Character Creation

1) - OPTIONAL Choose one or more Backgrounds: mechanically, backgrounds are packages of abilities aimed at giving you a solid base to build with the rest of your points, and a few possible Examples. Every background spends 6 Investigative Points and 18 General Points from the pools you see futher down this process. If you don't have the manual, you can skip this part and we can collaborate on making your background.***


2) Choose your Investigative Abilities
You get Tradecraft 1 and Streetwise 1 for free.
You get 24 more points to put wherever you want***

3) Choose your General Abilities
You get 4 points of Health and Stability for free. The cap for Health and Stability is 15
You get 15 Points in Network and 10 points of Cover for free
You get 70 more points to put wherever you want.OPTIONAL: You can trade 2 Investigative Points for 6 General Points or viceversa, if you wish to make a more action-oriented or deduction-oriented PC.

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4) Choose one General Ability to be your MOS (Military Occupational Specialty): once per session, auto-succeed in a difficult situation using your MOS.


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5) Choose your three Sources of Stability:
- a Symbol (an item reminding you of your religion, your country, your family…)
- a Solace (a person you can count on - spouse, brother, old friend…)
- a Safety (a place you feel at home – your favorite pub, a vacation home you rent under a fake name, an abandoned safe house only you know about…)

Spies. Mercenaries. Operatives. You were trained by the best in the world and spent years risking life and limb to stop terrorists and war criminals – or perhaps helping them. Now your organization burned you: maybe an op gone bad, maybe you went rogue, maybe you were the fall guy. You thought it mattered.

It doesn’t matter.

Through your network of contacts you discovered veritable proof of existence of something dangerous and definitely not natural. Something that is worth investigating and possibly stopping: vampires.
You are uniquely qualified: among the best in the world at what you do and with no affiliation. Whether you came from Interpol, the Mossad, the IRA… now, you have a new enemy. Now you are one of the




✅ Pitch & Style. It’s "Former operatives uncover a criminal conspiracy involving vampires". I’m going for a blend of tone from several sources of inspiration (some of them you see up there in the image). Expect tense and thorough investigation, quick and dirty action, and black humor.

✅ Adult Content or Controversial Themes. Corruption, injustice, drugs and alcohol and all manner of vice and crimes, blood-sucking of the metaphorical and literal variety, all kinds of violence (not on children or sexual in nature). You may not have time for sex and romance stuff. I may play some villainous NPCs as prejudiced towards some nationality or similar, but it is of course just performance.

✅ Game Duration and Post Frequency. 3-4 posts per week. I'd say the game may last 6 to 8 months, something like 3 or 4 sessions at the table. I’m stopping myself from joining any more games until this is done.

✅ Player Experience Requirements. I would like people who are comfortable adding to the narrative, coming up with their own NPCs, making up cover identities on the fly, improvising details about the world. Experience with the GUMSHOE system is nice but not required, it’s very easy and rules take secondary role in my games anyway.

✅ Specialized software. None. I’d like this to be played exclusively via forum, although I may open a dedicated discord server if the majority wishes so.

✅ Character creation. Use the NBA Sourcebook – should you lack it, I will provide a quick primer of the rules and copious help during character creation. The game is set in Europe (mostly Milan, in Northern Italy) in 2022, we will collaborate in character creation so that the PCs being somewhat familiar with each other.

✅ How to Apply. Post a character concept here in this thread: just a nationality, a former employer (real world military, intelligence agencies, large private contractors, infamous criminal groups…), one or two specialties (forensics, assassination, hacking, counter-intelligence, forgery,...) and a couple of lines about morality and personality.

✅ Welcome Marginalized Groups. This game is not welcoming AT ALL to vampires. Anyone else is very much welcome regardless of race, class, sex, gender or romantic preferences.

✅ What to expect from me as a GM. I enjoy roleplaying and narrative games. I will play fast and loose with the rules, ignore all the myriad of addition that NBA makes to basic GUMSHOE, and focus on personal moments. I’m not an avid image collector but I will try to add some pictures here and there when the post calls for it.