[Beast]Nightmares

Beast: The Primordial, News

The Begotten are born of primal horror, the simple, revolting, visceral fears that plague people the world over. Beasts can harness the power of these fears and inflict them upon others, to exert control, make a target isolated and paranoid, and even kill with pure terror.

Beasts of any Family or Hunger can learn any Nightmare; fears of illness, isolation, death, and justice are common and easy for any Beast to harness. The Children can also call upon their Kinship with other supernatural creatures to create new and unique Nightmares. These Kinship Nightmares can be quite broad (You Are Infected could stem from any vampire), specific to a subset of the creature in question (Your Tools Betray You might be created from an Iron Master werewolf), or based on one particular character. So if my Beast is down with, say, Zita Vargas, the example of character creation from Geist: The Sin-Eaters (I would have used one from Vampire or Werewolf 2nd Ed, but they don’t have example characters, lamentably, and Promethean isn’t out yet), then he might have a Nightmare that calls on fears of car accidents and losing control of a vehicle. Call it You Cannot Stop or something like that. Beast has a section on designing Kinship Nightmares that explains how to make sure the systems jibe with the rest of the game, our basic design principles in making them up, and how to avoid redundancy with the existing, common Nightmares. Several of our playtesters came up with their own, which they’re welcome to share in the comments.

Nightmares, unlike Atavisms (which we’ll get to next week) work better if the Beast is well-fed. If the Beast is hungry, she can’t focus as well on the Nightmares – they’re still potent, but they get a lot more so if Satiety is high. The player can also spend a point of Satiety for a truly impressive effect.

So, perhaps an example? OK, then. I’ll give ya two, a common Nightmare and a Kinship Nightmare.

All Your Teeth Are Falling Out

Your body is a ruin of wasted flesh and ragged skin. Age, disease, or infirmity have robbed you of your vitality, left you helpless and weak as the predators close in.

Dice Pool: Intelligence + Satiety vs. Stamina + Supernatural Tolerance

Normal: The victim suffers a –2 penalty to all Physical traits, and temporarily loses access to Striking Looks or any similar Trait dependent on physical beauty. This penalty also applies to derived Traits (e.g. Health, Speed, Defense, etc.)

High Satiety: On Physical actions where the number of successes matter (such as in combat or during an extended action), any normal success generates only a single success, no matter how many were rolled. An exceptional success yields two.

Satiety Expenditure: The player may spend multiple Satiety on this effect. For every Satiety spent, the Beast may reflexively cause the victim to fail a single Physical action.

Exceptional Success: The victim also applies a –2 penalty to his Defense.

You Are Lost (Changeling)

It was just here. Wasn’t it? Were you supposed to turn left back there? None of this looks familiar, and night is closing in fast.

Dice Pool: Manipulation + Satiety vs. Resolve + Supernatural Tolerance

Normal: The victim gains the Lost Condition. A successful navigation roll does not resolve the Condition until the Nightmare’s duration expires; instead, a successful navigation roll lets the victim make a single roll in an extended action to reach his goal.

High Satiety: Every time the victim fails a navigation roll while he has the Lost Condition, he suffers a dramatic failure.

Satiety Expenditure: The Beast may spend 1 Satiety when the victim fails a navigation roll. The victim’s hallucinations guide him into one of the many alternate realities that abut the World of Darkness: the Shadow, the Underworld, or the Hedge, for example. The Beast has no control over exactly where the victim winds up.

Exceptional Success: The Beast can apply the Lost Condition relative to some abstract goal rather than literally “finding your way.” She might, for example, render the victim hopelessly lost on how to proceed in writing a book or closing a business deal. Adapt the skill used for navigation rolls as necessary (in the examples of writing a book or making a deal, navigation rolls might be Wits + Academics or Manipulation + Persuasion, respectively).