Character Creation

Grab yourself a character sheet and we’ll get started shall we?

In Vampire: The Masquerade what would be called a campaign or adventure in other roleplaying systems is called a “Chronicle”. The act of creating a Vampire in this world is referred to as “The Embrace”, and “Vitae” is the blood of a Vampire.

Our chronicle is going to start the evening after you were all embraced. Your first night as a vampire. You won’t remember anything about the embrace, that’s something we can discover later. Also, we’re going to set it in a semi-fictional Manchester. All of the major landmarks will exist and it gives us something to use as a framework, but we won’t be super strict when it comes to details. For example, if the story requires an alleyway, there will be an alleyway, if we need a seedy nightclub…. Actually forget that last bit I don’t think it’ll be a problem!

Starting the chronicle in this way will allow us to do a lot of the character creation as we go along. But as a bare minimum we need to know who you were before the embrace. I’d recommend reading about the seven vampire clans. If there’s one that jumps out at you, you might want to create your previous life to match.

First off, what is your name, what did you do for a living, and how old are you? What values mattered to you most as a person? Try and come up with two or three of these convictions. Here are a couple of examples from the core rulebook (let me know if you’d like to see more), but feel free to decide your own.

Thou shalt not kill.
Disobedience is dishonour.
Protect the innocent from harm.
The guilty must be punished

When you have your convictions decide who in your life represents these to you and your relationship to that person. These are your touchstones. They must be a living human being and they connect you to your lost humanity. Again, here are some examples:

Your surviving human spouse, lover, or parent.
A human you admired in life, or their descendant.
Someone who represents something you once held dear in life and still cling to: a soldier, a baseball player, a musician or artist, clergy from your faith.

What kind of person were you? As mentioned above, this may relate to which of the seven vampire clans you select.

That takes care of the name and possibly the concept box at the top of the first page. If you have a clan you can fill that in. Your relationships should be noted in the, “Touchstones and Convictions” box on the second page.

There are some boxes that will be the same for each of you. Generation will be thirteen, Hunger will start at two, Humanity will start at seven, and Blood Potency is one.

Next we’ve got the nine attributes. You can fill these in now, or leave it until you need to use them and fill them in as you go as long, but you must be able to justify it based on what we know about your character.

If you’re doing it now, fill in the dots next to each attribute, you have these dots to spend: 4, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1. If you put your four in Strength for example, you can’t use four again, but you can put three dots in three different attributes.

Health = Stamina + three

Willpower = Composure + Resolve

When filling in Health and Willpower, fill in the boxes that you aren’t going to be using. There are ten boxes for each, if your Health is seven fill in the three right-most boxes. This will make sense when we play. If we need to use your Health or Willpower in the game, you’ll have to decide on any of the associated attributes at that time if you haven’t already.

As with attributes, you also have dots to spend in skills. Spend 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 (that’s 3 threes, 5 twos, and 7 ones for those not paying attention) for a total of 15 skills. You can do this now or later.

That should be enough to get us going. We can re-visit this after we’ve played for a while and fill in any gaps.

You’re probably wondering what those disciplines are! Each of the seven vampire clans has access to a number of disciplines, they’re your Vampire super-powers. We’ll discuss them when you’ve chosen your clan. I’ve listed them against each clan so you have some idea what to expect.

Let me know when you’ve completed this. We won’t be able to play until you’ve all done it. If any of it doesn’t make sense, or it all seems a bit much let me know. It’s not that bad, honest!

A few more things to consider…

Since I wrote the character creation process I’ve had a few thoughts not covered above. Each of these questions may help to round out your character. As I come up with more I’ll add them to the list.

Prior to your embrace, where did you live? Inside the city?
What were you doing in the city on the night of your embrace? Working? Meeting friends?
What is the line (or lines) that you absolutely will not cross?
What would you die for?
Which person matters the most to you and why?
Are you religious? If so what is your faith?