#Winter Masquerade

[wintermasquerade]

"Welcome to the masquerade."

Abel Dumont, CEO (M), played by Shrimps

Arabella Augustine, Video Essayist (F), played by Aster

Azuma Kondou, Talent Manager (F), played by Aly

Cupid, Event Planner (M), played by snow

Darcie D'aubigne, Cafe Maid (F), played by Pastry

Desdemona D'Angeli, Death Doula (F), played by June

Ergo, Metal Singer (M), played by Lovely

Grayson Fletcher, Snowboarder (M)

James Oakley, Wall Street Shark (M), played by Spooky

Katsuko Ichimei, Politician (F), played by Lila

Kikine Kimpo, Ultimate Rakugoka (F), played by Jay

Minuet Baudin, Theatre Actress (F), played by Augur

Ruby Rabbit, Detective (NB), played by Vince

Saengmul, Vocal Synth Producer (NB), played by Sheep

Scarlet Ambrose, Prosecutor (F), played by Tulip

Shin, Hitman (M), played by Sandy

Tatsumi Hatanaka, Wakagashira (M), played by Rich

Wu Xue, Postman (M), played by Rei

Yasuhiro Hashimoto, Kimono Tailor (M), played by Dao

Yu-Mi Seung, Ventriloquist (F), played by Faust

[eyeliner-and-c1garettes]

What?! Me, another masquerade set! I simply cannot. No, I can’t! But I…. Oh, a winter masquerade? Well, that’s different. Oh, what hurt could one more do? ❄️

[kevinklehr]

Listening to audiobook auditions

This is not an easy task. Some of these guys are good so there’s added pressure to pick the right one. And I have a bias for theatrical reads. Partly because many moons ago I studied acting, and partly because my last audiobook was presented by a trained British actor. All of this is being organised by my publisher, so every couple of days a new batch of recorded files are emailed to me. I’m…

[dostoevskybignaturals]

“You called me "angel" for the first time, my heart leapt from me

You smile now, I can see its pieces still stuck in your teeth.”

-

Bye, getting in line to beg Ava Winters to kill me. (Toreador OC belongs to @diableriedoll)

[diableriedoll]

As part of a trade, @crownedinmarigolds drew my Ava 🥹 She's so beautiful, omg.

Thank you so much 🥺✨

[paanmoxi]

WINTERHAWK 🗣️ENEMIES TO LOVERS🗣️DOUBLE SPIES 🗣️ MASQUERADE BALL 1800'S

[cloudcountry]

ROLLO REACTING TO US BITING HIM 😍😍😍 crack

crack.

funny

fluff maybe

but mostly funny

like

bite him then try to swing him around but bc this is semi realistic unfortunately he just stands there like 🧍‍♂️

LMFOAIDIWI

SUMMARY: you bite rollo.

WARNINGS: none!!

COMMENTS: this is such a weird request but rollo is so touch starved he'd be into it do not pretend im wrong

this one is for the biters i know you're out there

Rollo is working hard, you’ve noticed.

The library is quiet, aside from the occasional sound of pencils scratching on paper and soft whispers of equations being exchanged between students. You purse your lips as you stare at your Rollo’s back, hunched over some papers as his hand scribbles equations down. His other hand is furiously punching numbers into a calculator, and it makes you wonder if he’s working on the school’s budget instead of math homework.

You walk up to him, peeking over his shoulder at the work in front of him. Yup, definitely his math homework. Your face twists up in displeasure as you read the equations, unable to understand what any of them mean.

Unfortunately, you can’t help him with this one. You’re out of your depth here.

So instead, you place a gentle hand on his shoulder and dive into the crook of his neck, nibbling gently at the skin you find there.

Rollo jolts up in his chair and whips around, eyes wide and face red. You swear you heard him squeak, and you wish you’d heard it clearly because the prospect of Rollo squeaking is almost too good to be true.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he hisses, scrambling for his handkerchief to cover up his blush.

“It’s a library, Rollo.” you snicker, squeezing his shoulder as you take the seat next to him, “You need to be quiet.”

He huffs, clearly annoyed, but makes no move to shove you away. Rollo may be fed up with you, but you really are special to him.

[mountainashfae]

Local Malkavian uses Presence when pouting to his pack priest that she's keeping secrets..... Except he doesn't actually know he has that discipline. Diablerie has consequences.

How could anyone say no to this face? ✨

[galejro]

First shots of Vienna for VTM Reawakened as I began works on the Hub area, a bitter winter wonderland.

[wintermasquerade]

“Welcome, my dear.”

A fire crackles in a hearth, red tongues stretching upwards with orange embers that flutter daintily. The warmth washes over you like a loving embrace. Despite that, you feel a chill. You feel empty, as if you’ve lost something very important. A woman smiles down at you, a motherly kindness on her face.

“You have died,” she tells you softly. She kneels before you, tilting your head upwards. She doesn’t look human.

“But I can save you, for a price.”

————-　❄　————-

Winter Masquerade is an 18+ mutual killing game rp group set in purgatory with inspirations from the Soulsborne series, Frostpunk, and Dungeons & Dragons. This game will feature fun dungeon-exploring mechanics, rooms with mysteries to uncover, a 2-3 day queue-based trial system, and more! Step into an unknown mansion blanketed by the cold, where venturing outside means certain death. 20 unfortunate souls have found themselves here, where the ticket for another chance is given to the survivor.

This game will feature: ❄ A cast of 20 adult characters, both regular people and Ultimates. ❄ Unique roster art, AA designs, designs for victims post-death, and execution art. ❄ Videos for BDAs and AAs. ❄ Dungeons to explore with fun challenges and puzzles. ❄ Boss battles to fight alongside your allies. ❄ 5 chapters, all hosted on Discord. ❄ Multiple endings.

————-　❄　————-

The storm is coming and it won’t be merciful.

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[themilkshanghai]

Masquerade Dance

[brennustheskeleton]

Doodles below

[diableriedoll]

Because how many ask games are too many? Trick question, there's never enough! We all know we adore talking about our Kindred and hearing about others.

Send as many Clans/ Cults of your choice to the reblogger, plus their OC name, let them answer the relevant questions about their Kindred. The questions are based around the Clan/ Cult rather than you have to send the cult or clan the OC is in. ♥️🩸

Add your OC's names in the tags and share!

Don't forget to send asks to the person you reblogged this from!

Clan Inspired

Banu Haqim - What's the worst punishment your OC has received? Have they given any punishments out? How was it handled?

Brujah - What is something your OC will always fight for? What's the reason?

Gangrel - What is your OC's Beast like? Do they get along.. more or less?

Hecata - Does your OC have a family? Be it through blood or chosen. Tell us about them.

Lasombra - What's the most ruthless thing your OC has done? Why?

Malkavian - Think of your OC as a mortal, pre-embrace. If someone showed them what's going to happen to them, from the night they were turned to now, would they let the embrace happen or would they try to avoid it?

Ministry - What's the best/ worst lie your OC have ever told? What was the reason? Was it believed?

Nosferatu - Your OC is now cursed. Again. Their favourite physical thing about them has been changed to their worst nightmare. What is it?

Ravnos - Is your OC a daredevil or are they more cautious? What's the most chaotic thing that they've done?

Salubri - Ignore how many dots in Humanity there are. In your opinion, what's your OC's humanity like?

Toreador - Describe your OCs aesthetic in the worst way possible, then tell us what it actually is.

Tremere - What is something your OC wanted and got it for themselves, no matter how selfish or high the cost was?

Tzimisce - What's your OC's most prized possession? How long have they had it? Why is it important?

Ventrue - Does your OC have any influence or sway anywhere? Are they respected?

Caitiff - Would you say your OC is quite individualistic or do they conform to their Clan stereotype?

Thin-blood - Has your OC ever been shunned or cast-out? Are they currently an outcast? Or have they ever shunned someone else? Why?

Cult Inspired

Ashfinders - Does your OC use social media? If so, which platforms and what's their following like?

Bahari - How well does your OC cope with physical and/ or mental pain?

Church of Caine - Does your OC have any religious/ Kindred beliefs?

Church of Set - Is your OC able to be their true selves? If not, why? Is there anyone they can be real in front of?

Cult of Shalim - What's the worst thing your OC has suffered so far?

Cult of Mithras - Has your OC been in a blood bond? Are they currently in one? Do they have anyone bonded to them?

Nephilim - What pleasures does your OC get out of their (un)life?

[anarchswild]

FangFest '24 - Day 6

Winter Chills, the Kiasyd Pack Priest of the Dollhouse Pack. Unlike most Kiasyd, she would much rather have an unlife of action and violence than one of isolation and study. Her old pack was killed by a group of Camarilla kindred and she has vowed revenge against them. She is an avid Noddist, quoting the book constantly to her new packmates, and she has grown attached to the group's Malkavian. To his dismay, at times. (played by @prettycatgirlwinter)

[gorbalsvampire]

More Humane Than Human - Humanity as degeneration vs. Humanity as detachment

I wanted to repost the Requiem readthrough review before I got into this, because it started as one of those "Requiem vs. Masquerade which is better" conversations. In rules terms I think V5 has iterated successfully on Requiem - there's probably about the same density of actual rules there but V5 makes a better fist of hiving some of them off into advanced/optional/discretionary territory - but Requiem innovates hard in terms of ideas about how vampires and vampirism work, introducing things like the Predator's Taint and Lashing Out and, crucially, Touchstones.

Touchstones give the lie to the "V5 does rules better" claim. I have never liked how V5 does them. The notion of tying an individual vampire to a person, place or artefact is nothing new. Those of us who are Old, or retro-curious, may recall Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, in which Brujah himbo protagonist Christof is told he needs an "anchor" for his Humanity and selects Anezka, the nun who nursed him back to health and who he's been having less than holy thoughts about ever since he woke up. Christof is told, by his mentor Wilhelm, that choosing a person as his "anchor" is a dangerous call - but his mind is made up and, not to spoil a twenty-five-year-old game, it turns out to be for the best for both of them... as long as he's kept his Humanity up, anyway.

So, Touchstones in the context of Masquerade are nothing new to me - in fact I was quite surprised when the full TTRPG didn't have rules for them. But! Touchstones in V5 are a bit different. Instead of one, there are many: instead of humanity in general, each of the vampire's Convictions has a named person attached to it.

The problem - and this isn't just me, it's something that's come up in all the V5 games I've played or hosted - is that viable characters have two or three Convictions. Coming up with two or three Touchstones at character generation, before you have a feel for who this person is and how you're going to play them and what their routine looks like, has not worked for anyone I've played the game with. One might work - most of us can ideate a relationship with one other person before we start playing - but three seems to stretch the limited sense of a starting character's identity too thin.

Rules As Written, of course, a Touchstone doesn't have to be someone significant to the story. They can just be someone your character saw every day, or sees every night, or notices every time they pass by. But... that's bullshit. That is not a "hang a key element of your personal ethic and capacity for self care on this person" relationship. I can see the story beat of "this person isn't there any more and you're morally shook by it" working once, maybe, but still, permanently altering your character's relationship with the Beast is kind of an integral function of the game. It feels like that hat should be hung on a sturdier hook - a full-on fleshed-out SPC. Like in Requiem, where you get one Touchstone.

Also, Humanity works differently, at its most fundamental level, and this exposes a key difference between the two games - one where I think Requiem is strides ahead. @awakenedsalamander touched on this talking about the differences in the concept of the Masquerade between the two games, but I want to go deeper on it.

In Masquerade, Humanity is about degeneration - it's the Downward Spiral, an almost inevitable drift from Man to Beast with exceptions being so rare they're practically mythical. It's about becoming worse, with all the moral judgment that implies, about committing acts that appear on a Hierarchy of Sins.

(At least, it is in V20. V5 abolishing that in favour of chronicle specific Tenets and character specific Convictions is really smart. I didn't grasp how it was meant to work from the corebook - it took the Player's Guide to spell it out to me - but now that I grok it, I love the tension between the Tenets that forbid and govern a character's actions and the Convictions that excuse and forgive those actions.)

In Requiem, Humanity is detachment. It's about the state of being a vampire slowly and inexorably reminding you over and over that you're not human any more, drifting further and further away from what you were and into the all-night society of predators. It's quantified in terms of Breaking Points - roughly grouped by significance and severity, these experiences hammer home that you're dead, you're dead, you're dead and out of this world. It's less "I did a bad thing" and more "I experienced something that no human ever should" like walking off a stab wound or being reminded you're a hundred years old and still act like you're twenty. When you hit a Breaking Point, you roll a number of dice - how many is a function of how serious and hard to avoid confronting the Breaking Point is - to avoid losing Humanity.

Now. In the past I've met quite a few players who don't really want to engage with the morality play aspects of Masquerade. Whether that's "we want to speedrun to Humanity 4 so we can play the game 'properly' without having to pretend we regret doing all the things RPG protagonists do" or "we think it's kinda stupid the way low Humanity says you may no longer create art or have sex without 'faking it' and let's interrogate what the developers think 'sex' is, shall we?" doesn't really matter. Maybe you want to play on the theme of post-humanity rather than be wrist-slapped for trying to do main character stuff. I don't blame you.

I think it should be possible to wholesale lift the Requiem system of detachment, rolled for at Breaking Points and mitigated by a singular Touchstone who can be a more developed character, or a place, or an object, and slot that into V5 replacing Tenets, Convictions and Stains.

That gives you a version of Humanity that's more permissive and less frontloaded, allows you to go deep on one hook instead of ideating sets of pairs before you even know who your character is. It also divorces functions of sexuality and creativity from being a good person - in the Requiem model, vampires fuck, and make art, and low Humanity expresses more in how they do it than whether or not they can.

(Although - there'd need to be some finesse around Oblivion, since I think the Discipline's theme of entropy inducing personal decay still works in the detachment model - maybe keep Stains as an additional lever, a function of Messy Criticals and dangerous Disciplines, and have Breaking Points inflict Stains instead of automatically triggering rolls...)

Important note on this idea: this does NOT exempt you from having a conversation about what's off limits in Session 0. It's easy to miss this in the V5 core book, but Chronicle Tenets aren't a safety tool. Chronicle Tenets are the moral rules that are going to come up A LOT in play, they define what your coterie collectively accepts as Doing A Bad Thing, to be excused for personal reasons (i.e. Convictions). An actual out of character trigger, an aspect of the World of Darkness with which a real live person who exists does not wish to engage, is a line or a veil - something we either don't include, or don't narrate explicitly. It's not something we build into one of the game's mechanical loops and ensure will come up. That would be... the absolute opposite of safe.

Whadda we think?

[porcelainseashore]

Bonus art for this commission of my VtM OC, Gael, by @arc-tu-rus! Seriously, you’re so cool for creating a “found footage” version of the original. 

This piece was inspired by Paul Maheke’s Levant, which I had the pleasure of viewing at the Tate Modern. A single light illuminating the blurred movements of an abstract body in space, captured in the image for a brief moment before fading away, really screamed ‘Gael’ to me.

Her whole life she’s been an outsider, invisible, and living on the fringes of society. Now that she’s in the limelight with the Winters, all she wants to do is to retreat into the shadows and remain unnoticed again.