[OSSR]Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy

[Ancient History]

Vicissitude is edgelord Protean; the level 4 power basically lets you turn into the Man-Bat, and all the Clive Barker stuff came out later. Unlike Protean, it does reward creativity, but it's also become infected (literally) with the space parasite meme, which it has never shaken off, even though "Vicissitude is a disease!" is blatantly stupid.

But all the goodness in Vicissitude is on levels 2 and 3 - freeform fleshcraft and bonecraft. Zulo Shape and Bloodform are just tiny cherries on top, and never getting those is a perfectly valid life choice.

The being infected by space parasite and/or [Tzimisce] part is only relevant if your game is set during the Gehenna or your GM decides to severely punish you, in which case you've been fucked from the start.

I am perhaps not making myself clear: in whatever passes for Vampire canon, Vicissitude and Serpentis are explicitly said to be derived from Protean.

[Ancient History]

Appendix: The Faces of Magic

This appendix contains rules, systems and suggestion for creatures of thaumaturgical origin.

Lies.

The idea of having vampire blood magicians making critters and minions using blood magic is not a new or novel or bad concept. A not-insignificant chunk of classical occultism is about creating life, raising the dead, or summoning a spirit to serve you in some fashion. NPC blood magicians need mooks. For necromancers, this usually means one of several flavors of zombie; Thaumaturgists et al. generally have to get more creative.

Unfortunately, this requires the White Wolf writers to get creative.

The first "creature" is the Blood Brothers. This is supposed to be a bloodline (?) of near-identical vampires that work well together as a team, and are created by the Tzimisce. For bizarre reasons, this book decides creating Blood Brothers is a Level 5 Koldunic Sorcery ritual that also uses Thaumaturgy in some unspecified way. It does not actually give a description or requirements for this ritual, and instead points you at the Guide to the Sabbat, which also doesn't have it, but has the write-up for the Blood Brothers bloodline and their unique discipline of Sanguinus.

Corpse Minions are explicitly not zombies, but dead souls called back to inhabit their former corpse. Which sounds a lot like the Risen from Wraith: the Oblivion, but of course they can't say that because Wraith ended the year before this book came out. No rituals for creating a Corpse Minion, or any explanation of how it differs from zombies or biothaumaturgical creations or...anything.

Demon Bound - same thing as above; you've somehow bound a demon into a corpse. Woo. Never mind why or how (they say the ritual to create one is Level 4...and that's it)...now what? They did actually provide a ritual for something along the same lines in a later book - Sins of the Blood, I think?

Gargoyles! An artificial bloodline created by the Tremere, which ultimately rebelled. All we know about the ritual to create one is that it is Level 5 and requires a lot of blood from at least two Gangrel, Tzimisce, or Nosferatu.

Homunculus - Level 2 ritual. This one actually exists, I've seen it, so why is it not included here? I don't know. You don't know. It is a mystery.

Razor Bats and Stone Hounds - "animal gargoyles", which largely were forgotten about, just like those snakes that were embraced in Berlin by Night. They don't get into the specifics about these guys, but they should just be ghouled animals that can take some physical disciplines like Potence, Protean, and Visceratika (Gargoyle discipline)...but we don't know, because nobody could be arsed to think these things through.

That's it, really. Nothing on different grades of zombies, biothaumaturgical creations, creative ghouling, combining Koldunic sorcery and Viscissitude, summoning spirits, etc. Pretty lackluster, to be honest.

Then we get a couple Revenant families! These are families that have been ghouled so long, they just start giving birth to "natural" ghouls. In one post-apocalyptic campaign I wrote, it was the Bronze Age and there were no more proper vampires or big name supernaturals, just Revenants and the like.

Anyway, we have...

Ducheski (Tremere) - Inbred nerds who take Social Traits as their dump stat, but can start off with Thaumaturgy.

Rafastio (Independent) - Supposed to be hedge witches; cursed so they cannot be Embraced, and go through mood swings based on the moon. Unfortunately, their history is tied in to the Black Hand.

...and that's the book.

Thoughts And Ruminations
Way back at the beginning, this book said it didn't want to be just a list of spells. Honestly, a list of spells probably would have been an improvement. It's hard to point out any paragraph of flavor text that wasn't a mistake, the Paths are on the whole not particularly exciting or useful, a lot of the rituals are overlong on description and short on specifics - actually, that applies for the whole book. You pretty much require mindcaulk to get half of this shit to work as intended.

A vampire blood magic book should not be this hard to write, even with all the different hands that went into this one and the apparent complete lack of editorial oversight on something as simple as making sure all the rituals were formatted correctly.

Sure, there are a few power options here. Some of them don't even require group necrosex. But mostly this was cracking open the door for future exploitation - it was Blood Sacrifice which would go whole hog (while also trying to clean up this book's mess, at least a little). In fact, it is rather impressive how far later sourcebooks seem to have gone out of their way to ignore or improve on what Blood Magic did. House Tremere would completely rewrite the rules for gargoyles and creating your own paths. Necromancy rituals went in a vastly new direction, and most of them tried to forget this book ever existed. Assamite Sorcery and Setite Sorcery were both renamed (to various degrees of success), opened-up and partially re-imagined. Voodoo got weirder. The only thing that stayed largely relevant in this book was the section on Koldunic sorcery, and even that was expanded gradually.

Lessons learned... there's a sweet spot between setting material and mechanical material. At the one end you have something like AD&D's Wizard's Spell Compendium, a multi-volume work collecting spells from dozens of sources, unifying and fixing formats. It is impressive in shear bulk, even if you never use a tenth of it in game. On the other end you have something like Earthdawn's Magic: A Manual of Mystic Secrets or Shadowrun's Grimoire, which actively worked to expand the scope of magic in the game and the setting, not just provide a list of new spells.

Somewhere in the middle and off to the side is Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy. It tries to address both fluff and crunch, setting and mechanics...and it largely fails at both. The fluff isn't that interesting, and even where it isn't written badly it isn't presented in any sort of consistent, coherent fashion. The mechanics are grapeshot, some of them consistent with the Revised rules and formatting, and some of them using older 2nd edition format...hell, they may be leftovers from 2nd edition, I don't know. But they aren't really good, even in the few cases where you can actually figure out which dice to roll and then think up a reason why you would do that.

The dumpster-dive approach to Thaumaturgy is, I think, why some people like it. It speaks of system mastery rather than effectiveness; there is rarely a specific goal to these powers in the sense of something you hope to achieve by having them - which is what Frank and Longes were getting at earlier. Some people just want higher stats to have higher stats; they don't think through what they as the characters would do with those higher stats. So it is here. This book exists for people to dip into looking for some ritual or path or rule option to benefit their character or NPC, to take that bit and then ignore the rest as thoroughly as possible.

Which is sad, because what little potential the book has is thus wasted among a lot of crap options that basically no-one will take unless out of some obsessive sense of completionism. And I can't emphasize enough how much I hate hand-wavy mechanics where a lot of the basic action is so ill-defined, the Storyteller doesn't even have any guidelines on how to wing it.

And maybe this sounds a little harsh, but...it's not like White Wolf haven't had time to think of better ways of doing things. They just don't. They'll say it's about the story or the mood and leaving a lot of creative space, but if I have to design the damn game mechanics and try to get the fluff to match, I'll just go play GURPS: Vampire: The Masquerade.

[Iduno]

How would I have done it different? Honestly, I'd have expanded these guys. You don't need all the Thaumaturgy chapters, and there's no point in presenting half-complete systems for a bunch of different blood sorcery disciplines; they should have filled these out so that everybody got at least a couple more paths and rituals...basically what they ended up doing in Blood Sacrifice, but that book has its own issues. Aside from that...there's no real reason why Setite Sorcery and Assamite Sorcery are different from Thaumaturgy on a mechanical level. Or why they decided to differentiate between Western Necromancy and Voudoun Necromancy. That just feels like arbitrary and poorly-devised ways of splitting powers up for little real purpose or gain. I grok they were trying to keep everything unique, but if you're not going to make the effort to actually make the different powers worth taking, why the fuck bother?

And also less necrophilia/other creepy sex stuff, I assume?

[Ancient History]

...yeah. There's an entire conversation to be had about that, but the gist is that while a certain segment of your fanbase probably does want sex magic, there are a few possibly insurmountable problems:

0) Not everyone wants it at the table/LARP - Which is an entirely reasonable approach; some users might be underage, others are just not going to want to include that material in their games. It's why you normally put it off into a separate book like ExXxalted: The Scroll of Swallowed Darkness or the Book of Erotic Fantasy.

1) It's not going to be everyone's fetish - Tastes are broad, and sex magic tends to be weirdly specific in what it will or won't do. Contraception and abortion rituals largely don't exist in White Wolf products, for example, but fertility and conception magics exist in pretty much every game line. Furries and BDSM are explicitly catered to, most everything else paraphilia-related requires a bit of work...and it's easy to cross the line from something kinky (latex clubwear) to taboo (bloodplay, incest) to flirting to obscenity (necrophilia, pedophilia, snuff) to straight up fantasy (giving birth to a swarm of cockroaches through your orifice of choice). Even if you draw a clear demarcation away from, say, pedophilia, you're going to squick somebody out at some point, and probably not in a good way.

2) It's difficult to keep it interesting - Rote repetition gets boring, and finding the right dynamic for including sexual material in the game is an important balancing act which a lot of people just aren't prepared to expend time and energy at. At the really prosaic level you could have "I sex Jason to raise the energy I need for the ritual," or magical nipple-piercings, and maybe that's the right balance for a lot of people. On the other end, there are people that want to calculate anal circumferences and that is terrible AND boring.

3) Real World Sex Magic Does Not Give Good Guidelines - Real sex magic tends to be way more vanilla than people expect, since aside from props and dressings the actual coitus tends to be straightforward and most of the "magickal action" is mental or spiritual. There are plenty of charms to get laid or protect from disease or ensure/prevent conception, but ceremonial magickal sex can be some sad dude masturbating alone while imagining a shower of gold coins or trying to impregnate a lady with moonlight or something. People come up with way kinkier scenarios than that in their average Marvel Cinematic Universe erotic fanfiction these days.

4) Fantasy Isn't Much Help Either - Publishing limitations and personal taste left sex magic out of a lot of mainstream fantasy fiction - you don't have wizards stroking their staffs in Lord of the Rings - and erotic fantasy fiction isn't exactly renowned for the quality of its stories, unless you like the cervix-scraping fiction of Laurel K. Hamilton or Mary Gentle. There just isn't a Jack Vance of sex wizardry to steal from, which leads to a lot of writers doing their own thing and getting creative but not having any sort of real consistent touchstone work for writers to draw on.

And I'm sure there's more reasons than that, but those are the ones that come to mind. If I did do Vampire Sex Magick, it would be it's own separate optional book...but why would I?

[Username17]

The first thing you notice when looking at disciplines and thaumaturgy paths is that some of the people writing this shit were literally trying to sneak overpowered shit through the editors while other writers were furiously nerfing various groups that for whatever reason had raised their ire. And then you also notice that some people were just sort of writing random crap with no real idea of how it fit into the world or the game.

The five dot paradigm was a huge problem. Everything was made to fit into a five dot progression, so some things had to be ssssstttreeetttchhhed out with filler or lumped together with unrelated powers so there'd be enough powers to write something on all the dots. Other power collections ended up getting obvious or vital abilities cut - which in turn caused some later authors to make new disciplines whose entire purpose was just to express the powers that should have been in the original discipline but were cut for space (see: Nihilistics and Vicissitude). There was never a coherent idea of what it meant for a power to be a 2 dot power or a 4 dot power. Indeed, they never quite got around to defining whether powers scaling should be written as a series of powers at subsequent dot levels or just a single power that tells you it gets better if you have more dots while the later dots give you whole new powers. In short, the game had some kind of "Linear Warriors / Quadratic Wizards" deal going on just in the way different disciplines were formatted.

But the real bottom line was that the way Thaumaturgy let you cherry pick paths and cherry pick rituals, it just genuinely didn't matter how fucking bullshit most of the materials were. Heck, almost all of the paths and rituals in this fucking book are useless. Indeed, many of them are explicitly made to be useless, as deliberate nerfs and digs are various disfavored groups. And you know what? Despite that, this book was still as a whole a significant powerup for thaumaturgy users. Indeed, it was such a significant powerup for Thaumaturgy users that people called for it to be banned on the grounds that it made Tremere characters too powerful. If they printed 8 paths that were useless or worse than that and one path that was good, even if it was only good for a one or two dot dip, that was still a powerup. Users of Thaumaturgy got to sift through the spell lists and grab rituals and paths that were good and ignore rituals and paths that were not.

Meanwhile the other disciplines were locked in. However creative, powergamey, or nerfish the author who first created the discipline got with the five dots, that's what you fucking get. Eventually people came up with "devotions" to act kind of like rituals, but those were ass. Also they were few and far between and extremely expensive compared to what Thaumaturgical rituals were going for. For the most part, if the author of Protean decided to make a Chapter 8 reference instead of writing a meaningful power for one of the dots, you were pretty much stuck with it. No dumpster diving alternatives. For Thaumaturgy, there are at least six different ways to throw magical fire at people, and the exact mechanics make some of them extremely powerful and some literally worse than just punching people, but Thaumaturgists still get to pick and choose - and that choice makes Thaumaturgy the best discipline by a country mile. It makes it a discipline so good that it's literally better than all three disciplines available to any other clan by itself.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

And to expand on what Frank's ranting about, Thaumaturgy (and by extension blood magic) is so ridiculously broken in conception, that when they actually tried to clean things up for Revised, that was the equivalent of a massive power boost.

Necromancy, for example, went from being a 5-dot power which had associated Disciplines like Nihilistics, Thanatosis, Deimos, and Mortis to a blood sorcery discipline that started off three Paths (Ash, Bone, and Sepulchre), instantly tripling its available powers and options, and then they kept adding new ones (Cenotaph/Abombo, Vitreous, Mortuus)...and then they let it grab what it wanted from Mortis too (Grave's Decay, Corpse In the Monster, Cadverous Animation, Nigrimancy, Haunting, Four Humours). Even if there was a lot of overlap, Necromancers in revised had a shit ton more options than they had in the previous edition.

[Whipstitch]

1) It's not going to be everyone's fetish

Yep, and as a general rule any medium that's powered primarily by the imagination is going to be the chosen venue of niche fetishists since the fact that you can depict shit getting super freaky all without a big effects budget or having to do something horribly unethical is the single biggest advantage drawings and writing have over films, webcams or even just convincing someone to handle your jibbly bits.

[Jefepato]

For Thaumaturgy, there are at least six different ways to throw magical fire at people, and the exact mechanics make some of them extremely powerful and some literally worse than just punching people,

You know, I was never sure of how the mechanics of Lure of Flames in combat were supposed to work.

Like, does the Tremere just snap his fingers, and the other vampire ignites (and rolls to soak)? Or does he throw a fireball at the other guy, which could be dodged like any other attack roll (assuming the target has an action with which to dodge etc.)? (And if it's the latter, do extra successes on the casting/attack roll increase the damage as with any other attack?)

The Path description makes it sound like the former (and I think that's how we ran it when I was in high school), but the latter probably makes more sense (to the extent anything in this game could make sense). (As expected, when I asked the Onyx Path forums I didn't get a straight answer on how it was "supposed" to work.)

By comparison, Daimoinon 3 (Conflagration) does explain its mechanics pretty clearly, but it...kinda sucks shit. One damage per blood point? I genuinely don't understand how any writer, even one is who bad at math and doesn't care about game balance, could have written that and failed to realize it was awful.

And I think there used to be a "Dark Thaumaturgy" path for fire that was somehow different from Lure of Flames, but fuck if I remember how it worked. It's not in the 20th anniversary book (which neither clarified Lure of Flames nor fixed Conflagration). Was it better or worse than the others?

[Username17]

For Thaumaturgy, there are at least six different ways to throw magical fire at people, and the exact mechanics make some of them extremely powerful and some literally worse than just punching people,

You know, I was never sure of how the mechanics of Lure of Flames in combat were supposed to work.

Like, does the Tremere just snap his fingers, and the other vampire ignites (and rolls to soak)? Or does he throw a fireball at the other guy, which could be dodged like any other attack roll (assuming the target has an action with which to dodge etc.)? (And if it's the latter, do extra successes on the casting/attack roll increase the damage as with any other attack?)

The Path description makes it sound like the former (and I think that's how we ran it when I was in high school), but the latter probably makes more sense (to the extent anything in this game could make sense). (As expected, when I asked the Onyx Path forums I didn't get a straight answer on how it was "supposed" to work.)

By comparison, Daimoinon 3 (Conflagration) does explain its mechanics pretty clearly, but it...kinda sucks shit. One damage per blood point? I genuinely don't understand how any writer, even one is who bad at math and doesn't care about game balance, could have written that and failed to realize it was awful.

And I think there used to be a "Dark Thaumaturgy" path for fire that was somehow different from Lure of Flames, but fuck if I remember how it worked. It's not in the 20th anniversary book (which neither clarified Lure of Flames nor fixed Conflagration). Was it better or worse than the others?

The short version is that no one actually knows. Lure of Flame actually has a targeting matrix which is undefined. As in, you roll a number of successes and it determines whether the flames pop up exactly where you want them to, but what the numbers mean aren't explicitly stated. With one success you can make the flames pop up on something you're touching and with five successes you can cause a dot on the horizon to burst into flames, but the crucial 2, 3, and 4 levels aren't defined at all. Nor is it defined what happens if you roll insufficient accuracy. Like, if I'm trying to ignite that asshole across the street, and the storyteller has decided that I need 3 successes (already an asspull, but whatever), and I only roll 2, how far off target am I? How do we determine what direction I'm off target? I have no idea.

Also important is the fact that the actual sizes of these flames aren't defined. How much physically larger is an "inferno" than a "conflagration?" I don't fucking know. Neither does anyone else. If we get to these bigger levels of flame creation, how much does it matter if we are off target? like, at what point do the area of effects become larger than the scatter? I don't know. It's never defined. Vampire combat also traditionally has a Dodge roll in addition to a Soak (damn this system is awful), can you dodge "magically bursting into flames?" I have no idea. Does it matter how big the flames are and how much space the target character is in? Maybe?

There's also a thing where you can hold the fire "unreleased" for an unspecified amount of time, and it doesn't burn you while you're doing that, and I have honestly no idea what properties it has at that point. I am unsure whether it burns other people before being released or whether you can turn it off without releasing it.

It also doesn't help that the Lure of Flames is written slightly differently in each edition, and that Creo Ignem from Dark Ages is partially copy pasta but also has some other rules and genuinely functions differently in some respects.

The Fires of the Inferno (the Dark Thaumaturgy fire magic path) is even more incoherent, because it actually references Lure of Flames as some sort of inheritance thing. So ideally, when you try to figure out what your Dark Thaumaturgy Fire does, you look at the description of Lure of Flames, and then you line edit it with the rantings about evil green balefire from the Dark Thaumatury description, and then you look at the normal rules for Fire and realize that at no time does it tell you how many dice you roll or what you're supposed to roll on those dice to have anything in particular happen.

But when you cut through all that bullshit and hash out some targeting protocols and shit, the power is extremely, well, powerful. It becomes fire that uses the normal rules for being on fire. The rules for vampires "being on fire" is that they are fucking dead. The rules aren't quite the same in every edition, but in every edition you are super fucked if you catch fire. It's aggravated damage every turn that you can't do anything about plus a psychological roll that you aren't going to pass in order to take any effective action.

-Username17

-Username17

[Ignimortis]

Eh, I've caught on fire a few times in VtM. Granted, I had Fortitude (3 dots, so not much), and my ST was a good enough person to actually let me just stop, drop and roll to stop burning alive (undead, w/e).

[Username17]

Eh, I've caught on fire a few times in VtM. Granted, I had Fortitude (3 dots, so not much), and my ST was a good enough person to actually let me just stop, drop and roll to stop burning alive (undead, w/e).

So you didn't use the actual rules for fire in the game and then didn't experience the outcome dictated by those rules. Cool story bro.

-Username17

[Jefepato]

Hypothetically, if you could convince your coterie-mates to carry fire extinguishers around everywhere, couldn't your buddy spend a Willpower (in order to withstand Rotshreck for at least a turn) and hose you down before you die?

I mean, it sounds kinda ridiculous (I suspect toting fire extinguishers around would get you laughed out of Elysium), but I would expect any sensible modern vampire to stock up on fire suppression gear as soon as they realize how screwed they are in a crisis.

(I dunno. The V20 book says you stop taking damage if you leave the fire and put out any fire on you, but I don't see any rules for how hard it actually is to put out a burning vampire.)

[Username17]

The properties of Thaumaturgical fire have a lot of undefined parameters. The first level is described as a candle's worth of flame. Now, Vampires in Masquerade are absurdly flammable, so being able to expose people to a candle's worth of flame is actually shockingly lethal. But aside from the extremely good range, that's not actually better than real world weapons you could just fucking buy.

The second level is described as a "palm of flame" and is checked as being something that at least could be literally in your palm when not released. This implies to most people that we're talking about the fire magic used by the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz against Scarecrow. Which is a fine, if unexciting magical weapon. Vampires in Masquerade are of course still absurdly flammable, so it's pretty decent as a means of killing people if that is what you want to do.

The third through fifth levels are where things go off the rails entirely. These are fires that are physically larger than a person. What do they look like when they aren't released? Some people interpret this as basically being that all levels after level 2 start as a hand full of fire and just shoot out as increasingly large inferno jets or get thrown as balls of flame that explode into increasingly large conflagrations upon reaching their target. But of course, it doesn't actually say that. There are other people who think that at levels 3+ you engulf yourself in flame Human Torch style and then the fire flame waves itself to the target. There are other people who assume that you just point at things and they catch fire. Neither of these people can be contradicted because there is no discussion at all of what the intermediary steps between "I spend a blood point" and "there is a bonfire engulfing that dude I don't like" look like. It's entirely possible that you can surround yourself with an unreleased Inferno and have what is effectively a fire shield that fills the room and murderburns everyone who isn't you with no targeting roll at all. Or maybe not. No one knows.

So high end Lure of Flames is undefined in its area of effect, it's targeting procedure, what it looks like, and even whether using it constitutes a problem for the Masquerade. It's totally unclear how difficult it is to escape once it's been started or how many people can be hit at one time and whether people on the periphery suffer the full effect. But the damage is defined. A Vampire with Fortitude 5 still takes an average of 2.5 aggravated wound levels per round and has to spend a Willpower to do anything at all each round. It hits so hard that people use it anyway, even though most of the important parameters of the spell are asspulls by your storyteller at your table.

-Username17

[Orca]

One more thing that's undefined IIRC is whether the caster is immune to going nuts at the sight of flame they conjured. It's not just taking damage, even seeing fire has a check for Rotshreck involved.

[Username17]

One more thing that's undefined IIRC is whether the caster is immune to going nuts at the sight of flame they conjured. It's not just taking damage, even seeing fire has a check for Rotshreck involved.

Absolutely. It's kind of implied that when the flames aren't released (whatever the hell that means) that the caster doesn't have to Rötschreck. After that, who fucking knows? By the rules, there doesn't seem like there's any reason it wouldn't cause the caster to immediately flee the scene. But it also allows you to put the fires out to line of sight, so if you put it far enough away maybe you wouldn't? But if it actually shoots out of your hands, maybe you would anyway because it's right next to you when it starts moving to the target? No one knows.

The big problem with Rötschreck is that it was obviously a terrible idea. Just the fact that it exists makes Dark Ages Vampire and Victorian Ages Vampire literally unplayable. There aren't any places in those time periods where any social interaction is possible that have neither sunlight nor fires. Such places simply did not exist until the invention of electric light. But the specifics of how it works are unknowable. Every table spends as much mental effort as they dare ignoring the fucking thing, because every thing it does makes the game terrible.

-Username17

[Ignimortis]

Eh, I've caught on fire a few times in VtM. Granted, I had Fortitude (3 dots, so not much), and my ST was a good enough person to actually let me just stop, drop and roll to stop burning alive (undead, w/e).

So you didn't use the actual rules for fire in the game and then didn't experience the outcome dictated by those rules. Cool story bro.

-Username17

A character suffers the full damage effect for each turn that she’s in contact with the flames; she must leave the area and/or put out any fre on her to stop taking damage.

That's basically it. So I passed a Rotschreck roll (might wanna use Willpower for that, to be safe), took a turn to extinguish myself, soaked most of the damage with Fortitude (it never goes higher than 3, so I figure someone with 5+ Fortitude might actually just laugh at people trying to use a flamethrower if they make their Rotschreck roll), and...yep, that's the rules.

They might not be statistically sound, but you don't immediately die even if lit on fire, although it's quite likely if you don't have Fortitude.

It's kind of implied that when the flames aren't released (whatever the hell that means) that the caster doesn't have to Rötschreck. After that, who fucking knows? By the rules, there doesn't seem like there's any reason it wouldn't cause the caster to immediately flee the scene. But it also allows you to put the fires out to line of sight, so if you put it far enough away maybe you wouldn't? But if it actually shoots out of your hands, maybe you would anyway because it's right next to you when it starts moving to the target? No one knows.

The big problem with Rötschreck is that it was obviously a terrible idea. Just the fact that it exists makes Dark Ages Vampire and Victorian Ages Vampire literally unplayable. There aren't any places in those time periods where any social interaction is possible that have neither sunlight nor fires. Such places simply did not exist until the invention of electric light. But the specifics of how it works are unknowable. Every table spends as much mental effort as they dare ignoring the fucking thing, because every thing it does makes the game terrible.

Now that is absolutely true and those rules make no sense. What people usually do, IME, is take the phrase about "innocuous flames and controlled fire" and make it go up to eleven, so you don't roll for Rotschreck unless you're literally on fire, or are in a burning building, or someone's swinging a burning stick at you. Cigarettes are a non-issue, as are stationary fires that don't seem to expand, so torches and fireplaces are OK.

[Username17]

it never goes higher than 3

Sure. But the difficulty goes to 9 and you don't get to roll non-magic soak. So with Fortitude 5 you on average roll one soak and 0.5 botches, so you take an average of 2.5 aggravated wound levels. It's a very short clock.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Did they ever put out stats for flamethrowers? The way the general fire rules work I wouldn't expect vampires to laugh off novelty propane torches and I definitely wouldn't expect them to laugh off a flammenwerfer 35 or an M2 since that shit is throwing around thickened gasoline and is all kinds of no bueno.

[Thaluikhain]

Oh, hang on, do muzzle flashes count as fire? Take the flash suppressor off your gun and it drives vampire away, even if it can't really damage them much?

Hypothetically, if you could convince your coterie-mates to carry fire extinguishers around everywhere, couldn't your buddy spend a Willpower (in order to withstand Rotshreck for at least a turn) and hose you down before you die?

I mean, it sounds kinda ridiculous (I suspect toting fire extinguishers around would get you laughed out of Elysium), but I would expect any sensible modern vampire to stock up on fire suppression gear as soon as they realize how screwed they are in a crisis.

Hmmm, you'd probably be immune to certain fire suppressing things that ordinary humans wouldn't like, like inert or asphyxiating gases.

[Username17]

As mentioned in previous OSSRs on the subject, the degree to which Vampires are basically people or basically corpses is wildly inconsistent. Not just book to book or author to author, but sometimes even paragraph to paragraph. Like how there's this recurrent theme of vampires getting in all kinds of trouble because of diseases or some shit, but it says elsewhere quite explicitly that Vampires are completely immune to that sort of thing.

So there's always the question of "why can't I just encase my body in a protective substance?" And that's just a damn good question. Vampires don't get poisoned, they don't sweat, and they don't need to breathe, so why the fuck couldn't they just lacquer themselves? And the answer is... SMOKEBOMB! Thematically, Vampires are supposed to be all Goth and shit. So they are supposed to wear lace and tail coats and top hats and corsets and all kinds of fetish wear that is nothing at all like wearing heavy armor. But their whole tireless corpse concept that they keep coming back to when they want to wax poetic about deeeeeaaaaattthhhh doesn't leave any rational reason for that to be the case.

Fundamentally, Masquerade wanted to go with sexy vampires. Vampires that have heaving bosoms, pounding hearts, and throbbing penises. But then they went and ruined that with a bunch of rants about dead unbeating hearts in corpse paint. And they end up having to contradict themselves and walk that shit back all the time, because vampires you can't fuck is obviously not what the authors or the fanbase actually wanted.

The whole thing where there's this evocative rant about fear of fire and then everyone had to spend the next decade pretending that shit didn't exist because it's totally unplayable is simply emblematic of the whole Masquerade gestalt. People commonly said that World of Darkness had cool fluff and horrible rules. Hell, I think I've said that myself a few times. But that's wrong. Vampire actually had horrible fluff. It had good production values. The paragraph to paragraph writing was generally pretty engaging when compared to other offerings in the early 90s. The art was fucking fantastic. And the typesetting was better than what you'd generally see before the turn of the century. But the actual fluff, the descriptions of how things worked and what characters could do and all that shit was a dumpster fire. Everyone spent half the time playing the game just ignoring massive fluff reasons why you couldn't play the game.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Fear of fire is a weird one for vampires. On the one hand, it plays to the old idea that animals are afraid of fire, and being a vampire means the Beast gets spooked easily. On the other hand, you have the fact that old corpses dry out and people talk about mummies being very flammable...and on a third hand, combustion is one of those things that most people agree is capable of destruction of inanimate things. Because you can't "kill" a corpse by stabbing it, drowning it, or asphixiating it, but you can burn the shit out of it.

The thing is...and this is important...vampires heal. So they're not just walking corpses that have to deal with whatever injury they've suffered for all eternity, like Death Becomes Her. And the undead have a lot of other attributes normally associated with living beings too: they need to eat (well, drink blood), and sleep. But they don't shit (normally) or grow and change without supernatural assistance. Old vampires don't get weaker, "long in the tooth," and senile. They may gain derangements and suddenly human blood isn't enough to provide nourishment, but Great-Grandsire doesn't get weaker...in oWoD.

And you'd think that the details of undeath would be something that the writers would work out at some point...but they don't. Ever.

[Mord]

Old vampires don't get weaker, "long in the tooth," and senile. They may gain derangements and suddenly human blood isn't enough to provide nourishment, but Great-Grandsire doesn't get weaker...in oWoD.

And you'd think that the details of undeath would be something that the writers would work out at some point...but they don't. Ever.

I always wanted to see real rules for Methuselah's Thirst, since this is a serious consideration in fluff and has some real legs to it in terms of explaining and shaping vampire society. I know it's been discussed before that the requirement that everyone has to tithe blood upwards to Great Grandsire makes a pretty compelling explanation for the Camarilla's culture and structure, especially its enforcement of such a stratified model of age relations.

Sadly, even in Elysium (AKA War of Ages), the "rules for playing as elders" book, they didn't bother. This would have been the perfect place, but they continued to handwave it as "oh, this is a thing that sometimes happens and here's a list of risk factors, but whatever. If you want to play a 751-1,000 year old 5th Gen who still drinks human blood then that's fine." Not cool, White Wolf!

Curiously, the only way I'm aware of to actually force the Thirst (or any similar effect) is the ritual in this book, "Refined Digestion". Though this version just makes mortal blood 33% as good as normal rather than 0%. This could potentially have been meant to be a sly implication that all cases of Methuselah's Thirst are actually caused by getting on an elder Tremere's bad side, but considering the different mechanics, I'm going to guess this was just another roll of the shovelware dice. Sigh.

[Username17]

I always wanted to see real rules for Methuselah's Thirst, since this is a serious consideration in fluff and has some real legs to it in terms of explaining and shaping vampire society.

Oddly, this is one of the few issues that is actually directly and competently addressed in Requiem. Instead of Generations, you had Blood Potency. Blood Potency goes up over time as you gain power. When you get to Blood Potency 3 you can't get nourishment from Animals, when you get to Blood Potency 6 you can't get nourishment from non-magic people. That game mechanic by itself would explain pretty much all of the power structures that people seemed to want out of their Masquerade. It explains why powerful vampires keep making young shitty vampires. It explains why elder vampires keep going to sleep for long periods of time and fighting it out with each other. It explains why the powerful elders would sponsor young bullshit vampires into vampire society and why young vampires would want to overthrow the elders. Like, it fucking does it all. It's very elegant design, and if nWoD had basically just been a Masquerade reboot with simple solutions like that proposed to major flaws in the fluff and system we wouldn't be talking about White Wolf as a past-tense company.

-Username17

[K]

I had always assumed that thing where ancient vampires need to feed on vampires comes from a Thaumaturgy ritual.

I mean, this very book has a spell that makes animal and mortal blood worth 2/3rd less, and its only 6th level. Combined with some boosting rituals or just inventing a higher level version seems like the perfect way to fuck up an elder vampire's lifestyle.

By the same token, I always thought that the Assamite ritual to gain generation always needed a custom Fortitude power to make its Stamina roll.

Thaumaturgy has always been the place where people slipped their favorite overpowered stuff past the editors.