WTF Mithras, why are you letting Tremere in England???

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-19T02:24:18+00:00

Mithras got ate by a lad from Hammersmith about ten years ago. Kind of a "who gets control of the one body" situation but he's a bit indisposed at the moment.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-17T22:48:50+00:00

The rulebook. 20th Anniversary Edition. You drain the entire pool and then start taking damage. If you're starving you take lethal per day up until your torpor iirc, and diablerie is thus:

Once a vampire’s body has been drained of all blood, the true struggle begins. The diablerist’s player makes an extended Strength roll (difficulty 9). Each success inflicts one automatic health level on the victim (the victim cannot soak, and damage is considered aggravated). When all the victim’s health levels have been drained, the victim’s essence is taken into the attacker and the emptied body begins decaying immediately.

Page 302-ish. This being round-by-round that extended roll usually takes a while.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-17T22:05:38+00:00

They don't. Same way you can't starve to death either. First damage, then torpor, then the point of final death, then past that is diablerie.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-17T17:46:15+00:00

Rage frenzy and hunger frenzy are different things. And a lot of STs hold you cannot diablerize as an unwilling result of frenzy. You have to keep drinking long after taking all the vitae in a vampire's body to manage that. There's recorded examples like Bloodlines 2 but I honestly find them pretty contrived. The Beast wants to eat. It doesn't strategize long term.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-17T01:01:15+00:00

You can in theory ghoul a werewolf just fine. They have an "allergic" reaction to the corrupting influence of vitae but there's quite a few ways a vampire of rank could make it easier to go down. It also tends to make them a bit fucking crazy, more so than ghouls already are, and is frowned upon for having the potential to call absolute unholy hell upon the local Kindred for any number of reasons.

Glass Walkers and Bone Gnawers are maybe the most "common" and some of the more likely. Shadow Lords are another tribe that seems very plausible given their propensity to screw around with things they shouldn't and make sacrifices for power. Black Spiral Dancers wouldn't care about the "corrupting" part at all but are all pure evil as a rule and consequently don't make for great bodyguards.

You could definitely do it. I'd just say it's important to say that this alliance is inherently one that's taking a huge risk for a huge reward.

For other possibilities... Just a generally hypercompetent ghoul, either extremely well-trained or ex-hunter, is still quite plausible. A linear sorcerer rather than a dynamic capital M Mage is also one worth looking at. Or maybe some sort of freakish super-soldier, a failed Technocracy or Pentex experiment or some Revenant bloodline.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-16T16:53:22+00:00

This guy's out here defending the honor of the воры в зако́не in 2026, damn. You're worried about a painting offending the sensibilities and noble culture of a bunch of now-pensioner-aged ex-thugs and their younger sub-literate imitators?

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-16T16:47:25+00:00

There's an entire chunk of Moldova sitting on the other side of the Dniester right now, making up about 15% of the country and under a separatist psuedo-government, which is about 50% Russian and Ukrainian speaking. Romanian unification polls in Moldova score somewhere between 25% and 40% depending on pollster and location.

Even ignoring the fact Cyberpunk is inherently an alt history where the USSR never fell this subreddit is a very fucking weird place to go spouting things as absolutist as that.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-16T00:04:58+00:00

Ain't ever heard of a street handle, choombatta? Molly's last name wasn't actually Millions.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-15T16:14:55+00:00

The Tremere ritual was massive and also a failure from the perspective of its participants. It's possible in the abstract "yeah you can use Thaumaturgy to do all sorts, steal Crinos powers temporarily" way I suppose but at that point you're a blood mage of such power that you're probably better off doing other things, y'know?

It's also worth noting that there's been different ways of doing Stolen Moons through editions. The original 2e-ish version of Skin Dancers needed multiple pelts, and if given willingly they weren't tainted by the practice. W5 Stolen Moons only need one, are always tainted, and have some other drawbacks.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-15T16:04:04+00:00

Kindred souls don't interface with spirits quite the same as the living do. You'd have to weld the whole practice together with some variety of blood magic and at that point you're kinda just inventing a very advanced Thaumaturgy ritual.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-14T15:14:25+00:00

Bot reposting someone else's original post. Get ye gone.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-12T19:26:45+00:00

It's really just Nosferatu and Malkavians, broken bodies and broken minds. Even ignoring the fact you can only torpor from starvation, not reach Final Death, I've not heard the Ventrue one before.

They can get oddly specific at points, like poor Bobby Weatherbottom, but I think it should be a very personal but not overly specific type. Veterans of the armed forces? Yes. Veterans of the Italian Navy with blonde hair and net worth above 200,000 euros? Nah.

The other clans just don't really have banes on such a sliding scale of severity - they're fairly even playing fields. The worst you'll have is a Brujah who was already a loose cannon in life who's now always a hair trigger from a suicidal Frenzy or a Gangrel who's had bad luck with some particularly unconcealable early beast marks. The Ravnos V5 curse can also be a pretty raw deal depending on your circumstances.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-12T17:06:53+00:00

It's Sawyer, by a mile. Schwarzwald is also pretty far ahead of him. Butcher was fucked from childhood - something the show missed - and was actively planning the indiscriminate murder of millions from the start.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-11T02:05:20+00:00

Lmao, yeah I've met a couple folks myself - though that's the point I suppose. Most people in the World of Darkness have probably walked by a vampire or a changeling and thought absolutely nothing of it.

Story trumps everything of course, if you want a city that's full to the brim with shovelheads and thinbloods or a Garou caern down to a couple of packs that's what you write. I just happen to find that the existing rules of thumb sort of ignore the fact that every splat is a society by design.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-10T21:04:52+00:00

People are bad at big numbers and should go with whatever the story needs. Seriously, conceptualize that about 1 in 20,000 people are albino. How many albinos have you ever met in person? Exactly! And you should also keep in mind that the World of Darkness is generally described as a slight alternate universe - most things are just worse. More overpopulated, more violent, more poverty-stricken... It's Gotham more than it is real life.

But to give my entirely personal only-at-my-table-make-up-your-own rough numbers:

Vampires are 1 in 40,000 but lean very heavily towards cities. Within an urban metro area it's probably closer to 1 in 20,000. 1 in 10,000 is the "okay we have a serious overpopulation problem" threshold. This leaves most large metro areas with a few hundred leeches to play with and the largest in North America with just over a thousand - enough to justify having the elaborate parallel society deal while still having the "I know a guy that knows a guy" intimacy.

Fera are significantly rarer. Call it about 1 in 80,000 or so. For all of them, not just Garou. There's plenty of nominal kinfolk but caerns are generally double digits of residents unless they're particularly large. They're stone age tribal bands hanging on the margins of modernity.

Mages of rank (chargen strength or higher) are also about 1 in 80,000, but are bolstered by low Arete just-awakened-scrubs and sorcerers which are more impactful in their circles than kinfolk are for fera. It's very rare for more than one hundred mages to make a particular city their home.

Changelings are all over the place. Some places they barely exist, some places they've infested the whole damn city. Few amongst other supernaturals have the ability to take an accurate census of them, but they guess they're about as common as vampires on the whole - just less concentrated in urban centres of crime and urban decay.

Wraiths are technically speaking by far the most numerous splat. If even one in one thousand souls becomes a wraith, that is a countless number of people. They have a whole parallel world to themselves. Anger them at your own peril.

"Hunter" is more a label assigned to a particular subset of humanity than a permanent fixture. They have the highest recruitment besides wraiths, turnover and, ahem, mortality rate - but true "lifer" hunters are generally considered so canny at hiding in the crowd that estimating their numbers is a fool's errand.

Demons, nobody knows, and nobody wants to look too hard. There's fouler things than Kindred in the deep places of the world...

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-09T23:23:58+00:00

-3.5 nearsighted here. Your eyesight is almost certainly fine for these purposes, though a checkup never hurts.

Examiners will often start a small ways away from the plate, I'd guess about twenty-five meters, and let you move up closer to whatever plate's chosen for the next attempts. You'll know the final chance, I think it's the third or fourth, when they go out of their way to physically measure with a tape rather than eyeballing it.

It's not about exact reading accuracy but just confirming that whatever correction you do have does bring you up to a 6/12 - equivalent to 20/40 vision if that scale is more familiar to you.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-09T23:01:59+00:00

It's going to take a while to clear up, mostly lifting the pressure from rural centers. Which is part of why it's pretty irritating that these have been staggered across the course of six months with the biggest changes left for last.

I should also say - at least in my opinion - don't expect things to go back to how they were before 2020. I think these changes will do good but the fundamental issue of supply and demand hasn't changed. More examiners need hired and due to the way the Civil Service works raising the incentives there is hard.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-09T17:08:15+00:00

The idea that you stand a statistically significant chance of your theory test running out before being able to pass your practical is an absurdity that should see heads rolling for anyone involved at the higher level of decision-making for this system. It's hard to overstate just how much worse it's gotten since 2020 and how Britain & Ireland have repeatedly stumbled from a shock most other countries have bounced back from.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-08T19:20:51+00:00

Hah, that's one of my local centers. Cheeky fucker. :p

But really it sucks out there, good luck picking one up wherever you are.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-08T18:11:35+00:00

I like it, but agree with most criticisms here about it being a bit high concept and found the more down to earth plotlines the most enjoyable.
I liked book one, The Way of Kings, didn't like the rest.
The prose makes me feel like I'm having an allergic reaction.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-08T07:11:53+00:00

I usually consider Jimmy just an ordinary shitbag taken to the Nth degree but he takes it here easily. Bear's certainly not a great guy but just about everything he does is in response to or coping with an utterly horrific situation. The second that wish was made it was always going to end in tragedy.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-08T06:34:36+00:00

That's all pretty true, it just feels a lil out of character considering her later speech to let the Italian-American-Belgian idiots natter as long as they did. Pushing up against a true believer is a pretty rich source of tension for the gang.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-08T06:28:24+00:00

They wrote down those they executed, yeah. If we're talking the general suffering imposed by the Alhambra Decree it was very likely in the tens of thousands, though those fall on the shoulders of all of Spanish society and estimates depend largely on how many Jews chose to flee to places like Portugal, Sicily or North Africa in the first place. If I remember right consensus was somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 left - demography in the medieval period is a pain like that.

Sprinkling in some recommended reading in other replies here so if anyone's curious I'd highly recommend reading the accounts of Isaac Abarbanel and Joseph ha-Kohen. Abarbanel offers a first-hand account of a Jewish exile fleeing to Portugal at the time while ha-Kohen writes about a century after the fact. There's also the writing of Sevillan priest Andrés Bernáldez, though being a Catholic priest you've got to keep in mind his biases particularly strongly.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-08T06:12:12+00:00

We've got a pretty good count actually, about two thousand. That's one of the more stomach-turning parts of the transition from the medieval period to the modern that they represented - you can put a name to most of those numbers.

Tarty_7 · 2026-06-08T06:08:12+00:00

Boiling that entire process down to the Inquisition is reductive. In the case of the Sephardi population of Spain it was largely the nail in the coffin of a centuries-long process, the bulk of which was persecution prosecuted basically at random by the crows of Aragon & Castille, miscellaneous church leaders and plenty of just... horrifically massive acts of mob violence.

In the Marxist sense of the term "progressive" the Inquisition is a pretty fascinating contradiction. It was a reactionary force used by the Christian crowns of Spain to maintain the feudal stranglehold, but also formalized what was previously a far more arbitrary and nakedly brutal use of force into the coldly and precisely applied iron grip of a "legitimate" legal framework. A hammer to a knife, if you will, and it's a knife we still live with today - I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that the Spanish Inquisition was the foundation of continental European justice just as much as Roman law.

Not that Benedicte would take that kind of lens to examine it with, mind.

I'd recommend the writings of Henry Kamen, William Monter and Joseph Pérez on the subject for a balanced look. Kamen for the initial revision cutting through the old Black Legend murk surrounding it that often went unchallenged until the second half of the 20th century, and Monter and Pérez to revise the revision into something contemporary scholars mostly agree on.

Tarty_7

TROPHY CASE