Classic VtM - Notes on the Clan Tremere Weakness

Various Drew Tucker pieces from the Revised Tremere Clanbook

This year I dipped into a trad gaming a bit and ran some Classic World of Darkness. It was an amusing change of pace from my usual fare though I may have went a little overboard on diving into the lore. One aspect I wanted to sort out a satisfactory take on was the inherent weakness of Clan Tremere.

The Revised edition weakness is as follows (p. 79):

Weakness: By clan law, all neonate Tremere must drink the blood of the clan’s seven elders when they are created. All Tremere are a least one step toward being blood bound to their elders, and therefore usually act with great clan loyalty — in order to avoid having such loyalty forced on them. What’s more, this arrangement means that Tremere are hard-pressed to resist the will of their elders; the difficulty of any Dominate attempt from a clan superior is one less.

With the added shorthand on the character sheet: "One Step Toward Clan Blood Bond".

Unlike the normal blood bond, this one exists to centralize focus and loyalty to Clan Tremere rather than to a singular figure. Any superior can exploit it, not just the seven on the council.

The V20 edition weakness is as follows:

Weaknesses: Tremere dependency on blood is even more pronounced than that of other Kindred. It takes only two draughts of another vampire’s blood for a Tremere to become blood bound instead of the normal three — the first drink counts as if the Tremere had taken two drinks. The elders of the Clan are well aware of this, and seek to impart loyalty to the Clan by forcing all neonate Warlocks to drink of the (transubstantiated) blood of the seven Tremere elders soon after their Embrace. 

Again, the idea here is that this bond's emotional focus is still the clan on the whole. 

Breaking blood bonds and clan ties is a big deal in Vampire. It drove the Anarchs to develop rituals to try and wither such bonds. It drove the Sabbat to create the Vaulderie. Both are means of getting around the agonizing (and near impossible to escape when actively enforced) grip of a full blood bond between thrall and regnant. Another extreme alternative is to let another fully bond you, trading one master for another (only a foolish neonate would think the grass is greener).

If breaking blood bonds were easy, it wouldn’t be a big deal in the setting. If the so-called weakness of the Tremere was just another blood bond that could be wiped away or weened with time, it wouldn’t be a big deal. The Vaulderie is notable because the Viniculi is creates it doesn’t fade. A one hundred year old Vinculum is still as potent as the night it arose. It is not so easily erased. In my opinion, it stands to reason that the ritual created by the elders of a global organization of blood mages that emphasizes hegemony and loyalty would ensure that their mandatory-on-pain-of-final-death ritual that bonds a neonate to the Council of Seven is similarly potent.

(There actually is an extremely potent level 7 ritual that might exist to shatter the Vinculi in the Revised edition but that is Sabbat Inquisitor or Camarilla Justicar shit. Effectively a non-factor for normal consideration.)

V20 notes that the ritual Abandon the Fetters, while effective against Blood Bonds, is not able to affect Vinculi or the Transubstantiation of the Seven ritual that binds the Tremere. In Revised, it is noted in the Flaw “Bound to the Council", however, that one could get out of this by using the Vaulderie, accepting another blood bond, or using Abandon the Fetters so there is a notable difference here. The absence of fading with time here is notable in my opinion!

To me this indicates that it is truly a potent ritual. And even if Revised doesn’t have the note that it can’t break the Transubstantiation of the Seven ritual, the requirement of procuring the blood of the Council of Seven to enable an attempt basically makes it all but impossible from the start (or at the very least quite the chronicle hook). In the meta-plot, Carna’s (implied) use of the The Book of the Grave-War to end her enslavement to the Pyramid without the Vaulderie and without trading one master for another is a notable thing that could not be replicated by going about usual methods of erasing a blood bond.

In V20, the idea is that all Tremere who partake in their initiation ritual are two steps bound. This is a nice way to subsume the Revised era bonus to Dominate from elders.

At this point, some operating notes become clear here for Revised and V20:

• The bond created by The Transubstantiation of the Seven doesn’t fade with time.
• In Revised, this is why it is assumed that all proper Tremere are one step bound to their elders.
• In V20, this means that all proper Tremere are at least two steps bound to their elders.

A fun quote from the Revised era Guide to the Camarilla to go along with this:

“[the ritual] keeps [neonates] in line thereafter for fear of having the full bond enforced, while troublemakers are that much easier to Dominate or bond fully. Woe betide a Tremere who gets himself blood bound to someone outside the clan and is discovered, for doing so they have destroyed their elder’s most effective leverage on them. If the error is uncovered, the bound Tremere can expect an unpleasant time, and the vampire they are bound to will probably be marked for death.”

So to re-calibrate my thoughts here:

• In Revised and V20, the Tremere weakness can remain as is.
• The bond created by The Transubstantiation of the Seven doesn’t fade with time.
• This blood bond (both partial and full) elicits this dedication to the elders and their chosen representatives aka your clan superiors.
• In Revised this is one step bond, while in V20 it is a two step bond.
• A full blond bond, wiping out all other bonds, can negate this ritual’s partial bond and is therefore grounds for censure by the clan.
• Abandon the Fetters is basically useless in both editions (being completely ineffective in V20 and having practically unattainable requirements to even try in Revised).
• The Vaulderie is able to negate this bond and was the primary means by which the Tremere antitribu defected. Obviously grounds for being marked for final death by the clan.

Seasoning to Taste: Tweak The Strong & The Wise Classes

Aurore Folny, Boromir

An important part of running Whitehack is making it your own. The game offers lots of dials and levers to tune for your campaign setting and to support a variety of character types. Even so, certain mechanics might spark confusion or distaste. And if referees or players are going to take issue with anything in the Whitehack, it’s usually one of two things in my experience: the Strong's looting ability and Miracles costing HP.

I'm no stranger to house rules and I prefer to be accommodating to the tastes of my players rather than all by-the-book all the time, so here are some tweaks and musings when these points have come up over the years.

The Strong

On Conflict Looting

As the mechanical interface players look towards for a classic warrior or fighting experience, the Strong's ability to "loot" conflicts for spendable bonuses or uses of substances/supernatural abilities can easily be seen as out of place. And if it doesn't click, it sparks the same questions too. Is every martial type character in Whitehack a blue mage? How am I supposed to explain this in my setting? Is my warrior magical or something? Why is my fighter weird?

As a short explainer, Strong characters can hold powers, tactics, tricks, substances, etc. from conflicts. You can hold a number equal to your level and defeating foes yields them. This rule has evolved quite a bit over the editions and the 4e implementation is probably the most open it's been.

In defense of the ability, it's pretty simple to just talk it through. The trivial example of this is to lean into the mundane or supernatural bit as much or as little as you desire. It's easy for the Strong Mercenary to never go full blue-mage, primarily preferring to stack his loot pool with special conflict as tactics learned while "on the job" or substance loot. It's also easy for the Strong Death Knight to corrupt the abilities of the holy crusaders they slay and use them for dark purposes, as well as representing the special conflict loot as boons from their dark masters. In a similar vein, perhaps the Strong Occultist makes a fitting host for the spirits of certain enemies when they are slain by their hand. You get the idea here, I hope. It's completely in the table's control how mundane or fantastical this ability is and how it can work in the setting.

(I consider this ability to parallel the original tradition Fighter's ability to exclusively use magical swords, which often had a grab bag of magical quirks, senses, and abilities) 

Alternate Option: True Grit

If the cognitive dissonance is too much and simply downplaying it isn't satisfactory, I present this alternative. The idea is to appeal to the hardy and redoubtable martial archetype characters across fiction and their ability to just get back up (think Boromir at his last stand).

Replace the looting ability of the Strong entirely with the following (or allow as an alternative option on per character basis, either works): 

Strong characters stand fast, taking what harm comes their way. If a Strong character has zero or negative HP, but is not dying and wants to stay in action, the player may opt to make a true grit save (or toughness task roll).

• A successful save means that the Strong is only knocked down. They may get up and continue the battle at their current HP (if they had negative HP they are still injured).
• A critical success means that the Strong is still standing, continuing the battle at their current HP (and possibly injured). 
• A failed save means that the Strong is dying (d6 minutes).
• A fumble means the Strong dies on the spot from the effort to ignore their condition. Sometimes you need to known when to stay down!

Strong characters ignore the encumbrance penalty for being injured. On top of this, they die in d6 minutes instead of d6 rounds if they fail a death save from having negative HP.

Regardless of milieu, you can now focus on your Strong characters being the toughest bastards in the party. This is adapted from a general PC ability and the martial Prime class from Whitehack's cousin game, Suldokar's Wake. I often find it a good mine of semi-compatible ideas, if they don't exist in form in 4e already.

On Strong Abilities #1-8

The Strong class eight abilities that can be assigned to slots as the character advances. Understand that these are not exhaustive and that you are encouraged to add to this list. For example, 4e introduces an alternative ability better suited to modern firearms in it's optional rules. Perhaps there is a far more potent ability that can be only discovered, passed on to the character via training, or some other fantastical method. This list is a powerful tool to customize for your campaign and cooking up some interesting fighting styles or options to add here can only help.

On Combat Advantage

DCC RPG is often regarded as having an excellent implementation of the fighter archetype. I think a big reason for this is two-fold:

1. The Mighty Deeds mechanize and present an approachable menu of the tactical infinity to players, allowing awareness of more options beyond "idk I attack them".
2. The way Deed dice work don't punish you for trying said stunts. You are not sacrificing damage or actions or anything to try something. It's basically always in your benefit to be doing wild shit.

These get at some core issues. Some players might only look to roll dice for normal attacks when its not clear how other actions could benefit them. Some Referees might be shaky when faced with players who are very inventive and want to stick to codified things. Not ideal conditions!.

Consider the following: 

"Magick, abilities or situational circumstances can daze, stun, blind, hold, deafen, confuse etc. a character or monster. Positive effects can be cover, invisibility, blurring, increased speed etc. The Referee interprets unregulated cases using combat advantage, free attacks and penalties or bonuses to df, damage, move, initiative or av." -- Whitehack 4e, p. 59

Short of trying somehow to inject Deeds into the Strong (which can yield results in a wholly new class), I find the DCC Deeds ethos easy to embody with the above. Don't disallow swashbuckling deeds not codified in rules text out of hand, but instead grant a bonus when a player thinks of something clever in their fighting. Create interesting areas, foes, and conflicts that encourage this thinking and interaction. The formalized options in the text should be a starting point, not an exhaustive list of what's possible. You want players who know that trying thinks will be rewarded and you want referees who have a simple framework to adjudicate such things.

David Gallagher, Pyromancer

The Wise

Miracles Cost HP

I think it goes without saying that for some folks, it can be easy to have the perception of "HP go down" as always feeling bad, even if that HP going down results in good things (like miracles) happening. Meanwhile, I think folks see "managing bad number go up" as feeling good, e.g. any number of ttrpg corruption or sanity mechanics ever. 

While all the characters sharing common resources to deal with conflict and exploration (slots, items, and HP) is elegant design imo, I want to accommodate the scenario where paying HP just feels off for folks at the table without introducing some new resource or meta thing to track for Wise characters only. The lack of a "mana" pool or other makes the magic (or perceived magic in some cases) of miracles easy to flex across settings.

Alternate Option: Drain

The idea is that it is largely functionally identical to vanilla system, doesn't change how miracles work at their core, and (perhaps most importantly in some cases) isn't as easy to see as punitive.  

Instead of paying HP costs to perform Miracles, use scrolls, or any other item that draws HP, characters instead accumulate Drain. Drain represents the accumulated fatigue, strain, and internal diminishment from manipulating magical forces. If a character’s Drain is ever equal to or greater than their current HP, either because their Drain increased or because they lost HP, they must Save vs Death or take their current Drain total as damage (which can be lethal!).

Wise characters remove half of their Drain with a night’s rest, removing it fully if they succeed at a constitution task roll. They now also recover HP in the same manner as other characters. The “magickal interference” rules now refer to magical ways of removing Drain instead of magical healing of HP.

This option also brings the Wise into line with the rest of the characters regarding healing, eliminating their special exceptions while also keeping their HP as a central resource to manage for the class.

The Original Tradition: Trusting Your Imagination

Whitehack, p. 14

Volume 3 The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, p. 36

I've often introduce or explain both Whitehack and OD&D to players as "high-trust" games as I firmly believe that trust itself is core for these original tradition games. You have trust from the game's designers that things are better off in your capable hands, and that you will make the experience of the game your own. There's trust in your own imagination, and in the idea that nearly anything you or your fellow players can come up with is valid because you've all been playing make-believe with friends in form or another your whole life. 

While it may seem rote to point out house rulings are part and parcel of these style of games, written permission being emphasized is a powerful thing indeed. I think what I am really getting at is reinforcing that Whitehack and it's great ancestor OD&D's biggest strength is less about their elegant mechanical minimalism (something oft touted in old school adventure gaming and certainly at play here) and rather more about their own creative confidence in the people reading them. The base assumption of the texts, holding true even after people start questioning where the hell the initiative rules are in OD&D or how figuring miracle costs work in Whitehack, is that all the ad-hoc rulings, chatter, and explorations into these open spaces between the lines of rules text that you and your fellow players will run into are not misfires or signs of some deficit in systemic rigor, but rather the actual point of the damn game! These small books are screaming at you to make them your own. To boldly lay claim and form the table's ideal experience with the rich foundations so given in the texts. Write in pen! Fill the margins!

Getting back to this base foundation of understanding, something that seems like it comes so easily and naturally when we are first able to conceive of play, is a major boon for games in this original tradition and any branching from it and I am always pleased to see it emphasized in game text. Forget figuring out wrong way or right way! There should only ever be figuring out the way that does right by your table!

And therein lies the beautiful challenge of wrestling with these beasts of the original tradition. It requires a touch of vulnerability and humility. It requires a willingness to adapt. That the folks at the table release their hold and come to terms that the real driving force of such a game is not sitting within the pages of a book waiting to be discovered, but trust that it's been sitting around the table itself from the start.

B/X House Rules - Updated

Dead Lords by Brom

In February of 2023 I kicked off a B/X campaign with some friends of mine using B4 The Lost City by Tom Moldvay. Over two years later, with a hiatus here and a break there, we still meet and deal with the ancient secrets of Cynidicea on game nights. 

Below is the simple list of house rules we use to run the game. A few items added we added earlier have fallen off, some things we've tried haven't stuck. These ones have seen a fare bit of use so far and have stuck around.

I actually tried 3rd edition...

Redgar by Todd Lockwood

I'm not sure what exactly prompted it, but at a certain point in the past year my friends and I began talking about trying our 3rd edition (3.5e to be specific). Perhaps it was my starting a new work position or maybe ongoing AD&D campaigns were on a bit of a break. Why not try it? We've tried plenty of other games hadn't we? This quickly turned into several sessions and my first real exposure to 3.5e, its books, and the traces of its online presence. The results were interesting to say the least! What's more, my groups playing of OD&D and AD&D over the past few years combined with this trial of D&D 3.5e definitely changed my preconceived notions. 

I was a relatively late joiner to the G+ scene of OSR games. I was at the tail end of the year google pulled the plug when I started a Labyrinth Lord campaign and instantly loved it. Ever since I started rooting about this corner of the scene, I've heard chatter about 3rd Edition, its evils against humanity, and ultimately how it is oft cited as an antithesis and impetus for everything folks espoused old school games and their ilk were about. Having never looked at the books, I saw it as just a crunchy game that I probably wouldn't like. A cursory search leading to whole forums and sites dedicated to just building and optimizing characters didn't help this either. What follows are some of my thoughts on the whole thing after actually trying it.

The Transformation

In preparation for the game and in part due to some morbid curiosity, I did read quite a bit of  material from this edition. And while I wasn't insane enough to use any of the many splat books, I did end up reading a fair selection of them and skimming a good portion of the remainder to get the general vibe. Much like how reading far, far too much into OD&D made some traces of choices and mechanics roots very apparent in later editions, playing so much AD&D did help elucidate why some things are the way they are... most of the time.

I consider it a relatively cold take to categorize the core books for 3.5e as a "standardized take on AD&D 2e", where the strange mechanics are homogenized. Where the attitude of "here's the rules, work out what's left" was replaced with very extensive defining and a "check the rules, it's probably there" attitude. The (optional but oft used) Proficiencies of AD&D transformed into Skills and Feats. Everything got stats. The explanations and suggestions for various things in the DMG turned into an almost simulations framework. Monsters gained ability scores, stats, and feats as well as defined types to justify their abilities and nature. 2e's Kits became a core feature, turning into Prestige Classes or Feats.

As a general result of this, a lot of the early stuff is comparable to later AD&D. While HP totals are huge due to many bonuses, HD amounts are largely similar across the board if not fully identical (especially so in 3.0 books). As are many spell effects and monster abilities. The DNA of why many design choices were made is quite clear even if it is a different game. Aside from mechanics, the conceptual evolution lines up with a lot of the later 2e modules and material pumped out. 

As much as I love the esoterica of AD&D, mechanical standardization and clarity do have potential benefits. Many established benchmarks and definite examples can be a good resource to make judgement calls in a more complicated system. I'm no stranger to crunch and I don't see it as an innate issue per se. As long as you don't treat the text as some inflexible legal/holy text of course.

The Culture

For my purposes, reading older posts in various communities impressed upon me that the popular culture of play surrounding this game was completely alien to me. Maybe its a trad game thing, I don't know. It's clear it quickly evolved away from what the core books presented at least with the expectation that magical items in the DMG were actually an extended shopping catalog readily available, ideas about balance, that Prestige Classes were a given, and that the execution of a planned build was a fine art form. Where people argued rules in a vacuum on various forums in a manner as if the RAW text of the game, while certainly fallible, was to be utilized and exploited to the utmost letter. Where decisions on items and abilities were made before play even started (if it started at all), rather than being emergent choices. Oh and some of these choices could now be wrong apparently. So wrong that various options and classes were tiered based on their potential and a near-omnipresent grading of classes looms over such discussions. Now some of this is just ttrpgs hitting the internet and is by no means exclusive to 3.5e, but the tenacity of such discourse was quite clear.

One of the most striking examples I can think of was reading on how controversial the "Leadership" feat was among the 3rd edition forums. All this feat did was allow characters to accrue followers at higher levels, kinda like how name-level characters attract followers. Apparently this was considered incredibly overpowered! The baseline assumption seemed to be that the player created their follower and controlled them (this was stated nowhere). So effectively the feat was viewed as "make another character." Another example is the idea of a "diplomancer" where, rules being rules, you could convince anyone to do anything if your Persuasion roll was high enough, seemingly ignoring the rules that the DM decides what is actually possible or impossible in favor of this limitless interpretation. It was really wild stuff all around.

This was clearly a "game away from the game" and I am not the first to make this observation. Much like making an army list or building a TCG deck, the meticulous assembling of a character and sorting wheat from chaff was clearly a massive draw for many people (and in many cases probably their only engagement with the game, I'd wager). The massive drive for optimization and evaluation of options is definitely easy to compare to such competitive games and even video games, with people talking about the various aspects of the game as if they are characters in a fighting game and their tournament viability is up for debate.

Suffice to say, it was quite strange having only read the core books. And maybe I'm looking back with a good deal of hindsight, but it seems safe to say that the play culture diverged from the original text and the later material warped to cater to this new cultural norm. Because played straight, none of this should really even be a thing as far as I can see. We certainly didn't have any of these come up as an issue.