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Anger
is momentary
madness
, so
control
your passion or it will control
you
.
— Horace,
Epistles
An adventure for Vampire the Requiem using the Storytelling Adventure System
by Will Hindmarch
STORYTELLING ADVENTURE SYSTEM
SCENES
12
XP LEVEL
35-74
White Wolf
Publishing, Inc.
1554 Litton Drive
Stone Mountain,
GA 30083
MENTAL OOOO
PHYSICAL OOOOO
SOCIAL OOOOO
Anger
is momentary
madness
, so
control
your passion or it will control
you
.
— Horace,
Epistles
An adventure for Vampire the Requiem using the Storytelling Adventure System
by Will Hindmarch
STORYTELLING ADVENTURE SYSTEM
SCENES
12
XP LEVEL
35-74
White Wolf
Publishing, Inc.
1554 Litton Drive
Stone Mountain,
GA 30083
© 2007 CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and for blank character sheets, which may be reproduced for personal use only. White Wolf, Vampire and World of Darkness are registered trademarks of CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. Vampire the
Requiem, Werewolf the Forsaken, Mage the Awakening, Promethean the Created, Storytelling System and Blood Red & Ash Gray are trademarks of CCP, Inc. All rights reserved. All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by CCP, Inc. The mention of or reference to any company or product in these pages is not a challenge to the trademark
or copyright concerned. This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters and themes. All mystical and supernatural elements are fiction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content. Reader discretion is advised.
MENTAL OOOOO
PHYSICAL OOOOO
SOCIAL OOOOO
“192. Manslaughter is the unlawful killing of a human being without malice.
(a) Voluntary--upon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion.
(b) Involuntary--in the commission of an unlawful act, not amounting to felony; or in the commission of a lawful act
which might produce death, in an unlawful manner, or without due caution and circumspection.”
— From the California penal code
“Thou shalt not kill.”
— The Sixth Commandment
Someone’s Requiem is over.
A vampire is dead — forever dead — and it’s the fault of a Beast from
your coterie. Last night ended with the blinding red rush of frenzy and
the Beast carrying hunger and teeth off into the night in search of trouble.
This night begins in a dank concrete stairwell, underground, in the bloody
and ashy remains of a fellow Kindred. Now this twisted murder mystery
begins. You know who did the killing — it was one of you.
But who is the victim?
P
AGES
TO
P
RINT
For your convenience, here are the page ranges that you’ll find
especially valuable to print. We’re assuming that you’ll read most
of this on your computer screen, and only want to print out the
vital in-play reference material, like character sheets, charts and
scenes. Here they are:
Scene Flow Diagram 32
Act One Scenes
Introduction
“Blood Red and Ash Gray” is a complete, playable crime story for
your
Vampire: The Requiem
chronicle. It’s partly an investigative
procedural episode and partly a tale of tangled motives among a cast of
criminal monsters. Only you, the Storyteller, should read this guide to
the story initially. What follows is a frank how-to guide — containing
characters, scenes, clues — which you and your troupe will assemble
into a dramatic story unique to your own imaginations and choices,
using the game rules found in the
World of Darkness Rulebook
and
Vampire: The Requiem
.
Think of this product as a story kit, as if you’d bought a piece of
modern furniture and brought it home in a big flat box. Inside, you’ll
find all the parts you need to build this story at home, through play.
The tools you need to put this story together are in the
World of
Darkness Rulebook
. When you get your troupe together, you’ll use
all these parts to build something together. It might not look quite the
picture on the box, but that’s fine. Your troupe doesn’t get together to
look at a story, it gets together to build them.
35-41
Act Two Scenes
45-53
Act Three Scenes
55-58
Scene Cards
60-62
So this is a nuts-and-bolts thing. The parts in this kit are designed
to make the actual job of being a Storyteller easier, to make the craft
of Storytelling fast and fun for you. The heavy artful majesty you’ve
read about — the transcendent game experiences that shock and sat-
isfy as well as any novel — those come simply from doing a great job.
Everything in here is intended to take up the slack so you can focus
on doing that great job.
The basic parts that make up this story are simple: Storyteller char-
acters and scenes. Each of them can be used in different ways to keep
the story building towards its climactic end.
1
Characters
This story pits the troupe’s characters against an ensemble of undead
low-lives, each with their own motives and goals. Managing these
characters is the key to making this story work. The scenes that make
up this story unfold according to the motives and wills of the players’
characters and these. No matter what happens, it’s the characters who
determine why things happens.
Scenes
All that said, a story is ultimately about what characters do, not just
why they’re willing to do them. Every scene in this story is motivated
by a decision made by a character. The motivating character might be
one of the players’ vampires or one of yours.
Some scenes happen because the characters go out and make them
happen. Others happen because one of your Storyteller characters hap-
pens to be in the same place — or because she seeks out the troupe’s
coterie in pursuit of revenge.
Don’t be afraid to rearrange the scenes in your story, activating one
twice and skipping another completely, if it jives with the constantly
changing motives of the characters interacting with the players’ cote-
rie. In this story, what happens is essential, but so are the reasons why
these things happen. In every scene, strive to get across one or more
of the Storyteller characters’ motivations to the players
Overview
This is a story about consequences, about finding answers and paying
for them. The story begins with one or more of the characters waking
up at the scene of a grisly crime where, in the throes of frenzy, they
brought Final Death to one of the Damned. The story ends when those
wronged by the characters are finally satisfied, whether that means the
characters pay the price (fair or not) for committing this crime or they
utterly destroy every soul that might seek out revenge.
There’s no arch-criminal behind the scenes here, pulling the char-
acters’ strings. No convoluted conspiracy was organized to dupe them
into performing a frenzied hit on another of their kind. No one wanted
this to happen.
This is a story about how the secrets and conspiracies of the Danse
Macabre get interrupted and broken down by the chaos of the street
and the brutality of the Beast. This is a story where the fate of the city
is not at stake, but the fate of the characters’ allegiances and reputa-
tions might be, and the fate of a broken heart surely is.
W
HAT
’
S
A T
REATMENT
?
treatment:
n.
In Hollywood parlance, a treatment is a short prose
description of a movie’s story, written before production begins. A
treatment describes all the major dramatic “beats” of the story and
sometimes includes directorial or developmental information, too
(i.e., it doesn’t necessarily restrict itself to relating the story).
In Storytelling terms, the treatment is the Storyteller’s core
overview of the story, from authorial notes on subtext all the way to
frank narrative tips. Nothing is implied in a Storytelling treatment;
this is where the author breaks it all down in brief for the Storyteller
at home.
Treatment
A member of the coterie fell into frenzy last night. Because of fear,
anger or hunger, the vampire’s Beast pulled him screaming into the
night. After that, for the frenzied vampire, there’s nothing to recall
except a bloody blur.
That frenzied vampire wakes up, with his humane mind back in his
skull, at the bottom of a windowless concrete stairwell, on the lowest
level of an underground parking garage. His clothes are caked with a
cracked paste of grainy soot and blood. Across from him, heaped on the
floor, is a desiccated corpse — dried up like an exhumed body — dressed
in clothes too young to match the body’s dead hide. From underneath
the brown, split lips peek a pair of yellow fangs.
This is a dead vampire. The frenzied vampire — whom we’ll call the
Killer for the rest of this story — killed him during his blackout, when
the Beast was at the wheel. The Killer may deny it, may not want to
believe it, may not accept that it’s true, but it is.
The sound of footsteps coming down the stairs is what woke the Killer.
It’s the rest of his coterie, who’ve finally found him. So it begins.
The action opens here, with the gore of the crime scene underfoot,
and the clock ticking. The characters are standing in the middle of a
Masquerade breach, up to their ankles in evidence. They must make
the age-old choice at the heart of so many great criminal tales: What
to do with the body?
After that, the story expands to include a half-dozen other vampires. Do
the characters investigate the truth about what happened to the corpse?
2
(It’s not a “who done it?” but a “who’d we do it to?”) Or do they simply
hide their trail as best they can and try to forget it ever happened?
Whatever the players’ characters do, the Victim’s allies notice the dead
vampire is missing and seek out help to find him. A freelance Hound
— they call him the Eye — is dispatched to find answers, and this puts
him on the trail of the characters. Meanwhile, the victim’s lover — named
Sash — seeks out only as much truth as she needs to get revenge.
The middle of the story finds the cast of characters on each other’s
trails, circling and plotting, meeting by chance, meeting by design,
and lying all the while. The Eye investigates the Victim’s murder. The
characters may investigate the Victim. Sash puts out word that she
wants revenge. And all the while the Killer is haunted by his Beast’s
memories in the form of gruesome flashbacks.
Once all the pieces are in motion, the story unfolds how it unfolds.
The characters and your Storyteller characters are in the mix, now,
colliding and ricocheting in the dark city, until someone finally
gets what he or she wants. If the players want the story to turn out
in their favor, they have to manipulate your characters, getting all
the pieces into the right spots on the board so they can make their
climactic move.
Broadly speaking, though, the story — raising the question of whether
or not the characters get away with murder — ends one of two ways:
They do or they don’t. Both of the endings of this story assume the pos-
sibility that they do not (the odds are against them), but include details
for the event that the players pull the characters’ asses out of the fire.
How it ends depends on the choices the players make, and how those
choices provoke or placate the other vampires in the mix. Because
Vampire
is a tragic horror game, a happy ending is impossible. The
question, however, is who gets stuck with the unhappy ending? Is it the
characters, who suffer official punishment at the hands of a powerful
Kindred or are brought down by the revenge of a heartbroken lover?
Or is it that heartbroken vampire, whose lover goes unavenged? Or is
it the Kindred landlord who finds himself forced to pardon and protect
criminal vampires — the characters! — who have politicked their way
to a happy ending?
But if the troupe’s coterie wins its happy ending, it has done so through
blind, inhuman murder. The murderers have won. They are indebted
to the Beast. And they should expect little justice when some other
frenzied vampire happens to slay one of them in some dank concrete
corner of the city.
T
HE
K
ILLER
AND
H
IS
V
ICTIM
In this guide to the story, we refer to the character (or characters)
responsible for the Final Death of Hooper, the victim at the heart
of this tale, simply as “the Killer.”
Sometimes, you’ll see Hooper referred to simply as “the Victim.”
This is just a reminder that every character in this story is potentially
a placeholder for whatever preexisting character from your ongoing
chronicle you would like to drop into the role.
Telling the Story
“Blood Red and Ash Gray” is a dynamic story with a lot of presumed
freedom for the players and their characters. If you’re not an experi-
enced Storyteller comfortable with improvising in response to unex-
pected player choices and character actions, this can be intimidating.
Even guru Storytellers have stories that get away from them.
In the case of this story, the scenes and the Storyteller character that
follow are your tools for keeping the story within the play-space you
want. That play-space might cover physical territory within the World
of Darkness (e.g., just the domains of Cicero and Sol), a time period
(e.g., you want the story to unfold in fewer than four or five nights), or
a dramatic frame (e.g., you want to give the story a particular theme).
These are all fair game. As the Storyteller, it’s not in your best interest
(or the best interest of fun) to force any of these factors into play, but
it is your right to strive for these. (See “Just Say It,” p. 5.)
The scenes in this guide are probably not the only scenes, or kinds of
scenes, that’ll play out in your version of “Blood Red and Ash Gray.” If
the characters try to get away from the Eye rather than be interviewed
by him (in the scene, “Interviewed,” p. 51), you might play a scene
dramatizing a foot chase (see the
World of Darkness Rulebook
, p.
65). If the characters try to follow Sash back to her haven, you might
play out a suspense scene using the “Shadowing” mechanism on p. 76
of the
World of Darkness Rulebook
. The story goes where it goes.
But the scenes in here represent the heart of this story, the scenes
that define it as a play experience, and the scenes you should fall back
on when the players have escaped the Eye or found Sash’s haven.
Think ahead, before it’s time to play this story, about how you might
connect such unexpected scenes back to those in this guide. If the
3
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