…And
Then He Punched the Glass
In January I started a new Vampire
the Masquerade chronicle using the 20th Anniversary rules set. All of my players were excited because this
would be the first chronicle that I had run since February of last year. We’d played a few other games in between, but
most of my players prefer the Old World of Darkness system and setting.
Baltimore Skyline at Night |
Since I returned to running Vampire
the Masquerade, I made the decision to set all of my games in Baltimore because
it’s a midsized city with a big enough population to support a fully
functioning Camarilla city with a Prince, Primogen Council and a few other
positions. Baltimore however is not so
big that the players or I would get lost in an overwhelming number of
NPCs. Most importantly, none of my
players are familiar with Baltimore, so they are less likely to argue about
little details.
My version of Baltimore has a very
young population of vampires. Again,
this was chosen to make it easier for players to relate to the NPCs. This is true for both the actual age of the
Vampires, all were born in the 20th Century and their generation, all are 8th
Generation or higher. (One Elder does
reside in Baltimore but that’s a different story all together.) Also, Baltimore’s vampire population is more
open-minded to things like Caitiff and etc.
than the usual Camarilla city.
Finally, the Prince of the city is a Gangrel.
Not quite the Coterie from my game. |
Now that you have an idea of the
kind of setting that I use for Vampire the Masquerade, maybe you’ll understand
how things led to this point. The new
chronicle started with the players arriving at Elysium. The PCs were relatively new citizens of the
city. Leon was a former private
investigator and the childe of the Nosferatu Primogen. D.D. was a playboy bunny and the childe of
the Sheriff, and she was a Ventrue. Both
Leon and D.D. had spent most of the time since they were embraced in
Baltimore. The other three members of
the coterie were recent arrivals.
Vincent was a former car thief and a Lasombra-antitribu. Dexter was D.D’s brother and a former FBI
Agent. Dexter was also a Ventrue. Finally, Chris was a doctor who specialized
in prosthetics, and was embraced by a Tremere.
Most importantly, Chris had taken the flaw: Haunted.
Since Clan Gangrel had left the
Camarilla and the seat occupied by the Gangrel Primogen was vacant, the
Primogen were trying to decide if they should allow a Gangrel or Caitiff or
someone else to represent the independent clans in the city. Three candidates were available: the childe of the Prince (a Gangrel), a
runaway Tzimisce who’d escaped her sadistic Sire, and a streetwise Caitiff who
had recently been discovered in the city.
The players hadn’t chosen who to side with, but they had decided to work
against the Caitiff.
The
Caitiff, named Simone, had ghouled a pimp in the slums of Baltimore. The players decided to capture this pimp and
interrogate him for information about Simone.
When they finally tracked down the pimp at a bar he was known to
frequent, he had been attacked and kidnapped by a hunter. The players found only a bar full of corpses
and security camera footage of the attacker using military weapons to kill the
bar customers. With a little work they
were able to figure out that the hunter worked at a Private Military Contractor
(PMC) in Baltimore, and the PMC’s main office was in the Leg Mason Building, he
tallest skyscraper in the city.
So,
cut to the interior of the Leg Mason Building with the PCs standing outside the
glass walls of the PMC’s office. They
looked in at the security system and cameras, and then they started talking to
each other trying to discover the best way to break into the office. First, they tried to go through the ceiling,
but utterly failed that. They continued
talking and then with one sentence, Vincent destroyed my chronicle.
And then his happened to my whole Chronicle! |
He
said, “I punch the glass!” I looked at
him and said, “Are you sure?” He nodded
replying that yes he wanted to do that. He
spent blood to pump his Strength Attribute and with his Potence he was able to
punch through the glass. That’s when he
noticed the security sensor hanging down that had detected that the glass had
been broken. Vincent, D.D. and
Christopher rushed into the room to gather the information they needed to track
down the hunter, and Dexter and Leon went back to the hotel lobby to handle the
security guards. However, by the time
that Dexter and Leon were able to get to the lobby, the security guards had
already called the cops. Nevertheless,
Dexter and Leon were able to convince the security guards to erase the footage of
the break in and keep them from going upstairs to investigate.
Upstairs,
D.D., Chris, and Vincent were able to gather the information they needed but by
then the cops had already arrived.
Warned by Dexter and Leon, they took the freight elevator to the Second
Floor to avoid the cops on the main elevator.
Stuck on the Second Floor of the building, they decided to smash out a
window and escape into an alley. They
smashed out the window with a chair and jumped into the alley, but when they did,
Vincent landed on some garbage and drew the cops into the alley way. Everyone hid, but Chris failed his Stealth
check and the cops noticed him. He used
Dominate Level 1 and told one of them to run, and Vincent did the same to the
other cop. The cops fell all over themselves
trying to escape the alley and the monsters inside.
Cover to Wraith the Oblivion |
At
this point, I glanced over at Chris’s character sheet as it was passed around
the table. That’s when I noticed that
Chris has taken the flaw: Haunted. I’ve never read Wraith and I know very little
about Wraiths in general, but I decided that the Wraith that was haunting Chris
would bolster the cops giving them the courage to overcome the Dominate effect.
Instead of running for their lives, they
ran back to their squad cars and got their shotguns. The return of the cops into the alley was
foreshadowed by the most frightening sound in the world: the sound of a shell being loaded into a pump
action shot gun.
D.D.
and Vincent heard the sound and hesitated.
They looked to the other end of the alley and saw the lights of cop cars
down there too. They are trapped, but
they decided to run. Chris, on the other
hand, decided to play dead. D.D. and Vincent
ran out of the alley way and tried to avoid the incoming fire, but they couldn’t
dodge it all. D.D. is seriously injured
and Vincent chose to surrender so that the cops would stop shooting. He knew that D.D. couldn’t take much more
damage and lifted his hands over his head.
The
two cops with shotguns walked down the alley and found Chris’s body, obviously
dead. However, when the cops took a
close look at him, the Wraith caused him to exhale a breath of air. Assuming that Chris is just unconscious, they
grabbed his body and drug him back to the squad car and threw him into the back
seat. Vincent was tossed into the back
of another cop car, and D.D. was loaded into an ambulance because of all of
wounds she’d received. With D.D. cuffed
to the gurney, she had little chance of escape.
While all of this was happening, Leon and Dexter strolled out of the
building without a problem using Presence and Dexter’s credentials from the
FBI.
BOOM! Stop or I'll Shoot!! |
The
session ended with Leon and Dexter back in their respective havens. D.D. was taken to the emergency room cuffed
to the gurney. Chris was taken to
Baltimore City Jail to be processed.
Vincent was able to escape the cops by using Obtenebration to cause a
traffic accident. He stole the SUV that
the cops crashed into and drove away chased by the cops.
We
weren’t able to run for a couple of weeks because of an anime convention that
we all worked at took up one Sunday, our usual day, and one of the group wanted
to run Eclipse Phase for a night. Over
the course of the last two weeks, all of the players have pretty much decided
that their characters have been rendered unplayable. Even if they were able to survive the next
session, they would most likely be social pariahs because of their foolishness
or at the worst, they would be blood hunted for breaking the Masquerade. As a group we decided to call an end to that
chronicle and start something fresh.
So,
what lessons can we learn from all this.
First, I think that player boredom is a dangerous element in any
game. While the others were trying to
discern the best way to defeat the PMC’s security system, Vincent became bored
and decided that doing anything was better than just standing around. Second, be careful what flaws you take when
you build your character. Haunted is a 3
point flaw and gives a sadistic Storyteller one more powerful NPC to use
against the players. If you do take a
flaw like Haunted, make sure that you have access to some way to deal with that
Wraith. A Tremere, like Chris can’t directly
affect the Wraith, but a Giovanni could.
A Giovanni might be able to deal directly with the Wraith and at the
very least mitigate some of the damage.
Finally, I don’t think of myself a “killer DM” or even a “mean DM.” I am here to help the players tell a
story. I think that I got too carried
away with being an antagonist to the players rather than working with them. Next time, I’ll do better.
I
hope you enjoyed this tale from the table.
If you want to hear more about my version of Baltimore by Night, please
leave comments and questions below.
Sounds a lot lot like my last chronicle. It also suffered from player boredom which ultimately led to the chronicle being abandoned. But keep those posts about Baltimore by Night coming, always nice to read other peoples take on WoD.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much! Sorry to hear about your chronicle ending. I should be starting a new chronicle in Baltimore on Sunday. I can't wait. I get to use some nasty Sabbat guerilla tactics in this one!
DeleteSounds like a lead-in to a wonderful game of cat and mouse, perhaps leading to a reveal that the pimp's location was fed to the hunter by some opponant of Simone with the expectation that this whole thing would go tits up and ruin the Caitiff's chances.
ReplyDeleteIt's such pity that players flinch away from the really interesting stories, just because they're hard. :(