the Skin Reference on the final version of the book? y'know,Aztec Empire in this late days. Lots fo blood to be had

The version of the book that's online is pretty much the finalized version, beyond fixing any typos or mechanical glitches that might come up in the future. I wish we'd been able to fit Beneath the Skin in there somewhere, but we just couldn't cover every era. Partly that's because we had a slight bias toward the Dark Eras that had vampire content already, because it was easier to build on, and partly that's because there are way more Eras than there are bloodlines, and many of them don't overlap with their individual backstories (chronologically or geographically). For instance, I really wanted to do something with The Sundered World, because it's easily my favourite era, but we just couldn't make it fit.

[saibot]

Ideas on how difficult it is for the Adroanzi or Gehemein to take their products to market???

I can only speak for the Geheimen, but they absolutely are meant to be able to make stuff just to get rich. As it says in the Blutalchemie description, the products are for all intents and purposes the things they appear to be. Characters with a greater sensitivity to the supernatural might be able to trace that they were not created naturally, but they are otherwise mundane and since the processes are indefinite, you don't (usually) have upset buyers come back to haunt you. Check especially the In the Covenants sections where this is referenced a couple of times. A Dilettante should still use some discretion and keep a low profile as get-rich-quick-via-magic schemes tend to draw attention, both mundane and supernatural.

[Nicolas Milioni]

The version of the book that's online is pretty much the finalized version, beyond fixing any typos or mechanical glitches that might come up in the future. I wish we'd been able to fit Beneath the Skin in there somewhere, but we just couldn't cover every era. Partly that's because we had a slight bias toward the Dark Eras that had vampire content already, because it was easier to build on, and partly that's because there are way more Eras than there are bloodlines, and many of them don't overlap with their individual backstories (chronologically or geographically). For instance, I really wanted to do something with The Sundered World, because it's easily my favourite era, but we just couldn't make it fit.

Is ok , I getcha

[Yossarian]

Hello again!

So, I promised early on I'd talk a bit about the art I did in this book, so I thought I'd finally do a short post about that.

I painted the characters for the updated bloodlines in collaboration with another artist. He did the line work, then I painted over them. My talent does not lie in posing figures; I've never been a great sketch artist, and I find I can work faster when I've got a framework. I did do a few of the outlines for these, but only two or three (that I recall; this book has been in production for a while). To give you a sense of our process, here's how things shook out for the Sta-Au illustration:



As you can see, it's a solid sketch, so I didn't have to change much as I did the black and white. As you can see, I create a black and white "rough draft" before I add colour and other details. That method has some advantages, but it's not the most efficient way to do things. But I digress.

One of the bigger differences between the sketch and the rough version is the hair. It follows the same outline, but I wanted it to look a bit unreal, almost a little tendril-like, especially on the right-hand side, since she was going to be stepping out of Twilight.

Apart from colour, I added some plaid to her shirt, though it's intentionally a bit too symmetrical, as I wanted to give the impression of the colours kind of coming back together as she re-enters the world of flesh. The final version also fixes up some of the dynamics on her face and makes her collarbone a bit more natural, and I added the tooth necklace, because that was a fun detail from the write-up I felt was missing. The blue light/fade actually came after fully colouring things in, since I wanted to make sure the lighting was consistent; unfortunately, I accidentally deleted the un-Twilit version, so I can't show you the full colour. Finally, I veeeeery slightly tilted her more to the right, since she was a bit skewed when I flipped the image to check that it wasn't listing too far in one direction.

Fun fact about this one: the original Sta-Au illustration has a figure stepping out of Twilight with a similarly unnatural plaid design. This will sound completely untrue, but that reference was, I swear, accidental. It's possible that the original got into my subconscious, but the resemblance was completely unintentional.

Anyway, that's more or less how the art development went! I think that's pretty much all I have to say about the book, but feel free to ask questions here or on the RPG.net forums.

And, as promised, here's a little (disclaimer: unedited, undeveloped) teaser for our Rome project...

Julii: The sovereign dead

“You have the blood of a Roman! Good. Now you’ll bleed like one.”

She stands above the crowd because nowhere else will do. “Ave! Ave!” they cry, the rhythm of their chant the heartbeat of her Triumph. And when she casts her gaze on you, their eyes turn with her. And when she smiles, their knives gleam like her teeth. “Et tu?” she asks, and there can only be one answer.

Aliquid mortuum propinquat. It is imperium in marble flesh, balancing the world upon a fasces. “Veni, vidi… edi!” it laughs, blood-spittle staining its stola a deeper purple. It is the maw of more, gorging on the sweetest vines, the thickest veins, the comeliest vestals. But this is no mere carouser. There’s a bureaucracy to debauchery, a wrong way to live and a right way to die. It is the swollen corpse of tradition, magna mater, heavy with honored rite and petty procedure. When the feasting’s done and the bodies cool, it will await tribute in its candlelit lair (pardon, lararium), just as it did your father and his father before him, the tallow smelling so like the smoke the night they set your grandmother upon the pyre. “The dead teach the living,” it will say in her voice, and the first lesson shall be sacrifice.

The Julii are Rome. Rome the mother. Rome the conqueror. Rome the defiler. Rome the vampire. They are the Eternal City in all her contradictions, demanding virtue and violating ever greater bounds, preaching family and bleeding generations for their orgies, weeping for the ancestors and digging up corpses to lay at their enemies’ doors, MEMENTO MORI carved in fetid flesh. They call the world sacrosanct yet remake it with a word or a fist or a drop of blood, and this is the true genius of the Julii.

For this, the other clans call them Founders, sons and daughters of Dead Remus, the Inauspicious Twin who lost one city but gained another. He chose well for heirs, taking one among the gens Julia for his childe, and like their infamous mortal cousin, they became architects of a new order: the All Night Society. Before them, vampires were mere cadavers gnawing on carrion and rising from plague pits, barely thinking things with no drives beyond spilled blood. The Julii changed that. Now to be one of the dead is to be Propinquus. To be Kindred. This is what they claim, and they’ll never let you forget.

How?

The details aren’t important. A Roman reigns from the horse. What other explanation could there be? In the end, the truth is a useless concept to those who make it.

But they do know, don’t they? Watch closely and even a fool can see past the alabaster artifice of power and piety and puerility: When the fires blow black smoke and they turn a paler shade; when the hearth catches in their servants’ eyes and they recoil like babes; when they pay their blood-stained coin to augurs and find black feathers in the bowel…

[Prince of the Night]

I can only speak for the Geheimen, but they absolutely are meant to be able to make stuff just to get rich. As it says in the Blutalchemie description, the products are for all intents and purposes the things they appear to be. Characters with a greater sensitivity to the supernatural might be able to trace that they were not created naturally, but they are otherwise mundane and since the processes are indefinite, you don't (usually) have upset buyers come back to haunt you. Check especially the In the Covenants sections where this is referenced a couple of times. A Dilettante should still use some discretion and keep a low profile as get-rich-quick-via-magic schemes tend to draw attention, both mundane and supernatural.

was wondering think ebay or pawn shops would work better?


Think a contact or Allie is called for to help you bring it to market?

[Yossarian]

This reminds me: I seem to remember you remarking some time ago on the number of bloodlines that've just wound up getting Auspex as their fourth Discipline, and I notice that's still tending to be a common addition. Do you feel like this is a problem at all as far as design goes, or is this just one of those things to do with the nature of a lot of the bloodlines that've been getting made and updated?

Alright, I got bored and now I have statistics:

Disciplines:
Unique = 17
Crúac = 1
Praestantia = 1
Vitiate = 1
Nightmare = 28
Majesty = 33
Protean = 37
Dominate = 38
Animalism = 42
Celerity = 42
Vigor = 49
Auspex = 51
Resilience = 56
Obfuscate = 57

Clans:
Akhud = 1
Amari = 1
Bekaak = 1
Hypatian = 1
Nhang = 1
Twice-Cursed = 1
Any = 8
Gangrel = 19
Nosferatu = 19
Mekhet = 20
Daeva = 21
Ventrue = 24

Disclaimer here that this doesn't include the quick conversion clans, just the ones with complete 2E systems.

I'm happy to see that the main clans are pretty evenly distributed, though the Ventrue have a slight edge (technically, they really only have 22, because the Malkovians/Knights of the Moon are optional, but for the purposes of Discipline statistics, we'll leave them in). I'm also not accounting for double-up bloodlines like the Icelus, Vilseduire, and Les Gens Libres.

As for the Disciplines, things generally shook out how I expected, with Auspex being the most-used clan power, Nightmare being the least-used clan power, and Animalism/Celerity being the least-used common powers. However, I'm slightly surprised that Resilience and Obfuscate were the dominant common powers; I would've thought Vigor would be closer to them. I'm also REALLY surprised that Protean beat Majesty. Now, these are just the raw data, not taking into account what powers are already inherent to each bloodline, as opposed to being additive, but those are very interesting results.