Human Powers
In Giovanni: The Last Supper all the humans present at the auction are unique among their kind. They are gifted - or cursed, depending on who’s talking - with unnatural abilities. Such power is usually found in non-human creatures of the supernatural World of Darkness, leading many of these captives to question their very status of being human. Certainly, during a time when the Inquisition sweeps across Europe and superstition is at an all-time high, anyone who is too different from their neighbour can become a target - let alone a person who has genuine anomalies to hide.
After we have assigned participants with whether they will be playing a vampire or a human (we are expecting humans to be a little oversubscribed - but who knows! We also might have two runs of the same game, so you can swap to another run if you really want to play a human and weren’t able to for your original run) then we will get out a form for you to give us your desired power choice, ordering your top five from 1-5. This will all be done soon, before Christmas. You’re welcome to start creating a human character the moment you know you’ll be playing one, and thinking about it, but we imagine having your power known will alter it a lot.
When you create your character, you can work backwards from picking a power and crafting out a life that could have gone with it, or you can imagine the person they were - and could have been - before that life was turned upside down. We recommend thinking about a life independent of a power, and really giving emotional weight to the What If life in a way which you can identity with and feel sympathy for the character wanting it; it makes it all the more tragic when it’s stripped away from them. Three-dimensional characters with flaws, weaknesses and inner conflict are much meatier, realistic individuals than people happy with their lot in life. While we may enjoy the peace of that outside of fiction, in roleplay putting our characters through hard times is a wonderful way to see them come alive.
As Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “A woman is like a teabag. You don’t know how strong she is until you put her in hot water.”
The Deepest Scars
Above all else, the fictional character's internal journey from brokenness to wholeness is one everyone can identify with because, deep down, each of us is a bit damaged. We've all suffered emotional hurts and are looking to heal. And stronger still are the deeper motivations to find our purpose in the world, to belong, and become better people. To accomplish these things, like the hero or heroine of a story, we need to cast aside that which holds us back: our own fears and emotional pain - the root of our insecurities.
Connecting readers with complex characters who remind them of themselves results in story magic - achievable, but magic all the same. And creating true-to-life mirrors with our fiction is the key to drawing readers in. Human desires, needs, beliefs, and emotions are all areas to explore, but one of the most potent real-life reflections that should steer a story from start to finish is the character's emotional wound.
It is the same in roleplay. Except here we are living the unwritten and moving, living, breathing, for our character. I can't really recommend the following book enough for character creation:
The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Psychological Trauma.
You can dip into it on any trauma, it lists out the actual effects of the emotional wound, how it will affect a person's life or perspectives and it ranges from suffering large traumas such as accidentally killing someone or being forced to leave one's homeland as refugee or being raised by a narcissist all the way to being fired, laid off, being the victim of a vicious rumour, forced to keep a dark secret, incest, divorce, experiencing sexual dysfunction... etc.
As for Flaws, go for the companion. It’s what I use for my own fiction, and is a great touchstone for thinking about what motivates a character - in your own writing, or in your roleplay. (I don’t have any association with the book or author, I just love it.)
These are on the UK version of Amazon, so perhaps change the region if you need to!
Of course you don’t need to buy either! I’ve just found it useful myself. It’s well recommended by a lot of authors. <3 (A trait, I’ve noticed of many LARPers is a burning desire to write good fiction, but an equally strong, crippling fear of writing fiction. Did you know that falls into a psychological, childhood root trauma? Heh. It’s horrible, I know.)
I would say the first one, the emotional wound book, is your go-to for this game. Your human character will certainly have one, or several of these, and it’s important to know how to play it sensitively - you may have players around you who have a lived experience of what you are portraying. It is a large playerbase, and such games as these tend to attract people who have had rough experiences in life; horror, and strange fantasy, tends to be appealing to those of us with lived trauma. Put some thought into what drives your characters deepest insecurities and fears, thus, and do a bit of learning - read the lived experiences from people who have suffered what you’re giving your character - so it doesn’t play out like a caricature or a trope.
You may have players around you who have a lived experience of what you are portraying.
Use the first book in a safe space, if you get it. It's written by someone who knows their stuff well, and it can be upsetting to see your own limitations or wounds put into black and white text, especially if you were unaware of where yours might have come from. It is an incredible reflection of life and our deeper selves as people, and in rather no-nonsense text.
Playing a character with profound trauma, mental illness and darkness can be triggering for other participants.
Some of us identify with the experience that these human characters have been forced through. Playing it realistically carries with it a measure of responsibility.
A lot of our selection for human characters is based, either, on whether the participant themselves is sensitive to how they can achieve this trauma in their portrayal - i.e. without making mental illness or the character’s suffering hammy - or able and willing to learn.
These are not things to be afraid of to lean into; it is actively encouraged for human characters. Be brave - and keen to try. We’ll talk you through it and can go into good depth brainstorming your character with you, so you can fall in love with them and their hardships as much as we’re sure everyone else will around you.
Without further ado -
Powers Menu
Each power has its own unique page, too. The button following any synopsis will take you in.
The Alchemist
Short Description: From poison-smithing to potions and perfumes, you've had an uncanny knack for the craft of a mixologist. Whether formally educated or not, you have an intuitive knowledge for handling dangerous ingredients, and you know what goes where to create just what you need. Unbeknown to you at this stage, you have a supernatural gift - one that, when harnessed by the right person, will see you able to combine the potency of two samples of vitae (vampiric blood) and in doing so, create a third, improved sample, unifying the two and lowering the resultant generation for use in waking up ancient vampires from Torpor.
The Apprentice
Short Description: You devour new knowledge like vampires consume blood, and always within you is an endless, hopeless need for more. With such a wide skill set and a breadth of modern education out there and available to someone of your talents, you've likely been coined the ultimate Renaissance Man - or women, were there any such person. Unfortunately boredom is literally painful to you; it eats away at something within you, and should you find yourself with nothing to do, your skin begins to itch and heat and crawl until you are - actually - burning from the inside out. It's almost killed you before.
The Bane
Short Description: They call you Mage Bane. Your blood hums with a strange power, almost as though it was oppositely polarised from the energy of actual magic. Vampires with access to sorcery that touch you feel a tingling numbness in their skin as your blood roils and writhes in response. You are an anti-magic agent, devouring and nullifying even the strongest of thaumaturgical effects on an individual; all they need is to ingest your blood.
The Blank
Short Description: You nullify the powers of those who were born on the day of the Black Sun, rendering them ineffective. When taken directly from your veins your blood dampens any such ability of your fellow humans, so it can be forcibly fed to a human to temporarily mute their magic. Otherwise, on rare occasions you can send out a wave of anti-power that affects everyone in a six-foot radius, temporarily stripping special humans of their power as well as making supernatural creatures such as vampires lethargic, and their Beasts slow to rouse.
The Bond-Breaker
Short Description: Your blood out-competes and out-masters all others for its strength. Something within you rejects shackles outright, and your blood not only dominates others into submission, but it shrugs off attempts to subdue you with laughable ease. Unfortunately this makes you one of the most targeted humans by vampires - a creature known for oppressing the will of its victims through the addictive properties of its blood. Properties that you ignore entirely.
The Celebrant
Short Description: Much like ancient myths of the deity Pan or the Horned King, you are endowed with the ability to cause reckless mania in others. Whilst you yourself are somewhat resistant to it and can remain lucid if you so chose, those who spend time close to you for more than a few minutes might fall under its spell. For when your power is at its height, it triggers complete loss of inhibitions. This often manifests in an intoxicated group surrounding you, engaging in unspeakable acts as if possessed by devils.
The Cleric
Short Description: Many would say you have been blessed with the ability to perform miracles; you can heal conditions and injuries in others, absorbing them into your own body as long as you retain skin on skin contact. You have only ever seen this as a curse. From the moment it became known, you have been used for your powers by countless individuals, and viewed as little more than a valuable tool or mythical creature. The transfer of harm causes you agonising, crippling pain. When you heal someone it is as though every nerve ending in the body is being scraped along a branding iron - and once the process begins you cannot consciously break away or stop it. You can be forced apart from your partner, but if that happens the partner retains their affliction.
The Doll
Short Description: Upon the consumption of another's blood (one drop minimum) a temporary supernatural bond is created between the two of you, the strength of the bond dependent on the amount of their blood you consumed. For one hour after, if you sustain any damage or injury, it is mirrored in your victim. Likewise, sensations such as freezing cold or heat are also replicated, as well as intense pleasure. You can obtain this blood yourself (biting, cutting and licking the knife etc.) or it can be fed to you, but it must be relatively fresh - a sample no older than an hour. The supernatural bond lasts for one hour, or until you taste the blood of another.
The Dreamer
Short Description: You are a channel, able to bridge the minds of multiple people in one dreaming state. From the prime dreamer's mind a memory is called forward, and within that memory do each of the joined dreamers find themselves, every one of them an actor on the stage of the original scene. They live the experience as it occurred, and in this way forgotten memories can be recalled, because upon waking from the vision all the dreamers have perfect recollection of the event, as if it were theirs. Sadly for you, not only are you unable to be the prime dreamer and reap the benefits of your own power, but the world is increasingly fading to you. Nothing feels real anymore, if it ever has, and you cannot help shake the sense that this entire world is a false play, a dream itself.
The Echo
Short Description: You have been granted the power to look like whatever individual whom the viewer treasures most - whether this was in life, or post embrace. Without having to do anything, others find themselves double-taking to look at you - you remind them uncannily of someone precious to them.
The Expositor
Short Description: You are the perfect spy. If you spend a few minutes observing a target, you feel a mysterious whisper in your mind that communicates a single, specific weakness or vulnerability of theirs. Most of the time it will be one or two words (never more than seven), and could be as cryptic as ‘My Dear Emily’ but it will be an incredible personal and powerful word to them. This of course could get you in incredible trouble were they to know what you know. You have no idea who or what is granting you this insight, but it has both helped and hindered you in the past. You actively struggle to resist the arrogance that comes with such knowledge, and often it is your downfall.
The Forger
Short Description: You may well have been lauded as a genius child, a prodigy. You were able to perfectly replicate the greatest of paintings, the surest of calligraphic hand strokes, entire passages word for word from the Bible, your school texts - whether you were taught to read or not. You can replicate it. Whether this has bred a poisonous ego or a crippling sense of imposter syndrome, your own novel inventions lack life and look ugly to you. It's a desolate thing, being praised only for what another person has made. You're an artistic mimic, though your ability to create such exact copies could lead to a very different, criminal life.
The Fury
Short Description: Your anger feels like a tangible thing, raging in the shadows of your soul, clawing at your consciousness in a bid to find release. Others can taste it in your blood, your sweat - and even your tears.
The Ghost
Short Description: Life, when you're barely living, can stretch on. There's only so long you can go on telling yourself that you exist, that you matter, when the matter of this world doesn't even recognise you. Doors, objects, people - it's as if you're not a person at all. Being able to move through a solid wall is novel for only so long. People who have people in their lives underestimate how having no one, makes you want to die.
The Gorgon
Short Description: Your blood hisses and roils with poison, which permeates your very flesh and even your saliva. Regular humans experience organ failure upon ingesting your bodily fluids, which can be fatal if enough is consumed. Meanwhile with humans born on the day of the Black Sun, it causes significant pain and debilitating cramps that make it difficult to engage in physical activities or perform actions requiring intense concentration for the next hour, at which point their bodies can shrug off the effects. To vampires, your blood tastes unique with a strong tingling sensation as it flows down their throats. It is for want of a better word, 'spicy'. For one hour after consuming it, vampires that ingest your bodily fluids experience tingling pain and a loss of some mental faculties, which manifests in brain fog and an overall vagueness to their words and actions. It is hard to concentrate, and the body feels more sluggish than before.
The Hound
Short Description: Your sense of taste and smell is unparalleled and unnatural. Tasting enough of someone’s blood makes you able to determine certain things about them, even what other people who share their blood biologically, or vampirically, might be doing. You can locate a missing child or person by consuming a measure of their parent’s or relative’s blood; you can pick out a month old scent in a crowd; but the more you use your exceptional gift, the closer it brings you to something else, something that has dogged your steps and dreams all your life.
The Illusionist
Short Description: Making people disappear and reappear is a wonderful way to ply a trade on the stage. Sometimes you wish you could make the idiots of the world disappear, for good, but your talents require a willing participant to your "parlour tricks." Being able to hide up to five people though, as if they weren't there to the naked eye? Have them vanish in a blink? That's magic, to people. You know they’re all still there hiding in your illusion, you can see them and they can see each other, but no one else can.
The Inquisitor
Short Description: It is your honour bound duty to expose that which is false, and seek the truth in the words of monsters. Whether granted by divine means or not, humans and vampires within six feet (roughly an arm span) of you must not lie. They can omit the truth or avoid questions entirely, but they cannot fabricate. Humans are slightly more vulnerable to this power than vampires.
The Leech
Short Description: You feel a constant numb, uncomfortable sensation in the pits of your belly. It is alleviated when you spend time with other living creatures, so long as you are able to touch them. Whilst most experience no effects from this, the weak, very young or very old can waste away with prolonged contact. Your body cries out for contact like a starved infant, and you also find yourself occasionally afraid of being left alone; solitary confinement would be a torture. If you make skin to skin contact with a vampire for at least five seconds, some of their innate power flows into you.
The Leper
Short Description: You are cursed to never feel pain. Some might see this as a blessing, but it has only caused you suffering. From a young age you injured yourself without realising it - especially when fire was involved. You wouldn't remove your hand from a burning stove in time; you don't think to bend your legs properly after a jump; you wouldn't notice the cold. By now you are disfigured and scarred. Other people treat you as if you are diseased, and you have led a harsh existence. Worse, now vampires exist and they seem to gain immense bodily resilience from drinking your blood, a gift to them that you are afforded no part in.
The Mistletoe
Short Description: Your blood inspires abrupt, intense attraction between the people who have recently kissed you. Even your presence in a room can muddy the air with sexual tension, and people around you find themselves interlocked with one another until they pull apart, stunned and outraged. Your power will flex and flare out of your control, and obsessions between people - vampires included - that already exist are the most affected; your presence near such people inspires insatiable hunger for each other, be that in a misplaced sense of lust, positive affection or just outright blood hunger. It depends on the people involved, since you’re so unable to predict it, and you’ve been to blame throughout your life for hoodwinking and bewitching people out of their relationships and reserved, faithful lives.
The Mole
Short Description: Like the elders of the Gangrel Clan of vampires, you are able to move through the levels of earth and merge your physical form with the soil, becoming almost insubstantial to hide and to travel. It’s just as well: this world feels alien to you, and too bright. The turning of the age has brought with it belching fumes; impenetrable academia; political rot; and the expansion of western ideals into everything - the world is shrinking, the wild land is dying and the indigenous peoples of it are suffocating. With more financial loopholes than you can keep up with you are finding yourself slowly bound by a system, gasping for the old earth and clawing through the bars of this loud Renaissance cage.
The Plague
Short Description: You've stared out on a land ravaged by drought, its dry ground cracked crying out for nourishment; you have seen harvests devastated, the skies blackened by locusts and cattle punctured with bites, blisters and boils; your life is an omen of death and hardship to come. You carry the curse of your blood in your own face and body, warped and horrific as it is, a thing you cannot ever hide. Your very presence destroys the natural order and ravishes a land with change. At this point, you've never known a home that you haven't bled dry, and destroyed.
The Prey
Short Description: You are possessed by a constant awareness of just how in danger you are in this world of monsters and unseen terrors. Over the years you have learned to contain your fear, but when your stress gets the better of you, you can transform into a lithe, sinewy hare whilst retaining your self awareness. When you transform, your clothes change with you. Under stress, you see the world as if in slow motion, and when you sprint you blur to the human eye.
The Prophet
Short Description: As a child, when the visions came you couldn't control them. Not when they happened, nor the situation you'd be in at the time of the bodily and mental arrest. It's like ducking your head underwater - local amplification but the loss of the rest of the world. Everything around you distorts, becomes muffled, that's the warning you get. Better as hell not be swimming out in the ocean when it happens, or be on the back of a horse with the hedgerow blurring by your shoulder. Now, you’ve gained some mastery over them, although they’re no less painful when they hit. Your power can unite other seers or oracles and bind them in a single, amplified vision for clarity. A skilled vampiric oracle should well be able to direct such a force.
The Purge
Short Description: You can physically see sickness, though not sickness of the body. Yours is the domain of the supernatural and the spiritual. Anything that doesn't belong - you can strip it, flush a system clean through and cleanse it of unnatural corruption. Your power is restricted to sentient things, but you can return the creature or person to a place of relative spiritual health, and for a moment in time remind them of what it was to be truly themselves.
The Reverb
Short Description: Your body absorbs background extremes of emotion, especially negative emotion. When a room becomes thick with anger and stress, you’re able to project a telekinetic wave of force which abruptly repulses people (enemies and allies alike) and small objects away from you. You seem to act as a natural battery, and your very blood could be used to empower rituals a level higher than they ordinarily should be - with no requirement on the ritualist to adjust their foci or components.
The Shadow
Short Description: Although it's still frightening, you've learned how to co-exist with the unnerving sentience that inhabits - or is - your own shadow. It is wilful, twisted, often-times cruel, but it has saved your life more times than you can count. In the world of colour and sound, people fear you, and they've hunted you. It's hard sometimes, to hold onto the hope that this world is warmer than the cold-edged place where your shadow dwells.
The Trueseer
Short Description: You often catch the movement of strange shadows and shapes at the corner of your vision. Other supernatural beings attempting to hide are visible to you - though you can't see 'ghosts' as such, you constantly see things you can't explain, especially if you are stressed or unable to concentrate on keeping your mind clear. You see through this life's illusions, and the illusions of others.
The Unknown
Short Description: This world feels like a sunrise, by comparison to that dark and colourless place. A sunrise of vast and magnanimous proportion below a horizon blistering with life. There is pleasure here, there is comfort, there are constants. The world's like that. It is endlessly forgiving in its lack of need to forgive. You don't know how it happened, or whether you deserved it, but unlike all the other humans at this auction you were not born on the day of the Black Sun - you died. You died and you came back and now nothing is right anymore.
The Voice
Short Description: The heights and depths of your songs carry powerful emotions, and it can manipulate the emotions of those around you. With magnificent arias or oration, you raise others to the heights of passion; black melancholy flows from your melodies of despair. The part of this power you cannot control ties into the banks of memory - both yours and theirs. The closer you come to perfecting your voice, and the more enthralling the performance, the harder it is to remember your own personhood. Day by day you are becoming what they always wanted: an object of performance, beautiful but empty. How long until you are nothing but song?
The Witness
Short Description: In Aesop's Fables there is a cautionary story, numbered 239 in the Perry index. To perjure oneself meant waging war on the gods, who even themselves could suffer under the same sanctions. In taking an oath one called down a conditional curse on oneself, to take effect if one lied or broke one's promise. Oath-taking and the penalties or perjuring oneself played an important role in the Ancient Greek concept of justice - but an even greater one in your life.