Character and Traits

Concepts

 

Body Double
You make looking like a dead guy work for you. Sometimes, a dead body is needed to convince the authorities that someone is dead. You provide that body — your own — for a fee. A work night usually means a ride to the morgue or the funeral home (it helps to have someone there on your payroll). You might slip out the back or you might pay them off at the end of the night. Occasionally, you have to dig up a grave and climb inside when someone starts snooping around a Kindred playing much younger and more alive than they really are. The important thing is that the paperwork says there’s a body where the body is supposed to be. If some hunter digs up the grave in a few years, it’s not your problem. Unless they want to renegotiate at the end of the night.

 

Hijacking Urban Legend
They say that Blackbeard used to tie fuses and candle wicks into his beard and light them to convince his opponents he was of the devil. You don’t need the extra theatrics, but you take advantage of your corpse-like appearance in a similar way. Whether you are getting a truck on a lonely highway to pull over or taking the deck of a freighter in a midnight raid, you count on your strange look to frighten targets and build your legend. How badly you break the Masquerade depends on how poorly your planning goes, but you rarely feel the heat. Most of your raids are carried out between the domains of the same Princes that pay you well for your illegal goods. 

 

Speaker of the Crossroads
All Kindred have one foot in the grave and one in the underworld. You pride yourself on being able to negotiate both worlds, unlike most who ignore the dead parts of their nature. You serve as a gateway between the living and the dead, carrying messages between Kindred and their living relatives or speaking to the ghosts of their victims. What you ask for in return depends on how much your patron can afford to give. You usually help the poor for free but take the rich for all they are worth. 

 

Combination Disciplines

 

Switched At Death (Thanatosis •, Obfuscate •••)
Usually, the Samedi take great pains to hide their shriveled, dead appearance. Looking like the right corpse at the right time, however, can prove to be quite useful.
System: Roll Wits + Awareness with a difficulty equal to the observer’s current Willpower. Success allows the user to appear as a specific dead body that they’ve touched. The power allows the illusion to emulate any damage done to the body, such as a fatal gunshot wound or a severed head. Any actions the Kindred takes that are out of place for a dead body, such as obvious movement or direct communication, trigger  a Courage roll for the observer to stay in the presence of the Kindred. This power can only duplicate the state of the body the Kindred contacts. If the mortal has been dead 100 years, the Kindred will look like a skeleton. This power costs 12 experience points to learn.

 

Grisly Gris-Gris (Fortitude ••, Thanatosis ••)
A common voudoun artifact is a gris-gris bag. These talismans protect the wearer from harm or bad luck. You can provide a similar type of protection... to those with an iron stomach. 
System: The Kindred must spend a point of blood and break off a small piece of their body, such as a bit of hair, a fingernail, or a piece of skin. The target must ingest the Kindred’s body part. The next time the target makes a Stamina roll to soak damage, he or she adds a number of Fortitude dice to the roll equal to the Kindred’s Fortitude or Thanatosis, whichever is lower. While the gris-gris is in the target’s body, they temporarily lose one dot in Appearance per hour as their appearance becomes more and more corpse-like. If the target drops to zero Appearance this way, they become violently ill and vomit up the gris-gris along with the contents of their stomach. The target may choose to expel the gris-gris at any time once it’s become active. This power costs 12 experience points to learn.

 

Exquisite Corpse (Fortitude •••, Obfuscate •••)
When Kindred rise every night, their bodies usually return to the same state they were in. You are able to maintain that perfect look throughout the night through a combination of supernatural physical toughness and your ability to control how others perceive you. 
System: The Kindred suffers no cosmetic changes when she takes damage. If she gets shot, there’s no bullet hole. If a limb is removed, it turns to dust and an illusory one appears where the other once was. All health levels and dice pool penalties remain as normal, but someone trying to hurt the Kindred must make a Willpower roll (difficulty 7) after the first successful attack, or be stunned in disbelief. If stunned, all future rolls that scene to hurt the Kindred are at +2 difficulty. This power costs 18 experience points to learn.

 

Elder Disciplines

 

Marrow Sucker (Thanatosis ••••• •)
All animals contain a spark of life. This power allows you to scrape, suck, and savor those small bits of life out of dead things to allow you to survive. It’s not pretty and it’s messy as hell, but when you’re locked in a crypt with nothing but bones, it can keep you out of torpor for a while. 
System: For every 20 pounds or 9 kilograms of bone the Kindred eats (roughly the weight of the bones in one human skeleton), they gain one point of blood. The Kindred places the bone in or near its mouth and begins to suck. The bones turn into a grey, pulpy mass which the Kindred must then swallow. The product of this Discipline is far less satisfying that animal blood, and only those with this level of the Thanatosis Discipline can benefit from consuming it. 

 

Merits and Flaws

 

Death Grip (3pt. Merit)
Thanks to your connection with death, you have a keen insight few other Kindred possess. When in contact with a dead body, you make a Wits + Alertness roll (difficulty 7). On a success, you intuitively know how the body died. On a failure, you suffer an illusory version of the wound that saps a point of Willpower. On a botch, your body mirrors the wound and hurts itself in the same manner, causing lethal damage equal to the final blow 

Stitcher (3pt. Merit) Getting blown apart isn’t a big deal. When parts of your body are cut off or otherwise removed due to damage, you may make a Dexterity + Medicine (difficulty 7) to sew the part back in place properly. If successful, the cost of healing the wound is reduced by one blood point. 

 

Brittle Body (2 or 4pt. Flaw)
Your already disfigured corpse doesn’t handle the physical demands of being a Kindred as well as it should. Your bones break at inopportune times, your skin tears if you move too quickly, and you have to be careful on a nightly basis. The 2-point version of this flaw gives you a +2 difficulty to all Physical rolls because of the delicate nature of your body. The 4-point version means that you also hang onto physical damage longer than other Kindred. You may still heal health levels as normal, but any dice penalties remain until the next evening when you awaken. This is in addition to the penalty to Physical rolls.

 

Mortal Flashbacks (5pt. Flaw)
Your body remembers your death. Every night when you awaken, you vividly remember the pain of your death wound. The wound reopens during the night and closes itself shortly before you rise. This traumatic reminder of your mortality starts your night off in a bad way. You lose a point of Willpower each night when you awaken, because of the trauma of dying again.