Vitae Infusions
This piece is still a work in progress, if you have ideas or feedback, please hit me up over on discord @Socratov
Introduction
Previous versions had all sorts of ways to screw around with Vitae to make it usable in different ways. Things like Caliph, a drug which would be like weed, but cultivated through Vitae to make it useable for vampires (and very destructive for kine). This seems thematically cool and could make for great projects: things to create as a kindred or to keep busy with to do something interesting for their unlives.
Projects are important. In our daily lives, we humans also have more than just work and sleep., we have interests, things we watch, read or learn. As an example, playing the game is a project for us IRL: we spend time to create a story in which we can, through characters, explore certain aspects of humanity, learning about ourselves and others in the process. How we choose to spend our time says a lot about ourselves, more than just our job, where we went to school or astrological sign.
In the next sections I will set out possible rules to achieve this effect and how they should or shouldn't interact with Thinblood Alchemy and Blood Sorcery. Also I will include a section of inspiration.
Boundaries
Not everything should be doable in this way. After all, Blood Sorcery and Thinblood Alchemy are very distinct and preciously guarded disciplines and creating overlap with those is, to be honest, bad. It would cheapen the effects of those. So creating shelf stable blood or reproducing the effects of TBA is going to be bad. However, knowing Blood Sorcery or Thinblood Alchemy would certainly contribute to the practice of infusing vitae into things. As you are used to working with Vitae to achieve certain effects, so applying that skill/knowledge/experience would certainly come in handy.
Craft
having a hobby, especially when doing something creative, is often considered as something nourishing the soul and as a healthy practice. So while Survival would help you out finding the right plants, cultivation of a plant would definitely fall under the craft skill. I see the craft skill as an activity where you shape or bend materials to your will to create something new. It's a transformative process and it's a great candidate for creating Vitae Infusions. While this example references plants, vitae infusion might cover any sort of substance like food (honey), alcohol (vitae infused vodka), or any such thing. Anything could be a project like this as long as it doesn't overstep its boundaries.
Costs
To create an infusion, you need something to infuse into (materials), something to infuse with (your vitae) and time. Then you need to know the process. Creating lemonade is something else than creating an alcoholic infusion, brewing beer, cultivating sprouts, or whatever.
Knowledge
A of known innovations are thought of as happy little accidents. Think of the invention of Penicillin. However, most innovation and R&D these days is done through a lot of trial and error. The knowledge necessary of infusing vitae into something should reflect this. If it's about creating an infusion of food and vitae, knowledge of sous-vide and marinating should be easier to come by than the cultivation of plants on vitae. Of course not every process of discovery goes smoothly. Depending on how impactful a certain infusion might be and how long a certain story of the chronicle might go setting expectations for downtime and difficulty higher or lower. Finding the right process and the right materials takes time.
Vitae & Materials
Depending on the scale of the project you are running you could invest more or less vitae in a project. To prevent 'free stuff' shenanigans, a project would require 1 or more hunger's worth of vitae. Not rouse checks, especially if the project would yield food able to slake hunger. the rewards should be in line with these investments. The same goes for materials. Not every kind of bee will be able to make vitae-infused honey, not every strain of Cannabis Sativa or Indica might take well to vitae supplements. Finding out which materials work well and which recipes will work is part of the process. Better materials and tools may or may not affect difficulty, yield or quality of the results, much like how weapons add to a successful margin in combat.
Time
Projects are things characters do whenever they are not a plaything of Elders and pursue of their own accord. ST and player should workout if the discovery of the process and production of an infusion should be a short-term or long-term project and what a successful yield would look like. some projects are doomed to fail, but don't let that discourage the character. An example of this could be a chef trying to make food that won't taste like ashes.
Consider the scope and impact of the project. If the results will result in getting any of the lower end of status or resources it should be easily achieved. Maybe a couple of in-game weeks or even days could give a lot of flavour. Minor results should correspond to minor investments. If the project is part of larger plan to take over the city by use of a propriety drug or food to gain the upper levels of status or resources, it should take more time and investment. Even scaling up a minor project to a bigger reward might propose its own challenges. Apart from scaling up the 'production' of vitae and finding the nourishment, scaling up facilities poses all their own problems as well.
Numbers
V5 mostly works in the framework of ATTRIBUTE+SKILL(+SPECIALTY). Projects of infusion of this sort would add their (highest) Thinblood Alchemy or Blood Sorcery rating as well. As this dicepool is not a moment of stress, it is not expected to use Blood Surges. However, projects like these could work well with the extended test rules: where a project is complete once a certain margin or number of successes have been reached.
These projects should take time, say days or weeks during downtime. While the Craft skill can be used as part of a scene, projects like these aren't.
Margin
meeting the difficulty threshold isn't enough, sometimes players (vastly) exceed them and such things should be rewarded, especially as those kinds of rolls might be made with expenditure of certain resources. Usually crafting something and exceeding the parameters, leads to extra effects in three directions: time, quality, quantity. Not all of them will make sense for every project. For example: if you are making a statue and the player exceed the Difficulty with 4 dice it won't just mean that they will get more statues (quantity), but the statue might just finish earlier than expected (time), or will turn out better than expected (quality). Similarly, infusing your vitae into weed might not make it faster in growing (though, with vitae, who knows?), but you might end up with more buds on the plant which are potent (quantity) or the weed might be more potent to kindred (quality).
The same effect could go into the opposite direction. If the player would otherwise fail the roll, they could succeed at a cost. Maybe they make les than they promised, maybe the product is of inferior quality or maybe the player loses track of time, causing the player to have less time left for hunting or maybe almost miss Elysium where they needed to bring the product. (Hint, any of these shortcomings might incur a debt, loss of face, temporary los of status, etc.)
Inspiration
So, given these rules, how do you apply them? What could be great examples of such projects?
Bahari cultivar
So a Bahari Cultivar might not just cultivate a 'Garden' in the metaphorical sense, but also cultivate an actual garden where they use their vitae to influence the plants and the fruits they bear. Kindred who break their rules 'disappear' and are in fact used as an irrigation system for her orchids which find their way into the highest status Toreador's soirees and yet nobody can make orchids like her.
This project is a high impact project. First they have researched how to grow orchids with vitae, this took a couple of weeks/months of downtime (in play this could mean a year or 2). So for such a project you could put a threshold of 10 successes beyond the margin, requiring each test to meet a threshold of 3 successes, making 1 test per week of downtime. The results have afforded them a couple of orchids which the player used to gain the first dot of status with the Keeper of Elysium, as well as added a dot to their haven.
Then to expand on it by way of 'collecting' kindred who have broken the Traditions and making them disappear is a multi year project. This is partly plot-fuelled and partly a project. By building on the project and gaining another 15 successes (threshold difficulty 5), the player has been given the domain, space and tools to expand the garden. By acting on what happened in the plot of the chronicle they could sequester kindred and 'dispose of them', using an apparatus to keep those kindred torpored and using blood bags to convert them into vitae irrigation systems. As this has increased her yield of orchids, this has enabled her to gain more status among clan Toreador by not just supplying the Keeper of Elysium, but the Toreador Primogen as well. As those started parading her orchids demand has risen and no true Toreador soiree has been found without the famous Crimson Orchids. The player now has 3 dots of Status(Clan Toreador), an increase of 2 dots, and expanded their have with 2 dots for holding facilities.
Culinary arts
A (former) chef might try to find a way to enjoy food again by infusing the ingredients with vitae to make them edible so they could once again pursue their passion of making the best food. They've been trying to decades now to recreate flavours. Every time they thing they have found the breakthrough the food still tastes like ashes.
What about the mixologist who has a similar wish of shaking cocktails again and get drunk by themselves instead of needing to feed on alcoholics, who always seem to make him letharic and never give the subtle hints of a good whiskey or a perfect Manhattan. Further than a bottle of Vitae infused vodka they haven't been, but that at least has given them hope that one day they might enjoy a good lagavulin again.
The Chef makes it deeply personal, it's just to feel human again. Now humanity gain should be hard to come by, especially when it's not related to touchstones or kine. However, on a difficulty of 6, the player will find out that some recipes involve blood. these are very old recipes and not just run of the mill 'add a little pigs blood to bind the sauce' or 'blood pudding dishes', but more like medieval or roman era blood-based recipes. So with the right books (collect rare books to drop the difficulty by up to 3 down to 3). Finding those books takes a success of a contacts roll of difficulty 5.
The chef hasn't built the right connections yet (no successful acquisition of successful experiments yet), while the mixologist has applied the knowledge of the Pisanob whom they talked to about their sacrifices atop their mastabas to creating vitae vodka. It was a lucky guess that vodka would work. Neither of them have had any real lasting successes, but the Mixologist has been making a good appearance in Elysium by presenting the fruits of his labour to the prince and has been rewarde with a slightly bigger domain with some distilleries in an industrial area to further his research. He has also become interesting to the local Tremere who are willing to see how his process impacts the vitae's properties of bonding kindred and ghouls.
Drugs
But I think a lot of Ventrue would kill (literally) for the ability to once again enjoy powdering their noses as if they were still working on Wall Street (or whatever the local variant is for your game) and again feel that rush of nose candy running through their veins. So far just cutting the coke with scabs hasn't yielded no results, but the Ventrue's connections in the chantry are hard at work hoping that hooking up the Clan of Rulers will give them an edge in negotiations for domain. This could have very grave consequences for the plot indeed.
Honey
Me? I would settle for a beekeeper who wants to keep his bees and once again enjoy the fruits of his apiary without feeling it turn to ashes on his tongue. Nothing bad ever happened by giving a jar of honey... Or did it?
Projects
This piece of homebrew is to give structure to some possible directions a player's project might take. I myself like rewarding player creativity and feel that inclusion of projects and hobbies bring the characters to life in a different way than the stressful nights neonates and fledgelings might experience for the most part in your games. They require little to no set-up and give a lot of depth to a character. And who knows, maybe the project in question might come up as a plot relevant aid some times in the future.
Credits
Author: Socratov
Other Credits: Path of Night Actual Play for mentioning the cultivation of Caliph through vitae, V5 corebook (p.199) for Difficulty table
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