Guide to the Night and Spilled Blood Update [Vampire: The Requiem]

Vampire: The Requiem

Hey everyone! Danielle here. It’s been a hot minute since the last time we’ve talked about Requiem. I’ve been deep in the word mines of editing and getting two books moving along. Both Guide to the Night and Spilled Blood are advancing as you can see in the Monday Meeting notes, but I figured I’d come in and tell you some about both these books. First is Guide to the Night, a joint players and storyteller’s guide. The whole book is designed to give an advanced level of play to your normal Requiem games. We give lots of alternative rules to play with or add into your game however you like. We also have some tips and tools on character, coterie, and chronicle building. I think I’m most happy with the chapter on alternative settings for Requiem 2e, all of which I’m eager to play in. We also give a new mechanic for social combat that mirrors physical combat. If you want to get into a battle of wits with a particularly nasty Harpy, this is your go to system. We’ve previewed the basics for it below. Then we have Spilled Blood. This is another Night Horrors book, and it’s a nice mix of vampires as antagonists and non-vampire things that antagonize vampires. We’ll have some bloodlines, lost clans, weird non-vampire vampire things, and some antagonistic covenants. I’ll probably do another update when that book is further along to give a preview of the new updated to Belial’s Brood. I can’t say much about what comes after Spilled Blood, mostly because I have some ideas, but I haven’t pitched them fully to the team yet, so I don’t want to get my own hopes up. Anyway, enjoy this preview of Lingua Bellum.

Anatomy of Lingua Bellum

A full Lingua Bellum is called an exchange, and any number of Kindred or mortals can take part in it, and some vampires in fact are known to bring their friends into the court for the sole purpose of backing them up in their social struggles. To successfully win an exchange a character must Maneuver to position herself in the stage to better undermine her targets’ Dominance. Different Kindred do it in different ways, but the goal is always the same: to leave their rival’s public persona beaten bloody on the ballroom floor.

A vampire who allows her Dominance to be broken loses the exchange and pays the price of her hubris, the size of the Audience determining just how dangerous it is to fall prey to fellow Kindred in Lingua Bellum. Exchanges are never without stakes, and are as much about controlling your opponent as controlling the Audience, to come out on top. Below are the steps of Lingua Bellum, in greater detail.

The Audience

Social exchanges can be a heated meeting in a hallway, or public spats the Damned love to watch, but the bigger the audience, the higher the stakes. Before Lingua Bellum begins, the Storyteller determines the Size and Intensity of the Audience Environmental Condition (p. XX). Audiences greatly influence the exchange, raise the stakes and are a weapon to be wielded by skilled vampires who know how to sway them and use the spotlight in their favor.

An Audience has a Size and an Intensity, and those can change as the exchange gets more heated. The Size of an Audience is determined by how many people are watching and putting pressure on the characters involved in the exchange. The more witnesses to their spat, the more weight their words hold and the more brutal the defeat. Intensity is how invested the crowd is in the exchange. A domineering vampire might control the Audience and make it quieter, while a socially savvy crowd pleaser sways it until his allies are an extension of his voice.

An Audience may be swayed by characters through Maneuvers.

Example: Megara knew she would meet her rival again but did not expect for it to happen so soon, or so suddenly. The eyes of the Elysium turn toward the two and the room shivers in anticipation. As Megara declares she is not running away, the Storyteller decides the exchange will be under the effects of the Crowded Audience (Invested) Condition. This means all Dominance damage is increased by 2, and the Guile of all participants is reduced by the same amount.

The Stage

When a vampire leaves her haven to feed, it is the instincts of the Beast that guide her. One lesson any neonate learns early is that, when hunting, the hunting ground is as important as picking the right, most vulnerable, prey. This instinct is as valid when engaging in ferocious verbal altercations as it is when seeking to bury one’s fangs into soft flesh to feed.

When setting up the scene, the Storyteller must take into consideration whether or not the encounter is spontaneous or premeditated. Some vampires know how to pick the best battlegrounds when engaging their rivals, making sure they have some sort of advantage. This is a game of cat and mouse better left for roleplay, but if desired it can also be resolved by a contested roll.

Dice Pool: Manipulation + Subterfuge vs. Wits + Socialize

Dramatic Failure: The vampire has made her intentions obvious. The character’s rivals gain +2 on their Timing rolls.

Failure: The character can’t lure her rival to the desired place.

Success: The Kindred sets the stage to her advantage by making sure the exchange happens in a place of her choosing. The character gains a pool of dice equal to her dots in a relevant Merit (such as Staff, Haven, Hunting Grounds, etc.) to spend whenever she wants in the exchange.

Exceptional Success: Gain +2 on Timing in addition to the Merit dice.

These bonuses are not the only advantages Merits can confer to Lingua Bellum (p. XX) but symbolize how a strategic vampire can make use of them for greater effect. A Haven might not be useful to social interactions when it comes to most Kindred, but a smart predator knows how to make her home enhance her best characteristics, such as making her more menacing or more influential.

Example: Astrid knew Megara would be too aloof to realize this was coming. Her player rolls Manipulation + Subterfuge versus Megara’s Wits + Socialize to make sure that when they finally come face to face, they do so surrounded by Astrid’s cronies, represented by Staff. With that Merit rated at 4, Astrid now has four dice to ‘spend’ over the course of the exchange, as her crew does its best to make the vampire’s attacks more effective with taunts and laughter directed at Megara.

Maneuvering

In each turn of the exchange, characters resolve their Maneuvers according to the Timing order. The objective of Lingua Bellum is to reduce your rival’s Dominance to zero.

A Maneuver is a social trick or strategy employed by your character, wittingly or not, to gain leverage over one or more targets during Lingua Bellum. Each Maneuver is detailed below, and each has a different outcome and mechanics.

When a player scores an exceptional success on her Maneuver she may choose to use that momentum to sway the audience instead of other exceptional success benefits. She may sway the audience in a number of ways:

Increase or reduce the Audience’s Intensity by one (changing it from Indifferent to Invested, for example).

Gain the Rising Star Condition.

Gain the Crowd Darling Condition, or remove it from the character who has it.

Regain one point of Dominance.

Example: Having scored the highest Timing, Megara acts first, deciding to use the Undermine Maneuver. She rolls her dice, after subtracting Astrid’s Guile, and removes her target’s Ego from her successes. Being left with 2 successes, Megara damages Astrid’s Dominance in 4 points (2 for her successes and 2 for the Audience Condition).

On her turn, Astrid picks the Measure Maneuver, deciding to build up a dice pool for the next turn. Both players roleplay their actions out, with Megara launching a derisive comment towards Astrid while the other woman grins and sizes Megara up in silence.

Resolution

Any character who has their Dominance reduced to zero loses Lingua Bellum. The vampire who dealt the final blow to their rival’s Dominance gains The Edge Condition. The loser loses all her Guile for the night, feeling deflated, upset or appropriately distressed. Her head is ‘out of the game.’ Losing Lingua Bellum inflicts the Repressed Condition on the losing party, plus a consequence determined by the Audience Condition. The defeated vampire may spend a Willpower to avoid the Repressed Condition, but in that case the winner takes a Beat.

At the end of the resolution stage, characters who are still in the exchange may continue Maneuvering against each other.

Example: Although Astrid suffered quite the blow to her Dominance, she isn’t out of the fight just yet, and decides to go on. Megara does the same, and they continue Maneuvering against each other until all Dominance is lost.

The dispute goes on until one of the vampires loses the exchange upon having her Dominance brought down to zero. The loser takes the Repressed Condition and, given the Crowded Audience Condition, loses a dot of City Status. The winner takes The Edge Condition.

Advantages

Timing

Timing is everything when it comes to social interactions; it is a derisive smile before your sparring partner even says anything, or the interjection of a quick phrase between bouts of screaming in the crowd. Time in Lingua Bellum is tracked in turns just like in normal combat, and Timing acts as the initiative for such.

At the start of Lingua Bellum, determine your character’s Timing by rolling a single die and adding Presence + Manipulation. Characters act in order of highest scores to lowest, with the character with higher Timing going first and the one with lowest going last.

Dominance

When monsters clash they do so for Dominance, and the more jabs a Kindred takes, the more her ego gets bruised while the All Night Society watches in rapt fascination. Dominance is Lingua Bellum’s Health, and when it reaches zero, the vampire cannot make an impact in the scene anymore. She is done for. She may have avoided her attacker’s gaze, choked, got her ideas demolished by her rival, anything.

A character’s Dominance is determined as Composure + Socialize + the character’s highest Status.

Guile

The daft seldom survive in the All Night Society. A Kindred must be aware of the posture and language of fellow Kindred, always ready for when they might strike with even the subtlest jabs. Guile is an Advantage which, much like Defense, reduces the attacker’s dice pool by its rating from any Maneuver. It may be improved by Willpower for a turn in the same way as Defense.

A character’s Guile is determined as the lower of her Wits or Composure + Empathy. For every character involved in Lingua Bellum after the first, reduce each character’s Guile by 1. Constantly watching for the moves of multiple participants makes a Kindred vulnerable.

Ego

Although they are born of violence, Kindred are social creatures by virtue of their own humanity. This need to connect, to feed off each other’s status and integrity, is best represented by the Beast, a presence that unfurls from the deepest reaches of the vampire’s soul and extends outwards, ever pervasive and unwilling to give up the one housing it.

The Beast is a dangerous partner. It sabotages the Kindred to feed its own lusts and desires, but is wickedly protective of the vampire attached to it. At the start of the exchange, and just once until it is over, the character rolls her Socialize + Blood Potency to measure the presence of the Beast once it feels the Kindred in danger; this is her Ego. Successes scored subtract from the successes of all attackers until Lingua Bellum is over, acting like an armor against social attacks.

The downsides of rousing the Beast are that with it so close to the surface, the cracks show easier. Any attempts to ride the wave, stifle frenzy, or act against one’s Dirge lose an amount of dice equal to her current Ego.