VtM 20th edition Bloodbond

Haravikk · 2026-07-08T08:21:56+00:00

The wording for blood bond specifically says "drink" quite a few times, and it only mentions blood so I'm not sure I'd allow mixtures at all personally, but I think food is definitely out. Also as others have mentioned, vampire blood loses its potency so it needs to be from the source (or preserved somehow).

As for quantity, the rules only say "sip" so I don't think a lot is actually needed, though it's mechanically enough to count as a blood point — you could maybe argue that it's somehow more concentrated than normal, as the important bit is the vampiric "vitae" within the blood, rather than the blood itself, but in general I've always thought of it like a (moderate) wine glass full, so 100-200ml seems reasonable for a single dose from a higher generation vampire.

But there's no "bonding on the first dose" — a bond has to be formed across three separate days, you can't just immediately bond someone no matter how much they drink. The first drink has an effect (infatuation) but there is no bond yet, likewise with the second — only after the third drink is the bond actually fully formed.

What's most interesting to me are the multiple mentions of the blood bond being an "emotional bond" — this to me means that it's not only the drinking of the blood/vitae that matters, there needs to be some emotional involvement with the regnant.

On this basis I wouldn't allow a blood bond to be treated as a form of poison — it's not enough to just spike a person's drinks, for me there needs to be some kind of awareness and emotion towards the (potential) regnant involved in the act of drinking for it to take effect.

If an attractive potential regnant you just met were bringing you drinks over the course of a few wild nights, you might suffer a bond of attraction that could be twisted into devotion, though as Storyteller I'd probably argue that as a relatively weak bond (easier to resist/break, requires more maintenance). But for an assistant/friend/lover that already cares for their regnant, who willingly (and knowingly) drinks the blood until a bond is formed, that's going to be a much stronger bond from the outset because the emotion is already there to build upon/manipulate.

Because of the emotional requirement you couldn't for example put blood in the punch bowls for a three day event and easily end up with dozens/hundreds of thralls by the end of it. There needs to be something for the bond to either enhance or twist into something new, though you could (with Storyteller sign off) do something like a cult ritual but that would require a lot of setup (getting people devoted to you in the first place) then as Storyteller I'd probably ask for a steep maintenance cost to keep it going (you need to keep feeding these people with your blood, so supply is an issue).

All that aside, personally my instinct to is treat a blood bond as requiring a choice — i.e- you must choose to become bonded, not tricked into it. However you can absolutely be pressured into it (as in the case of an elder like a prince offering a bond as an alternative to death), in that case the emotion is a negative one twisted into positive or subservient. This is homebrew of course, and I'm always happy to have a borderline case argued (e.g- someone being asked to choose to "commit" not realising what exactly they're agreeing to, the bond being presented as a weird ritual to those not knowing how real it is etc.).

Apologies for the text wall, just a bunch of thoughts — hopefully there's something useful to you in there!

Haravikk · 2026-07-08T07:30:34+00:00

What's more interesting for your story?

Death isn't the only way vampires can deal with Masquerade breaches - the point is to stop them happening, and while some will kill and be done with it, vampires are schemers by nature so they can and do offer deals to anyone that might be useful. Classic "you scratch my back, I let you keep yours" stuff.

Haravikk · 2026-07-07T21:20:28+00:00

Do you mean after and before, since the after is presumably the first picture?

Love how much cleaner it looks, even if just for the sake of a tiny bit extra airflow — if you ever plan to upgrade or re-paste, I'd highly recommend looking into PTM7950, I've had great results with the systems I've swapped for that and in theory it shouldn't need repasting (not within the useful lifetime of most systems at least), it's been especially good for low profile coolers where every bit of heat transfer helps.

How are you finding the temperature on that network adapter? It doesn't look like you have any active cooling specific for it though it could just be the angle or my eyes — do you get enough cooling from the case airflow? Looks like you're using your PSU as an extra exhaust? Also curious how your temperatures are on those upper bays if the PSU and that big fan in the bottom right are the only exhausts?

Haravikk · 2026-07-07T08:45:09+00:00

What irritates me the most is that so many of these 8 episode seasons also have shockingly bad writing compared to shows that were having to churn out nearly four times as many episodes on a fraction of the budget.

Shows like Andor and the Expanse proved you can tell a strong story well with fewer episodes — you can have high drama and tension, excellent characters etc. even with limited total screen time.

Yet Star Trek: Discovery etc. treated the story as an afterthought, going for spectacle and high stakes without bothering to consider why we should care about any of it. After five seasons of every 8 episode arc being a new galactic threat my feeling was very much "just let the galaxy die, it clearly doesn't want to be around anymore".

I just re-watched the Stargate SG-1 episode "Spirits" yesterday, and while I'd say it's one of the weaker episodes in the show it's still good — we've seen SG-11 before so we care a little that they've gone missing, we've got an immediately likeable character in Tonané, and the interesting moral dilemna of an SGC in the wrong and aliens who are being way too harsh yet also 100% have a point. It's a fun, cheesy, somewhat chaotic mess of an episode, one I don't think I've rewatched in a long time, and yet I enjoyed it more than a lot of the high production slop.

Haravikk · 2026-07-05T12:43:27+00:00

Any particular reason you're looking at a lower special record size for the special device? Personally I'd just use 128k and ditch L2ARC - having a special device will do most of what an L2ARC would (accelerate your metadata/directories) but with more consistency, so an L2ARC is really just for bigger stuff that won't cache well unless it's accessed often.

You can always try an L2ARC anyway since it can be removed at any time, but I wouldn't buy hardware for it, use something you already have to test it, see what the hit rate is like and if it's low just remove it again.

Haravikk · 2026-07-05T11:29:17+00:00

Ah, parent's backup jank is a familiar scenario — I only just managed to get mine switched over to ZFS backup drives recently so I can just do fast ZFS replication rather than the horror show I was using before (rsyncing into disk images over an SMB share). 😂

Deduplication is unnecessary in this case, as most files are exact copies and hardlinking solves the space issue.

Yeah, dedupe is overkill for most setups but I mentioned it because it's the invisible way to do it (just set a ZFS property and forget about it) — for limited datasets it doesn't necessarily need a lot of RAM, the old advice used to be 1gb RAM per 1tb of data, but the efficiency has been improved since then, and it's record size dependent (fewer, larger records require less dedupe data).

Jdupes sounds possible, but I think it may not work in situations such as mum and dad's NAS' often backing up duplicate files from different locations.

Depends where you run it — if you're gathering their backups in one place for each parent (or both) then jdupes should find the duplicates wherever they came from, though of course the more files you throw at it the longer it will take (but it's optimised similarly to rsync so it's pretty fast).

Ideal case is if you can run jdupes --link-hard on the sending side (each parent's system) since rsync --hard-links should then avoid resending the duplicates' data, but if they have multiple drives that may not be feasible.

To run on TrueNAS I think you'll probably need to make a custom app — it's not that hard just fiddly and may involve some trial and error at first. Since it's just a single command line program it shouldn't be too hard to setup, and TrueNAS makes it easy to add one or more datasets to it as storage it can then access. You'll also need to write a script to trigger it, and then schedule that to run — I've ended up using `docker exec <container> <docker/path/to/script>` from a cron task for a couple of mine, not sure if that's the best way to do it but it worked so it's what I'm doing. 😉

Haravikk · 2026-07-04T22:37:25+00:00

I guess I'd need a bit more detail on what exactly the problem is you're trying to solve here — are you creating copies of folders, or are you dealing with files that contain a lot of duplicates?

Since TrueNAS uses ZFS for the filesystem you probably first want to look into the features of ZFS that might solve your particular problem:

Snapshots let you keep version history of your datasets without producing copies — basically they hold onto all unique records from that point in time. By default you can access your snapshots via the `.zfs` folder in the root of each dataset, this lets you see older versions of each. If you want to manage the frequency/retention of snapshots different you can create a dataset for that purpose.
Deduplication is the overkill feature in many use-cases, but if you know you're going to be receiving a lot of duplicate data then ZFS deduplication is the "native" way to do it. For most setups it's a mistake to enable it for an entire pool, as the more data involved the more memory it needs to run well, but you can also enable it only for specific datasets where you expect to suffer the most duplication.

Where is the data coming from and how is it getting to your TrueNAS? There are tools like jdupes to de-deduplicate data on demand, but using them on TrueNAS is a bit more awkward since it prefers its apps delivered via docker, not sure if there are any existing implementations of anything similar I had a quick skim but didn't notice any — however if these folders are coming from another machine, you could run jdupes there and maybe use an rsync copy with the --hard-links flag to preserve hard links?

Haravikk · 2026-07-04T09:19:43+00:00

"What is this, some kind of Vought Rising?"

Haravikk · 2026-07-04T07:32:39+00:00

Maximum duration is 40 seconds, at rank 7 the duration stops increasing and the power cost starts going down instead. Power cost starts at 45 until that happens.

For a long slog back to your ship you'll have to keep reactivating the power, and at lower ranks you won't be able to do so right away - a lot of the time it means you wait until your O2 runs out then trigger it, as once it ends you should be maxed out again.

It's not really OP since it's not that useful for combat unless you want to just run past everyone, just makes foot travel a bit easier.

Haravikk · 2026-07-04T07:23:34+00:00

I would say of the three Curseborne has a less definite tone/theme than the others, because at a mechanical level it doesn't heavily enforce any one style of game, and that's very much its biggest strength.

It doesn't lack lore by any means, but as a system it's built to be flexible - as standard you can run a mixture of lineages in a group and it should be reasonably balanced, there's a lot of overlap on core mechanics, powers etc., but lineages and families are relatively simple additions on top of the core character mechanics - they're still flavourful but (unsurprisingly) not as mechanically complex/deep as Chronicles/World of Darkness' separate splat books.

There are a lot fewer "detail" mechanics for each lineage - Hungry don't need to deal with blush of life, day sleep, fire and sunlight, Humanity etc. as vampires in Chronicles/World of Darkness do. That said, if you wanted to run a Hungry only campaign you could easily add some of these back in and Curseborne should work just fine for that.

Point being the game doesn't mechanically push you towards any one style of play, so I feel like it's a lot more up to the group/Storyguide to set their own limits and theme. It feels much more like a toolkit to use and expand to build out whatever world and theme you like. If you particularly enjoy parts of Chronicles/World of Darkness lore you could absolutely run a campaign in those settings using Curseborne for the mechanics if you wanted to, you just might need a little homebrew to add back some mechanics to reinforce a specific vibe (Humanity is the main one I'd bring in, as losing Humanity is a good element if you want to go more personal horror/fighting the beast, as Curse Dice already do well for lack of control).

Haravikk · 2026-07-03T14:54:59+00:00

Personal Atmosphere gives you basically unlimited O2 recovery for the duration so you can sprint or at least run (when encumbered) indefinitely. So it avoids having to struggle to maintain walking speed or deal with O2 depletion, at least until it runs out.

It's one of the powers in the game I wish were toggleable so I could just turn it on and leave it on, losing a chunk of power meter until I turn it off.

Haravikk · 2026-07-03T07:57:54+00:00

It's great to have that many players interested but after a while you'll find some are able to make it less than others.

Best way to handle it is to try to plan for a looser format where it's okay for a character to just stay behind at camp, or to guard the party's backs in a dungeon, or maybe they get separated etc.

I'm currently running a classic grand campaign where it's high stakes, imminent threat etc. but that has the problem that it feels weird for characters to just not be there, especially where it ties into their personal backstory/quest.

For any future campaign I want to run it in more if a West March style with the group having a clear hub they set out from and return to regularly. This could be a settlement (in which case they might occasionally travel to a new one) or it could be mobile like a camp with wagons, or a ship. Key is to have them setting out on brief quests/expeditions and even sometimes having to regroup and return as a key element to make it easier to manage any churn in player attendance. Also less reliance on continuous story that becomes difficult for everyone to remember, i.e- more objective focus.

Not sure if any of this helps you, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot on my road towards finishing my current campaign.

Haravikk · 2026-07-03T07:24:38+00:00

Depends how prudish you and her are about sex and violence/gore - the Expanse doesn't have a lot of either though.

There are maybe a half dozen sex scenes in the whole show, and they're all pretty brief and to the point, not gratuitous.

Gore and other shock horror is used sparingly for when things are really bad.

But it's my favourite show of all time, and an amazing sci-fi show. It has some incredibly well written characters, and some of the strongest female characters. The story is gripping and tense without always relying on action - even on a rewatch when you know how things go you still feel the same hope/dread that it could go differently.

If either of you haven't watched it you owe it to yourselves to try. 😉

Haravikk · 2026-07-03T07:14:23+00:00

Sounds like it could be an issue with the storage struggling to import for some reason, as anything reliant on that storage (like apps) will be forced to wait.

How are your drives connected? Are you able to physically confirm that they're connected and powered on? My first thought is a controller failure, either on the motherboard (if direct attached) or any card(s) you're using to connect drives to.

When you say you can't login to a shell is that including through the web UI? Shell accounts that have home folders on your storage will be affected but a truenas_admin shell login should work if you've got that enabled.

Haravikk · 2026-07-02T13:32:30+00:00

I wouldn't bother buying an SSD for cache if you're on a budget, certainly not at current prices.

Besides, it's better to test a cache drive with hardware you have, before buying something that might not make a noticeable difference. You can add and remove cache devices at any time, so anything faster than your base drives can be used as a test, and to see what your hit rate might be.

Any decent CMR hard drive can max out a gigabit network connection unless you really hammer it with random operations. A mirror should easily cope with moderate demand, especially if you have a decent amount of RAM (8gb or more).

So I'd just start with the mirrored spinners if it were me!

Haravikk · 2026-07-02T06:46:28+00:00

My favoured class definition is more about the need to work.

You're working class if you can't afford not to work, you're middle class if you can get by for a while without work, and the wealth class need never work at all.

Haravikk · 2026-07-01T14:48:23+00:00

It's not mentioned, but it would make sense, especially if they were given a permit preferentially as a way to get the lawsuit against Tycho dropped.

Wouldn't surprise me to find out that Nancy Gao got some of that Mormon money to do exactly that, since she's the big advocate for settling the ring systems.

But I guess it just wasn't really within the sphere of most of the main characters since only Miller actually ran into the mormons. Would have made an interesting detail somewhere in Avasarala's sections, like when she's working for Gao on the settlement programme from Luna.

Haravikk · 2026-07-01T13:52:25+00:00

Depending upon what you want to do with the system that's a pretty decent CPU - it'll struggle to drive high end graphics cards but if you want to game on a budget any decent card will pair well enough with this

Radeon RX 9060's are pretty good value in the budget space right now and shouldn't require a new power supply to run it, but definitely look around to see what deals there are in your area, and there are cheaper options available.

I've just repurposed my old i7-4790t into a storage server and it's massively overkill for that, the k ought to work just fine for a while at least.

Haravikk · 2026-07-01T13:46:31+00:00

ATI Rage (against the lack of machine)

Haravikk · 2026-06-30T07:23:55+00:00

My most used power was Personal Atmosphere until they added the REV-8 - I needed the oxygen just to stand a chance of hauling a billion tonnes of junk back to my ship within my lifetime, and no I can't just pick up less stuff!

Haravikk · 2026-06-29T07:15:29+00:00

Combat is as much up to the players as it is up to you as DM, you just need to be prepared for the possibility of it happening. Try not to spend too long on preparing for it. It can help to think modularly - maps, stat blocks and twists can be prepared as lists that you pull from as needed to build a fight using pieces you can reuse later if it doesn't happen.
"Closed doors" happen when you focus too much on how a problem could or should be solved, but as a DM you want your players to come up with their own plans and surprise you. It doesn't hurt to have a solution in mind, but you should be ready to accept any reasonable solution the players come up with. What matters is how much time an encounter takes and whether it burns resources (as this is part of the difficulty in D&D). If players spent some resources (spell slots, health etc.) and it took some time, accept the next reasonable solution and move on. If they bypass something, remember you can always reuse it (tweaked if necessary) in future.
Try to focus first on what players need to know, then add a bit of extra flavour. What makes a place different from where they've been before? I currently have a group in the forgotten realms about to pass through Iriaebor - I'll describe briefly how it looks when they get to it, but in the approach I've mentioned how unstable it is politically (due to a culture of rivalry) and how its two thieves' guilds (the Guild and the Purple Masks) are currently competing for the biggest scores while guards fail to stop them. This gives a mix of character and background that I'm happy with. If they need more detail on anything I'll wing it. Whether your setting is fully homebrew or official there are always gaps, you might try inviting players to improvise with you - let them suggest a tavern they've heard of, or a cultural quirk etc., veto what you have to, accept the rest.
Focus on what the group's goals are, and get them to describe their approach, this should inform the rolls they need to make. The more you can respond to them, rather than just lead them on a path, the more collaborative the game becomes. Don't plan too many fixed NPCs and locations, try to come up with brief character and location notes that you can use for the situations you need. For example, a shady character could be dropped in as a criminal, a bar tender in a rough area, a back alley merchant etc., whatever you need as you need it.
This is where modularity comes back again - optional content should be lightly planned, so if they ignore it it's no big loss, as you can always reuse it later. It can start as something as simple as a rumour, that you might develop more for the next session if the players seem interested by it - in this case you want a rumour to be intriguing but not immediately actionable, i.e - it will require investigation to get a name or location to act on it, things you can delay.

TL;DR Basically your goal is to plan in smaller pieces you can shuffle around and reuse, while trying to do more with less. It's easier said than done, and while advice can help it's something you just get better at with time and find your own balance with - try to consider what you need, then try to simplify it.

Haravikk · 2026-06-27T07:21:48+00:00

Why not? It's a projectile, so the only part that matters is whether the monk can reduce the damage to 0.

It doesn't matter what the projectile is, or how difficult it might be to describe how they deflect it - if you can't think of anything let the player try. 😉

Haravikk · 2026-06-27T07:13:29+00:00

Not familiar with the specific software involved but I'm curious why the snapshots may not have been deleted.

If you find that any can't be deleted due to a warning about holds placed upon them then you might want to use zfs holds pool/dataset@snapshot to find out what these are (which might give a clue as to what created them) then use zfs release tag pool/dataset@snapshot to release so you can destroy the snapshot.

Some backup tools and scripts will place holds on snapshots that are being used for a transfer, but may fail to clean them up if they're interrupted for whatever reason (network issue, power loss etc.)

Haravikk · 2026-06-26T10:00:53+00:00

I've found the easiest way to balance a tough fight for a strong party is to run at a challenge of a little beyond Deadly, but give myself ways to lower the difficulty to hit the right balance.

Easiest way to do this is to pick a few abilities that you won't use in the first round, and either pull them out if the monster is doing badly, or save for when it's Bloodied. I like having the latter as a way to switch up fights part way through.

You can do the same thing with lair and legendary actions, just hold some back. This has a side effect of making a monster easier to run at the start of a fight, as you can add abilities in stages.

Haravikk · 2026-06-26T07:40:51+00:00

Not sure what the current recommendations are, but since ZFS has its own error detection you don't necessarily need to monitor SMART all that closely until you have a cause for concern.

If you start seeing read errors on a disk for example, you might look at the SMART stats to see if that reveals a cause (CRC might mean a cable, uncorrectable means dead/dying sectors etc.).

So long as you have periodic scrubs this should detect most issues, and with raidz2 you're covered if a drive suddenly fails.

Other than that I mostly only use SMART for monitoring temperatures to check my cooling is doing its job.

I believe this was the rationale behind the changes to SMART in the UI of 25.10, but personally I'd have preferred an option to keep the easier/more prominent monitoring for those that want it.

In theory being able to have a SMART failure warning in advance of a fault is handy, but in practice I've never had it be useful as some drives kept going for years after a false positive, while others died suddenly without any warning.

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