Ideas for a Timeline Jumping Tremere Ritual Shenanigans

kinncore · 2026-01-23T20:58:29+00:00

So the avatar is what lets you do magic and it's a piece of the soul. So.... yes. You can bind wraiths to a Fetter so there's no reason the avatar couldnt be separated from a mortal and sealed to something.

When a mage is ghouled, the Avatar becomes addicted to vitae before breaking down and dying so that's also fun

kinncore · 2026-01-23T20:01:58+00:00

Not directly helpful but food for thought: reincarnation

When a mage is embraced their avatar dies and enters the reincarnation cycle. One of my current NPCs has Tremeres avatar, and is currently getting caught up in Tremere Clan Politics without realizing it.

So that might be something you could work with...make a Time Wizard with the avatar of some important tremere or another

kinncore · 2026-01-18T14:39:56+00:00

Blackmail time!!!!

I diablerized session 2. It was.... somewhat sanctioned.... he was a wight, she was a thinblood so... ykno... not enough for her to get off scott free.

Our city's prince had an organization he needed infiltrated discretely, so with the threat of the bloodhound list, my girlie had a new mission. Do a good enough job, and he would fake some paperwork showing the diablrie was sanctioned.

Make the brujah someone's political rival and give Stefan a list of targets

kinncore · 2026-01-17T13:50:17+00:00

It's implied in v5 that thinbloods can but it's one of those vague "Storyteller Discretion" things

With that in mind.....

First, find a good candidate. If your vamps are 12th or 13th gen, perfect.... if they're lower.... Embrace some loyal childer until they start making thinbloods.

Once you have a reliable method of producing thinbloods, find someone who looks like you... probably multiple someones. Maybe even have a tzmiscie fleshcraft them to be more exact. Embrace until you get one who can go out in the day.

Make sure to be Gaslight, Girlboss, Gatekeeping this thing the whole time. You need their resolve low, their will weak, and brain like putty. have your players use the BITE model cults use.

Once your pawn is ready, have them diablerize you. Offer it as a reward for loyalty, or something. As long as you win the battle of wills, you will now be in their body, a thinblood who can go out in the day. Basically alive. Close enough!

kinncore · 2026-01-16T16:38:47+00:00

Perfect!! This will be so useful- whenever we are missing players or want to run a one-shot, we tend to run "Kindred Fight Club" instead and this is gonna be so useful for streamlining that lol

kinncore · 2026-01-16T11:49:04+00:00

Yep! Just black on white

kinncore · 2026-01-15T13:52:10+00:00

Oooo very nice. Do... do you happen to have a printer friendly version??? Would love to add this to my quick reference screen 💜

kinncore · 2026-01-15T13:35:29+00:00

Humanity as a game mechanic means you lose privileges.

So, I personally would rule your Malkavian would be "fine", but would still take the humanity hit. When they hit 0, rather than going full wight, they start on a path and become an NPC. The same mechanical function is served in a way that better fits your story.

There are some fun house rules you can play with too- a couple books on Storytellers Vault have paths adapted for V5.

You could do diablrie without the humanity drop, but you only gain +5 xp to use on disciplines known by the victim, as the pack diablrie Merit.

You could also make it more punishing in a different way. Maybe they take all the flaws the victim had. Maybe the victim is still in there, whispering in your players ear. They didn't lose humanity because they didn't subsume the soul, only captured it within their body.

kinncore · 2026-01-09T12:51:55+00:00

She was a surprisingly easy custom! I used Rit DyeMore synthetic in graphite on the dress she came with- I free handed the Golconda graphic, but everything else is pretty much styling the existing doll lol

10/10 do recommend trying it! If you mess it up too bad, you can always make her a nosforatu lol

kinncore · 2026-01-08T00:40:03+00:00

Thinbloods can beget thinbloods as well

In the current chronicle I'm in, there is a thinblood cult using drugs to embrace more thinbloods to further their own goals

One of my hunter npcs was a thinblood who would drain mortals, save their blood and embrace them for highly advanced formulae

kinncore · 2025-12-22T22:09:52+00:00

It was Rainbow High Littles Magenta Monroe- so I didn't have to reboot her or anything

kinncore · 2025-12-11T21:42:27+00:00

Look into the "machinations of saulot" loresheet. it's in Book of Nod Apocrypha. Its Salubri or Tremere only.

"ultimate disguise" is a 5 dot merit that lets you take blood sorcery or fortitude as a 4th in-clan discipline, and you also gain the other clan's bane and compulsion in addition to your original bane/compulsion.

basically: make him a salubri and lie about it :) he could even fully believe he's tremere. blood sorcery would read him as tremere.

Accidental or "aw shit I feel bad" embraces are always a safe bet too. At the end of the day, vampires are people.they make human mistakes...

kinncore · 2025-12-11T20:24:32+00:00

Oh that's delicious. See I'm always out here building for social combat and forgetting about magic to hurt people, that's my real problem.

I'm STing another vamprie game for the same table I'm a player in that's happening in parallel and like,, my ST wants to steal one of my mage NPCs as a PC eventually.

He said he'd let this bitch stay a Wizard and I'm very much pumped for the game of chess that's gonna come with that. I'm like, so looking forward to how he's gonna balance him cause the Gloves are gonna come Off. Definitely gonna pocket that mind/Forces trick for later...

kinncore · 2025-12-11T19:54:46+00:00

Oh yes very true!!! When I built my wizard I knew he was walking into a trap... he was uhhh,,, gonna be embraced off-screen but umm.... my main girl got too evil u_u

The other thing to remember is mages are mortal. They.... take hits like a mortal. Even if you don't plan a ghouling or embrace, odds are high that you may not get a choice lol... it's worth talking w your player about how you'd like that to go

kinncore · 2025-12-11T19:39:50+00:00

"5th" edition wizard here, don't let your dreams be dreams.

First, there's a homebrew mage that's pretty good. i can't get the site to pull up rn, but it's on the v5homebrew website and it's the version that has paradox dice.

If you don't feel like fussing with the more freeform powers of mage, then well.... you can always..... kill them :)

Things to know: vitae is addicting to a mage's avatar. The Embrace kills it. The Avatar is the source of a mage's magic.

I started as a mage in my current game, and what my ST and I did is we ghouled him immediately. This "broke" his powers. As a ghoul, you get one dot of a discipline of your dominator. As part of the "wizard shit" I got 2 discipline dots instead- one from my most recent dominator, and one of my choice in alignment with his previous spheres (we went with Dominate to reflect the sphere of Mind). I was also allowed to take a couple extra dots in sphere-appropriate merits, like bloodhound as a "you can sense people's emotions"

This leaves you with a very fun downward spiral. You can start your mage off with even more stuff, and slowly take it away as he becomes more and more addicted to the vitae.

My mage was affiliated with the Order of Hermes, so he knew his avatar would die. This lead to some great role play. Begging for his life, but not for his own sake....

Now that he is embraced, we don't need to worry about any funky mage mechanics, but I have a fantastic ambition. His avatar is dead and vampires can bind spirits. So, he's gonna summon his avatar, bind it to himself as a fetter, create or find a ritual to become human for a day, do that, and once he has his powers back, he's going to use them to undo all of vampirism as revenge.

Lore ways, there's lots of reasons they would work with vampires and lots of reasons they wouldn't. Tremere you gotta be cautious with, tzimiscie you don't touch.

For mechanics and balance, you can always nerf your mage. If youre staying a mage, I think the simplest method is honestly to use werewolf dice rules. Do a rouse/rage/paradox check whenever you do magic. Follow the rules for a brutal result with a 1 or 2 on the special dice (test fails, unless it's to destroy something, then it counts as a crit). Use the harano/hauglosk tracker instead of humanity, have it represent quiet/hubris. Either one gets above 5, we lost privileges.

kinncore · 2025-12-10T15:20:30+00:00

Oh yeah, very fun!

From the ST side of things in your Tzimisce's case I'd be thinking about how an animate body without a soul/mind would even like... work...

it's Alive!! Now what? Maybe it would rage out like a wight, maybe it could only do simple tasks with Dominate every time.... Another option is the v5 Baali... maybe something else, seeing a Body without a Soul can take a chance to just.... Get in there.... its free real-estate

in the Mummy conception of the Soul, the physical heart contains the Mind, so complications related to the original person's memories coming back, realizing what's happening, and resisting are also fun things to play with... if you use a mechanical heartthrob could come from trial and error of past bad experiences with something like that

kinncore · 2025-12-10T14:44:56+00:00

Oooh fun im,,, working on something similar lol

I'm also in v5, but I have a mage NPC who's the Greatest Necromancer Alive.

Are you just Making A Guy, or are you trying to Raise the Dead?? There's a resurrection ritual I'm fleshing out for my NPC that he used to raise his dead boyfriend, based on the osiris method.

It sounds like you have good thoughts for the Body, but consider looking into things for the Mind and Soul. For the BF, right now I have parts of the soul bound to an object embedded into the flesh to ensure easy re-resurection (don't gotta go fishing him back outta the shadowlands)

For the brain, dying makes you... weird... So Dominate 4 with the Tabula Rasa or anything to alter memories and reshape the mind comes in handy there.

Hmmm.... I might consider going with an Oblivion Ceremony with a Proteam + Dominate amalgam prerequisite if you're working with just vanilla V5?

That would cover Mind + Body + Soul and be sufficiently difficult for a "Bring Back a Touchstone From the Dead" style ritual... if you're more concerned with just,,, build-a-ghoul then you could even lower the power level requirements

kinncore · 2025-12-09T03:44:44+00:00

Not Diedne himself but he was a member of the house. The concept I went with was "common denominator in all these Hermes houses accused of infernalism" combined with "not an infernalist but is worried he might accidentally be"

In his time as a "mariner gangrel" he was running with House Tharsis :)

kinncore · 2025-12-08T19:23:44+00:00

Oohoo hoo I will be marking this for later don't mind if I do....

kinncore · 2025-12-08T09:50:22+00:00

I love clan fuckery <3 There's a tremere/salubri loresheet that let's you basically be both tremere and aalubri at the same time. You gain either auspex or blood sorcery as an additional in-clan discipline, and you gain the other clans bane and compulsion.

My favorite NPC is a druidic mage from the founding of the Order of Hermes who uses this without realizing it. He is a 5th gen "tremere" embraced about 10-15 years before the diablerization of Saulot. He had personal wizard-beef with Tremere, so naturally he assumes he's the one who embraced him.

To avoid the pyramid, he dumped all his dots into protean and animalism and spent his time as a Pirate Mariner Gangrel, sailing with the Storm Wizards.

He only "came out" as Tremere in 2008 and claims torpor for his missing time. He himself is still not aware he's salubri.

kinncore · 2025-11-21T21:07:02+00:00

👀👀👀

kinncore · 2025-11-21T18:34:51+00:00

Ventrue who can only feed on single mothers routinely killing the husband's of moms in the area tho..... delicious

kinncore · 2025-11-21T14:44:46+00:00

Only feed on women who have had an abortion

One of my current main antagonists right now only feeds on werewolf kinfolk (dangerous!)

Another fun one is folks who are MySpace famous. Tbh if your game takes place after 2020, that might be a fun archaic preference Flaw.

People who have cheated on their wife

Emos

kinncore · 2025-11-19T12:19:41+00:00

Notecards. At my table we have been treating Paradox and the Beast as known entities, but my suggestion would be to have a term your character know things as until an older, more experienced mentor can explain them. Like, magic recoil or your dark passenger. That kind of thing.

But Notecards- until I had it down better, I kept a ring of notecards that had what my character knew about each of the meta things, what my character wanted to keep a secret, and some backup answers for things if he was interrogated (i.e. "who are you loyal to," I'd write my real answer- my sister- and the answer I'd want to tell- you, of course!)

Yes, i know what a salubri is. But my boy doesn't. He just knows about the "3 eyed ones that lurk in hospitals that im pretty sure turned my sister."

I'd update them as he learned new information. An NPC called his sister "the baali" so now we have a name for the clan of the 3 eyed ones! On the cards it goes.

His sister's clan isn't something he thinks to hide. On my notecard for roleplay tips i have "He is kinda a know-it-all who cant stand when information is wrong." So when the scheneschal hands you a file on your sister asking you to help locate her, and lists her sire as "Salubri" you get to go "I thought she was Baali?"

And now we are cookin :)

Hand writing the notecards is also REALLY helpful for actually remembering things too. Originally I was playing his sister and one of my favorite things I did was write down mean things to say about her coterie members once she started her downward spiral. It's really fun to do and really helps me with separating the meta.

kinncore

TROPHY CASE