I have had a first run of the V5 Playtest a few weeks ago. During the playtest I noticed that the character backgrounds as written, even though I already made a few alterations, did offer some some challenges.

In consequence I decided to give the characters a bigger overhaul for the next playtest. I would like to share my documents and do would be happy to receive comments or remarks.

For the playtest itself, please go to white-wolf.com and download it at their blog:

V5 pre-alpha: The curtain rises!.

If you run the playtest, please give them feedback. If you did alterations, like using the characters as I changed it, please mention it as the standard assumption will be that you ran it as written.

The first thing to be adapted were the character-sheets:

V5_CharacterSheet_Amelina.pdf

V5_CharacterSheet_Amir.pdf

V5_CharacterSheet_Bruno.pdf

V5_CharacterSheet_Nicholas.pdf

The sheets remained mostly the same. There are only two sheets with changes.

The biggest one is for Amir. I granted him a dot in medicine by moving the dot in occult one up, as he works as a night nurse and should have basic knowledge. Next to that I switched his „Humanity“ and „HP“ stats as its been a mix-up. I did as well try to repair the frame. The changes to Bruno are purely cosmetical. I removed the artifacts.

Next to the pdf version I actually edited them by creating jpgs:

The biggest adaption happened within the backgrounds:

V5_Background_Amelina.pdf

V5_Background_Amir.pdf

V5_Background_Bruno.pdf

V5_Background_Nicholas.pdf

The biggest alteration to the setting itself is that I did change the feeding restriction of Amelina. At the one hand to respect the wishes of my players, at the other hand to facilitate running the scenario with players who I don’t know and at last but not least as I personally didn’t like the integration of the topic.

Safe from that I decided to add information that was missing or misleading.

Thus the player will know what his characters motive is, what he knows about the location of André, the information about various cities, their hunting grounds, their cover identities and other information that is assumed in the scenario the characters have, yet not mentioned in the background.

I did as well add information. Like a haven for each character, a hunting ground for Nicholas, some Camarilla ties in. Which I did to facilitate a smoother way of playing, that’s more interesting to the players and does respect them more.

I did alter the relationships between the characters.

I believe I did still provide plenty potential for conflict, yet I wanted to give them some more constructive connections. Explaining why they are actually a coterie and not just a dysfunctional group that would implode withing a week, even without a revolution at hand.