Auspex
[ 1 ] Heightened Senses
The most basic ability of Auspex doubles the range and sensitivity of a vampire's senses. The character can see and hear twice as far, and can see better in faint light than other vampires do. Similarly, she can pick up scents as well as a hunting dog and follow them if she learns to do so. Her senses of taste and touch do not increase in range, of course, but they do becomes vastly more sensitive. A character with Heightened Senses might detect the vintage in a victim's blood or recognize a long-absent mortal acquaintance in pitch darkness.
At the Storyteller's discretion, Heightened Senses can provide glimpses of the past, the future or faraway lands. These flashes are nearly always cryptic premonitions that must be interpreted. Whether these messages are the character's own clairvoyant tendencies extended beyond her conscious control or messages from torpid Methuselahs -- or other powers -- is not known, and the source of debate. These sorts of visions never come when willed, and they are almost always disorienting and frightening, leaving the vampire with a brief loss of sensation of the here and now.
When concentrating on faint sensations, the character is particularly vulnerable to strong ones. A bright flash of light in the dark or a thunderclap in a silent cave might blind or deafen the character for as long as an hour.
System: It takes a free action to activate this ability, but no roll or other cost is required. The difficulty of rolls associated with using the character's sense (such a Perception + Alertness) decrease by a number equal to the character's Auspex rating when the power is engaged.
The Storyteller should remember the potential hazards listed previously and fit such blindness or deafness to the situation at hand, perhaps allowing a Stamina + Alertness roll to overcome its effects. The content and frequency of insight and premonitions are left to the Storyteller's discretion. She may roll the character's Auspex rating as its own dice pool (with a difficulty ranging from 6 to 9) to see if a vision comes at an appropriate moment, if she wishes. Intelligence + Occult rolls may also be necessary to interpret the visions gained with this power. Such visions should be quite rare: The voices are no mere servants, to come when bidden.
[ 2 ] Soulsight
Cainites with Soulsight claim that every being with a soul projects a halo a short distance from his body. They know this primarily because Soulsight lets them see this halo, which shimmers and undulates with each person's mood and changes color as various emotions wash over them.
Harsh emotions tend toward the red end of the spectrum, while calm and cool ones are bluer; strong emotions are bright, while weak ones are dim. As it is rare (outside of frenzy) for anyone to feel just one emotion at a time, most halos are mosaics of color, with veins and spatters of secondary emotion that tinge the primary feeling. A vampire's halo is pale, much as the Cainite's skin is, while a healthy mortal's halo fairly pulses with life. It is relatively easy for a vampire with Soulsight to distinguish between the two.
Soulsight does not work well as a lie-detector. Most accomplished liars (particularly Cainites) are perfectly calm and comfortable while lying, and they frequently learn to distract themselves with pleasant thoughts while spinning the most outrageous lies. Conversely, someone may be being totally truthful and still be nervous. Additionally, spying on halos is not a subtle thing. The character must ogle her target to get a good view of his halo.
System: Roll Perception + Empathy (difficulty
. The Storyteller may prefer to make this roll for you, so that you don't know just how much information you have gained or whether you have failed or botched. You must get one success to get even basic information, per the following chart:
Successes Information
Botch Misleading halo
Failure No aura
1 success Can read the shade (pale or bright)
2 successes As above, and can distinguish basic color
3 successes As above, and can recognize patterns
4 successes As above, and can notice subtle shifts
5 successes As above, and can identify mixtures of color and pattern
If the target has around a quarter cover or concealment (which includes moving around in a crowded room), increase the number of successes needed by one (so one success gives no information, and four gives patterns). If the target has more than around half cover, increase the number of successes needed by two. You cannot read the halo of someone with more than three-quarters concealment.
You cannot re-roll to improve your character's perception of another character's halo until at least an hour has passed. Doing so is treated as an automatic botch. Also, it is very easy to sneak around you while you are ogling a halo, and observant foes are sure to realize that and gain three dice to all Stealth totals against you while you use Soulsight against another.
The halo colors chart offers sample colors and patterns for the Storyteller to use in describing a character's halo. However, the Storyteller should not feel constrained to stick to these halo colors, nor even to this metaphor (emotional state as halo). For certain characters, Soulsight might manifest by making other beings appear as though they were carved of stained glass; others' might perceive distinctive scents. In all these cases, however, your character will still understand the basic meaning of the halos he sees.
Condition Halo Color Condition Halo Color
Afraid Orange Idealistic Yellow
Aggressive Purple Innocent White
Angry Red Love Blue
Bitter Brown Obsessed Green
Calm Light Blue Sad Silver
Compassionate Pink Spiritual Gold
Conservative Lavender Suspicious Dark Blue
Depressed Gray Vampire Appropriate Color is Pale
Desirous/Lustful Deep Red Confused Mottled, Shifting Colors
Distrustful Light Green Daydreaming Sharp Flickering Colors
Envious Dark Green Diablerie Black Veins in Aura
Excited Violet Frenzy Rapidly Rippling Colors
Generous Rose Psychotic Hypnotic, Swirling Color
Happy Vermilion Magic Use Myriad Sparkles
Hateful Black
[ 3 ] The Spirit's Touch
A mortal creature leaves a subtle scent on everything it touches. Ask any king's keeper of hounds: Dogs, among others, can easily track this scent. In the same fashion, mortals and vampires leave a trail of their own essence upon anything they touch. Vampires with Spirit's Touch can see this immaterial residue. Although Spirit's Touch users generally cannot track people with the ability -- a person must keep an item long enough to leave an impression, or care about it strongly -- they can easily determine who the last owner of an object was, who created a work of art and the like.
Beyond this simple identification, a character with Spirit's Touch can catch glimpses of the object's creation, use and meaning to its owner. These impressions vary widely, but a brief glimpse is rarely sufficient to learn anything useful about the item. The character must have time to sit and study it.
Members of the clans to whom it comes naturally treasure the Spirit's Touch. The Cappadocians can re-create the end of a life from examining a corpse and its treasured possessions, which may aid in their divinatory abilities. The Toreador use Spirit's Touch to refine their own techniques with musical instruments or other artistic tools, or to help gain insight into the creative process of a long-dead master. The Tremere are better able to identify the properties of magical potions and enchanted items than any mortal wizard. Some Tzimisce use Spirit's Touch to ensure that a letter passed from another voivode was created by the one whose seal marks it. And many Malkavians are known to rob mortals' homes of treasured items, then use those objects to gain a disturbed sort of insight into the minds of those whom they wish to torment into madness.
System: Roll Perception + Empathy, with a difficulty based on the strength of the psychic impression. An item that one handled only briefly, one that was unimportant to its last owner or one that is otherwise meaningless has a target of 9. The stake that Tremere may have used to immobilize Saulot while diablerizing him would have a target of 4. Other difficulty numbers range between those. When in doubt, the Storyteller may wish to assign a flat 7. The number of successes rolled determines the amount of information available:
Successes Information
Botch The character is overwhelmed by psychic impressions for the next 30 minutes and unable to act.
Failure No information of value
1 success Very basic information: The last owner's gender or hair color, for instance.
2 successes A second piece of basic information.
3 successes More useful information about the last owner, such as age and state of mind the last time he used the item.
4 successes The person's name.
5+ successes A wealth of information: Nearly anything you want to know about the person's relationship with that object is available.
Animalism
[ 1 ] Feral Speech
This power allows the Cainite to hark back to the days before the fall of Babel, when all speech was one. Although he cannot use this ability to communicate with humans or Cainites who do not speak his language, he can communicate with animals, be they wild or domesticated. The vampire needs only to look into the creature's eyes for a moment, and he briefly gains facility with that animal's native speech. The two communicate in the animal's tongue -- a vampire speaking to a horse must whinny, one talking to a wolf might bark or howl and so on. (The animal replies in kind, of course.) According to rumor, the Nosferatu can communicate with animals without making a sound, but they must concentrate solely on the creature in question, and they cannot lose eye contact for even a moment.
The use of Feral Speech does not predispose an animal to react in a friendly fashion toward the vampire. Keep in mind that animals that have not been made ghouls tend to react poorly to supernatural predators of the night. The character can bully small creatures such as squirrels or rabbits easily, but raptors and swift, independently minded animals do their best to escape from such a situation. Larger creatures require some negotiations to get any useful information.
This ability does not grant the animal in question any unusual information. The Storyteller should consult the Appendix (page 210) to determine a rough level of intelligence for the animal, and use that and the creature's known behaviors as a base for roleplay. Remember that few animals can count or read, and humans mostly all look alike to them. The character may be able to convince animals to do him favors if he is sufficiently impressive to them. If such is the case, the beasts do their best to perform such favors.
System: No expenditure or die roll is necessary to activate this power, but the character must spend one turn getting the animal's attention and looking into its eyes in order to key his own Beast to the creature's language. Roll Manipulation + Animal Ken to get favors or useful information out of an animal. The difficulty is 6, unless modified up or down for circumstances. Each success gleans one favor or one useful piece of information; five successes gets the character roughly anything he needs, within reason. The style by which the character gets what he wants depends in part on his road and Nature, but primarily on the roleplaying between the player and Storyteller.
[ 2 ] Noah's Call
This ability -- named by those Cainites who believe that Noah called on all the wild creatures to come to his ark before the flood -- allows a character to call out a summons for a particular kind of creature. In order to use Noah's Call on a particular kind of animal, the vampire must already have used Feral Speech on an animal of that species in the past. The Cainite then uses his sublimated memories of that "language" to cry out audibly and summon as much of the local population of that animal as he can. Not all of those creatures definitely come to the character's assistance, but those that do aid the character as best they can.
The character can call a somewhat broad group of animals -- all those of a single species, by modern parlance -- or he can be more precise. He could try to summon all dogs in an area, or all female red-tailed hawks between the ages of one and three years inclusive. Obviously, the former summons brings more creatures and the latter might not bring any at all.
System: Roll Charisma + Survival (difficulty 6) to use this ability. Consult the table to see how many creatures succumb to the character's power. Note that if, for instance, only one animal meets the character's criteria within range of hearing, then one or two successes will not summon it. The power works out to the limit of hearing -- which can vary from beast to beast. A wolf might be able to hear a summons howl as far as four miles away, while a groundhog had better be within a half-mile. When in doubt, the Storyteller should roll Perception + Awareness for a sample member of the species. Every success extends the range by half a mile.
Celerity
[ 1 ] Celerity Levels
System: Vampires with Celerity can use the Discipline to take multiple actions in a turn without the normal penalties to their dice pools. These actions can include movement, enabling the Celerity-user to sprint at unheard-of speeds.
Each point of Celerity allows up to one extra action, and the vampire may use his entire dice pool for each additional action he takes. The character must spend one blood point per extra action taken per turn, and she may spend blood points beyond her normal generation maximum. For instance, an 11th-generation Brujah with Celerity 3 may spend three blood points to gain three extra full-dice-pool actions. The blood points must be spent at the beginning of the turn, and they cannot be mixed with any other blood expenditure. Additionally, the actions provided by Celerity cannot be further divided into multiple actions -- the character may use her basic action for multiple action as much as she likes, but each action granted by Celerity is "indivisible." Also, Celerity-granted actions must involve physical action. The Discipline does not allow a vampire to translate a text or perform a Thaumaturgy ritual more rapidly.
Extra actions granted by Celerity do not take place until after each character has taken one ordinary action, so that everyone gets to act once before anyone acts twice. Everyone who is able to act twice does so before anyone takes a third action, and so on. The only exception to this rule is using Celerity actions to provide for emergency defense: A character may use a Celerity action to dodge or block even if he's already taken an action, for instance.
These extra actions may be taken to provide extra movement, allowing the character to move across a battlefield, room or sunlit field very quickly. Each action can provide a full turn's movement
[ 1 ] Potence
System: Potence grants one automatic success per point on all tests of Strength. This includes feats of strength and lifting tests as well as damage rolls in melee and brawling combat. The player still rolls the character's full Strength dice pool for these tests, then adds her Potence rating in successes after the dice have been tallied. Potence successes do count in diablerie.
[ 1 ] Fortitude
System: This Discipline grants the user increased protection against all forms of physical damage. Each dot of Fortitude adds one to the user's dice pool to soak bashing and lethal damage (see p. 239). Unlike normal Cainites -- who cannot soak sunlight or other aggravated damage at all -- Fortitude users can roll Stamina + Fortitude to soak damage from sunlight and fire. They roll Fortitude alone to soak other forms of aggravated damage, such as that imposed by holy ground or the claws of Lupines.
Author
Topic: Lucius (Amalgam of Ennius and Lucien) - Retired, Avatar of Kupala (Read 95915 times)