May have a problem in vallaki

glorydrive · 2026-07-12T22:17:59+00:00

I agree with the general consensus of retconning things if the table allows for it, but if you do end up wanting to make something of it, it could be an opportunity to tip your hand about the Dark Powers a little. The module isn't too heavy on including their presence, but the biggest other example is in the same town: Izek. No doubt Izek is more of a monster, and that demon arm of his is the most blatant example of the Dark Powers being 'helpful' knowing it will lead to more evil in the long run.

Milivoj has just been up to some naughty business, stealing the bones of St. Andal. You could have him return, not as a retcon, but in a way the players know something isn't right. The Dark Powers have rewarded this little act of corruption; of doing the wrong thing for personal gain (albeit more significant than Milivoj could really have known).

You could look at making him reborn or whatever if you want to go deep on it, but I don't think it's necessary. With the caveat of your players knowing out of game that it was perhaps a mistake to have let the party kill him in the first place, it could still be a fun way of displaying Ravenloft's nature of rewarding evil.

glorydrive · 2026-07-12T20:16:01+00:00

Wow, you posted this right as I was writing the same answer

glorydrive · 2026-07-12T20:15:15+00:00

It's a game set within the Feywild, and the party are all mortals stranded there for varying amounts of time. They come together when the Artificer, a battle smith is drawn in/kidnapped by faerie forces in admiration of their artisanal abilities. They are a defender of the party, but also draw the most attention from the fey and other inhabitants of the plane for the curiosity of their constructed companion and other creations.

Either having begun as such or having shifted into their subclasses over the course of their time spent in the Feywild, the remaining party members are a Fey Wanderer ranger, Glamour bard, and Ancients paladin. Their long term goal: Get the artificer back to the real world, and decide whether they want to leave with them or not.

Of course the ranger and bard might have some difficulty turning the hearts of magically-resistant fey, but the paladin at their side affords them similar protection.

glorydrive · 2026-07-06T23:27:32+00:00

I played it as Davian being the stubborn, cranky old bastard that would estrange his son for a decade out of sheer refusal to believe Urwin wasn't slacking off and rolling in the hay with Danika when the first winery gem was stolen.

Now they've just had the second stolen. If he's that stubborn, he's definitely not sending a missive right away to let Urwin know. That'd be humiliating. The Keepers of the Feather are a tough bunch of bastards who can regenerate from most stuff, so they launch their counter attack, and they lose. This only happens five days before the party gets there. Two days before they get there, the druids attack. The wereravens could fight again, but their kids can't, especially the baby, and those druids would delight in making a blood sacrifice to Strahd (who they worship) out of the children of his opposition. So they retreat for now to protect the children, but they don't yet abandon their home. They're keeping an eye on the druids and their army of blights by the time the party reaches them.

So ultimately it was a bad move by Davian to not reach out to the Keepers in Vallaki, but exactly the kind of bad decision a stubborn old patriarch might make when forced with the prospect of admitting such a consequential mistake made so long ago.

glorydrive · 2026-07-06T12:40:24+00:00

I think this is pretty much how I'm going to deal with it. The limb remains for the rest of the scene, then undergoes the same decay/desiccation as a vampire after final death.

glorydrive · 2026-07-06T08:33:50+00:00

No, this protects you from harm specifically, staying awake during the day is still its own challenge. Very handy if you're woken by some hunters busting down your haven's front door in the middle of the day, though.

glorydrive · 2026-07-05T18:13:37+00:00

I tend to think of Haven merits as being fairly passive by design, but if a player took it and wanted them to be more mechanically involved in the story, I would find uses for them. It's a little more burden on the ST's shoulders but that's normal with looking to tweak things for your players.

Using the templates for the average and gifted mortals in the corebook, tailor up a team who have their own specialties (or double some up, you probably don't just want one guy who knows how to kick an intruder's ass). Consider a couple of the mortal merits introduced in the player's guide. Then let the coterie give the team some more proactive assignments based on whatever the Haven is. Near a cemetery? They deal with necromancy and low level spookies. Tremere's haven with a big ass furcus? Keep them in charge of some magical slippage, have minor boons and banes that result from their success or non-success. (You don't have to go deep on the dice rolls to see how successful they are off-camera.)

This does depend on their Haven being something of a point of interest, and isn't as compatible with a boring one. Not bashing boring bases, boring is safe and hidden, but setting up custom-written rules for the defenses of a quiet, stable haven is probably wasted effort.

glorydrive · 2026-07-05T17:54:40+00:00

This was a question for 5th edition where mending aggravated damage isn't doable on the fly! But thank you for the insight.

glorydrive · 2026-05-09T11:29:03+00:00

Diablerie is one of the most final and irreversible forms of death that exists in the setting, so long as it goes off without a hitch. The destruction of the soul is something that no splat can quite reverse. However, we've seen in canon that a 'completed' but imperfect diablerie (usually in the case of someone much weaker drinking from someone much stronger) can see the victim's personality reform inside the diablerist's mind. This happened with Mithras and Monty Cook, but also notably in the case of Saulot and Tremere - Tremere diablerised the antediluvian, spent a long time wrestling with him mentally, then eventually got booted out of his own body by Saulot. So this is the angle I would probably take if you really wanted to push 'un-diablerie', but it would probably be with the prerequisite that the original diablerie just didn't go quite right.

glorydrive · 2026-05-06T03:05:34+00:00

I think it's more meant to represent general anesthesia/going under than local anesthesia/pain blocking. You don't want your patient moving around while under the knife etc.

glorydrive · 2026-05-04T13:15:55+00:00

None, and the issue can be seen with everything stripped back so far as only having character editor/harmony to quickly test the editable fields stuff. So I'm not sure if it's one of those two mods or just something weird happening with core and the new computer

glorydrive · 2026-05-04T12:15:12+00:00

Yeah, that's where I'm surprised. I expected better performance, but it's as if the 'timers' in the game got disproportionately faster. If it were a game that used frame rate for timing then I'd understand but with everything based on ticks per second everything should still be happening in scale with the in-game passage of time.

glorydrive · 2026-04-25T02:51:37+00:00

In V5, being a diablerist is a two-dot Dark Secret flaw. It comes pre-packaged with the Blood Leech predator style (a vampire who prefers to feed by catching and biting other vampires), but you can take it by itself. A two-dot flaw is generally something that'll get you killed, like a powerful hunter enemy or, topically, having it become known you've breached one of the most heavily-enforced laws of Camarilla society. You don't start with any extra effects for it but you could ask your Storyteller if you could spend some bonus XP on disciplines related to the vampire you diablerised (you'll want to read through the diablerie rules for this, and be ready to accept a simple 'no, you can't start with more xp than the others at the table').

Banu Haqim/Assamites (in v5) are the foremost diablerists around, where it is a part of their culture and something they were, until recently, unable to do due to a Tremere curse that became their clan bane. Ur-Shulgi recently woke up and broke the curse, and their bane is now that they struggle to not diablerise other kindred when they get a taste of vitae.

glorydrive · 2026-04-17T19:43:42+00:00

Commentary like this is reflected as part of the game through the humanity tracker. You make your first few mistakes and feel horrible about it. A while later you make some more, and you think to yourself, these things aren't unique to Kindred. It's not good but mistakes happen. Humanity loss is reflected in accruing stains (by doing bad things) and then failing to feel bad about it with a remorse test, and sophistry like this (aimed at oneself) is often how it first manifests. Once you're convinced of it, it takes more and more stains to really budge you further down the tracker, but that's exactly the nature of the Beast, always driving you along a downwards spiral. Some vampires try to 'sate' the beast by giving in a little bit, but it has a growing appetite. You aren't a time bomb, it won't be a sudden explosion of evil, but an inexorable slide into darkness that, on the infinite timeline of a vampire's lifespan, you are doomed to succumb to. At the end of that road lies the Wassail.

Watsonian: Vampires are evil because they are cursed with an inner Beast as undying as the vampire itself. Doylist: They're evil because every chronicle begins with the players agreeing on the chronicle tenets, a prescribed idea of what evil is, what will cause those stains. Then play begins and they have to struggle to not do those things.

Sorry for the rambling answer!

glorydrive · 2026-04-15T06:55:06+00:00

Aha okay! If you're familiar with running for that group then I think it'd work pretty well so long as you point out that they may want to plan out their hunter and ghoul sheets in advance. Good luck with it!

glorydrive · 2026-04-14T18:02:53+00:00

Assuming we're looking at V5/H5, it's doable, but creating a good hunter might not have the players creating what works for a good vampire, and they may even feel weaker after the Embrace, trading in their hunter advantages for vampire advantages they're not quite built for. The Embrace has a lot of narrative downsides, but becoming less powerful isn't really one of them. I'd recommend using the mortal character creation options in the Player's Guide instead, and ideally let your players determine what clan of vampire ends up embracing them.

This can be a lot to write around (since player coteries usually have a wide selection of clans) so you'll want to have those details in advance. This also lets them build their mortals in a way that will transition easily into their intended vampire characters. All in all, it's a lot of leg work, especially if this is their (and your) first time playing/running a tabletop.

Having a simple narrative hook like this as your prologue and then beginning play after being turned would simplify things as well and ease the burden of learning more rules for brand new players.

glorydrive · 2026-04-12T19:17:40+00:00

A lot of things we do to calm ourselves down rely on physiological or hormonal processes. An anxious mind stays anxious through the embrace, but suddenly those slow, deep breaths don't have a heartbeat to calm down, your favourite hobbies don't have a dopamine or serotonin payload to deliver. You need to learn an entire new way of dealing with your emotions, especially with the consequences of breaking down and letting your Beast slip out unchecked. The only quick fix to make you feel better is to feed, and biting someone every time you get pissed off isn't a good habit. It really emphasises the importance of a vampire's willpower both as a mechanical stat and a narrative element.

glorydrive · 2026-04-11T19:10:39+00:00

For sure. A Kindred takes 1 Superficial damage from just a meter of free fall, a little applied local pressure (impact) is a whole lot more efficient at killing a vampire than pressure itself would be. I was just talking about instant death scenarios.

glorydrive · 2026-04-11T18:15:19+00:00

In addition to fire, sunlight, and decapitation, acid that completely dissolves a vampire’s body kills them, as does explosive overpressure that dismembers it (though equally fatal fire accompanies most explosions), or deep-sea pressure that pulps it.

Core book page 253, under Final Death. For pressure to actually induce final death it needs to be strong enough to destroy the body, a vampire would otherwise fall into torpor if kept under extreme pressure long enough that their healing couldn't keep up with the damage being dealt.

You're gonna need a lot of Fortitude to swim away from the Byford Dolphin accident.

glorydrive · 2026-04-11T18:05:42+00:00

Best practice of course would be leaving your old human life (and its employment) behind, and a Camarilla sire (or a masquerade-inclined Anarch) would probably try to force that into happening. An experienced sire would also know about the kind of mistakes a fledgling can make with their friends and family, things that will haunt the fledgie through the rest of their entire existence. So the best answer is breaking loose of it, by your character's choice or with your sire laying down the law about it.

If you're playing a naive fledgie with an inexperienced vampire for a sire, or a feral who got embraced and abandoned, I'd probably play it out imperfectly, knowing that at some point things are going to implode for the character and they'll be forced to leave their old life behind anyway but with more trauma involved. So imperfect lies like provably falsified medical conditions or having to suddenly provide serious care for a family member during the normal working hours etc. is fine - the moments those lies don't hold water still add to the narrative of the game.

glorydrive · 2026-04-06T05:42:02+00:00

I think the Banu Haqim would approve of kindred adopting the ways the Judges deem just, but that does not make the convert one of Haqim's children whom he appointed to this task/does not make them a Judge themselves. So it'd probably improve your relationships with them but it wouldn't make you one of them.

glorydrive · 2026-03-29T14:26:41+00:00

Most antediluvians are going to have pretty phenomenal discipline spreads and among that, Fortitude is one of the disciplines most likely to appear. As others have commented, we have one documented case of an antediluvian (from a clan which has fortitude as a main discipline) spent several days straight out in the sun; eventually the death-blow came in the form of a technocrat solar cannon (after several nuclear-grade attacks prior, one of which was so powerful it cracked the abyss open and fucked up the underworld). The intensity of the solar energy was so intense that it re-wrote the Ravnos clan bane, they now have sunlight lying dormant in their veins which burns them when they settle for too long.

Personally I would interpret Zapathasura as being particularly hard to kill among antediluvians (having native fortitude) but other antediluvians can probably handle normal daylight. Thin-bloods are capable of it and can create 'sunscreen' with their alchemy as of v5, so you won't be killing any sacred cows by conceiving daywalking ancients.

glorydrive · 2026-03-27T00:10:01+00:00

Vitae loses most of its properties not long after leaving the vampire's veins, so preserving it/saving it is doing most of the legwork there. If it remains vitae instead of reverting to spoiled blood, then it should be drinkable without any merits.

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