[OOC] The Autarkis

A warm-blooded welcome to everyone! Thanks for coming together to play this game! My Discord, for the casual chats.

Welcome welcome! And we'll give everyone a chance to join up before we start any proper discussions.

Looks like everyone's in, welcome again!

I figure we need a moment to wrap our heads around V5 options and pecularities, so browse through and ask questions if you're not sure if something is available. I'm generally keen on allowing everything if it makes sense to whatever you're conceptualising.

I do have a question though that you can think about whilst you do chargen, since we're intending to co-construct some of the world. Where would you like your city? I need a ballpark, North America, Europe or Asia, or 'surprise me'?

Heh that's a different game pitch altogether! Either that, or the kuei-jin are the antagonists, but if so we might just as well play V20 instead ;)

Thanks, I believe everyone's replied on this. 4.5 votes for surprise/any, 0.5 for North America, 1 for Europe, (and -1 for Asia in jest!).

Gimme the evening, announcement tomorrow, and you can continue to think character concept around this city!

MaJunior's comment left a sticky in my head, and Emberskyes' point about an older city resonated as well. May I propose -

Hong Kong!

There's well established lore on it (it's got its own excellent book from years ago).

Key features to consider for chargen:
- there's no prince at this point, only primogen
- it's cosmopolitan enough to encompass characters of any descent, you don't have to make an asian character. The former prince certainly wasn't.
- your sires will have lived through the British handover to China
- or your sires might have moved to HK to get away from the major vampire political conflicts in US and Europe (5e advances the plot for the Camarilla Anarch conflicts, the slight retreat of the Sabbat, and the rise of the Second Inquisition) and living in a place without a prince allows for that, also explains why they were allow to sire.
- in lore terms, something may have happened between Kindred and kuei-jin in the recent past, but we're not delving into that

You can choose to ignore some of the bullets above of course, and just let things play out. I will be happy to describe things as they unfold. So your character can still make sense as you create it without worrying too much about history.

That's an excellent education!

No chop-socky vamps!! :p

Under the Linguistics merit, everyone gets their birth language, and the dominant setting language, both in perfect fluency. For Hong Kong, the setting languages are English and Cantonese, so that takes care of both, or if your character isn't of English nor Cantonese speaking descent, you'll still get one of them. (And go ahead and rationalise that, eg if you don't have Cantonese, it's probably because you haven't been here that long, etc)

Also means it's perfect timing for me to craft our starter posts! Thanks everyone for putting together a solid concept, can't wait to see them in action.

Some reminders: you know what you're getting into with VtM, so I haven't been as considerately circumspect as I often would be to ask about lines and veils, no-go areas, etc. I am expecting we're okay with darker themes and descriptions, but please raise flags anytime if we're going somewhere not all of us are comfortable with, either in thread, or direct message.

Other expectations: as you know, this game intends to give V5 a run for its money, so it's okay to like some of its changes and dislike others. I intend to trial the newer mechanics to see if they hold up, and will occasionally nudge us to consider them (loresheets anyone?). There will be zero 'dungeoncrawl', and as much 'social' development as you can put up with, and combat will not typically be the ultimate solution to everything.

Let me hear your expectations for this game too, if any!

Yeah there won't be a Hong Kong specific one, so we'll custom it once you see something you like and we can collaboratively create some narrative behind that.

Am here for social mechanics! And yeah, let’s kick the tires on the new mechanics in general, like Hunger. Combat is mostly boring in Vampire games imho, but I’d be willing to try it once, to see if it’s different.

As for lines/limits, I’d like to keep the sexual violence and child abuse to a minimum. But otherwise bring on the darkness

Thanks, clear line that, and that aligns with what I prefer as well.

I've got everyone's character sheet in! Which means we can get started!

You can still be making final adds and tweaks along the way, that's fine.

Hooray!

Thanks for the patience everyone! I did take longer than usual to mull over what a good start point might be. You all have your individual threads to start with, and these threads double up as session 0s so that we can work out any bits of detail there which might be missing or need filling.

Stalker05 says he'll be a bit held up this week, so I'll wait for a bit more background from him before I flesh out a good intro for the character.

Also, we all start a game with a die roll! Everyone better get used to the idea of Rouse checks, that's the currency of the system.

Let's get to the thick of it!

So, quick one on Rouse checks:

Everytime you wake, you'll need one to see if your Hunger rises. I've assumed everyone slept in the day and woke as night fell, so that's the first roll I asked for.

Next, to have some semblance to humans, you need Blush of Life. This lasts for one night, makes you look like you have some colour on your skin and life to your eyes etc, and in this smartphone era, enables you to swipe touchscreens. (I know there are styluses for that, but let's bear with the fiction for a while more).

Any other Rouse checks have to do with use of disciplines. We'll come to that.

Hey everyone, apologies for the slow down. The slight GP lag coincided with my own off timings. New posts coming up, together with our last addition to the coterie so that things can end up connecting. Thanks for your patience!

A note on starting Hunger. While it makes sense for newly rolled up PCs to start with a Hunger reset, the rules have it that the only way to get to 0 is to have imbibed a mortal to death.

So what I suggest is, you all start at Hunger 1, unless you feel in your backstory that you've definitely killed someone recently through blood drain, then set it to Hunger 0. Edit: If you have Prey Exclusion of some sort, let's take that as indicative that you've been trying your best to draw the line somewhere, ie, perhaps you haven't killed, yet. And so you start at Hunger 1.

After which, don't forget to adjust for these starting Rouse checks.

Mechanically, Hunger gives Hunger dice, which affects your die rolls by making them riskier in having the beast side of you come out more.

(And as mentioned before, V5 doesn't do blood pools like previous editions, there's no need to drink up to fuel your powers.) Think of the tension as, the more you do vampy things, the more vampy you're likely to behave.

I'll talk about Resonance next.

And thanks for the patience! This week was a bit of a gap, though I'm okay with a slow build of individual characterisation for these starting posts. And I've got Stalker05's PC up and running too, so that's all six of you heading for a collision course somewhere down the line!

No worries, I got you!

New posts incoming; when it's group posts I typically do wait for everyone or almost everyone to get a word in first. For individual threads I can actually go faster for those who reply first, but I also will regulate so no one is too far ahead or behind.

Quick instruction on your Hunger die. Short of my trying to write up a small code to indicate which dice are the Hunger dice (I think that might be fussy because the number of Hunger dice may vary from roll to roll), for ease of rolling, let's count from right to left which are the Hunger dice rolled.

Eg, if you're rolling say 8d10, and your current Hunger is 2, in a roll of (4, 6, 1, 10, 3, 5, 5, 7), the last two are the Hunger dice.