Now Available on STV: Bloodlines: The Ageless

[Yossarian]

Got this. Read this. Loved this.

Always great to hear! Consider leaving us a star-rating/review on the STV; it really helps!

[Demigod Beast]

Got this. Read this. Loved this.

[Minty]

I think most mortals would assume it's the result of an industrial accident or terrorism over vampire magic but that doesn't make it any less noticeable. Whether that is a punishable offence or not probably depends on the City. That said, the Joneses also have Obfuscate so they are in a better position to hide it than they otherwise might be if they also use Oubliette.

[Prince of the Night]

Is their a reason im missing that keeps Echo of Ypres from being a masquerade breach?

[Prince of the Night]

Is it reasonable to guess that a Bak-Ra Dragon will often Pursue coil of the voivode right after the Ascendant

[Yossarian]

Love the mood and the allusion to Rom as a vampire itself. Loved that bit in the original Requiem for Rome! Think it was in the foreword if I remember correctly.

I'm of the opinion that the forward to RFR is some of the best writing White Wolf ever put out.

Just wanted to express how excited I am for this project! Probably the most excited I've ever been since getting into VTR!

Cheers!

I hope it lives up to your expectations! The first drafts have just started to come in, but the book is starting to take shape. It's gonna be a lot of fun, and easily the biggest book we've done. I'll definitely have more to say about it in the near future...

[Spacedigger]

Hello again!

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…

Love the mood and the allusion to Rom as a vampire itself. Loved that bit in the original Requiem for Rome! Think it was in the foreword if I remember correctly.

Just wanted to express how excited I am for this project! Probably the most excited I've ever been since getting into VTR!

Cheers!

[saibot]

can blut alchemie create gemstones??

May I ask what makes you doubt that it could? I'm not being facetious here, just genuinely curious why you might believe gems may be off the table.
That is all to say the simple answer is "yes".

[Prince of the Night]

can blut alchemie create gemstones??

[saibot]

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?

I would rather avoid any public, easily traceable website to move my suspicious wares with unclear origin. You can only sell so many of dad's Rolex watches before it gets suspicious. Generally, I would see fences as Allies more than contacts, but I don't think knowing a reasonably trustworthy fence requires Merit dots, but it may need Streetwise.

I think you're probably onto something there. Obfuscate covers a lot of more metaphorical illusory powers and concealment effects (emotions, for example), and Resilience fits well with healing and more general resistance effects. Conversely, Vigor typically gets added in when you need a damage aspect to the Devotion, which is a bit more narrow in scope.

At least for Resilience I think it is also just a very simple shoo-in when nothing else comes to mind. As far as vampire fiction beyond Requiem and Masquerade is concerned, Resilience feels like the most common Physical Discipline. Not all vampires are especially fast or strong, but it's hard to think of settings in which vampires are easy to kill. So you have some bloodlines that get Resilience because bloodlines are supposed to have 4 affinity Disciplines, but the bloodline's concept doesn't make a strong case for any specific Discipline as their fourth.

[Yossarian]

Without a strong grasp on which bloodlines got which offhand, my impulse is to suggest this is for the practical reasons of those two being functional survival-boosting Disciplines — being able to keep under the radar and stay unliving through more are tricks that can definitely help a group of vampires enhance their staying power over the decades, whereas inhuman strength is a bit of a loud card to pull in situations a conspiratorial monster should ideally be avoiding.

It could be that their impact on Devotion recipes is also a contributing factor, but I can't say I have the strongest understanding of the more abstract ways the common Disciplines go into those to speak to how Resilience affects a combo-power compared to Vigor.

I think you're probably onto something there. Obfuscate covers a lot of more metaphorical illusory powers and concealment effects (emotions, for example), and Resilience fits well with healing and more general resistance effects. Conversely, Vigor typically gets added in when you need a damage aspect to the Devotion, which is a bit more narrow in scope.

[Satchel]

However, I'm slightly surprised that Resilience and Obfuscate were the dominant common powers; I would've thought Vigor would be closer to them.

Without a strong grasp on which bloodlines got which offhand, my impulse is to suggest this is for the practical reasons of those two being functional survival-boosting Disciplines — being able to keep under the radar and stay unliving through more are tricks that can definitely help a group of vampires enhance their staying power over the decades, whereas inhuman strength is a bit of a loud card to pull in situations a conspiratorial monster should ideally be avoiding.

It could be that their impact on Devotion recipes is also a contributing factor, but I can't say I have the strongest understanding of the more abstract ways the common Disciplines go into those to speak to how Resilience affects a combo-power compared to Vigor.

[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.

[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]

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…