Got a while before I run Cairn today, and it's not like I can sleep anymore (sleep has been hard to come by of late), so sure, let's make a character.
The Game: Stay Alive!
The Publisher: Monte Cook Games
Degree of Familiarity: A good deal with the system, though I've never played this particular flavor
Books Required: Stay Alive! and the Cypher System core
Stay Alive!, apart from being the first lines in a song from Hamilton, is one of several supplements for the Cypher System that talks about playing said system in a particular genre. I got a bunch of these books as a Kickstarter reward recently, and I kind of went round and round about whether to count them for purposes of the chargen project. But at the end of the day, all of them present new systems and takes on characters, and my rule of thumb is to err on the side of "yes make more characters", so here we are.
Anyway, there's a whole chapter in Stay Alive! about playing vampires. I know, how innovative! An RPG where you play vampires - but like, those are usually monsters, whaaaaaat. All sarcasm aside, yes, this is ground that Vampire: The Masquerade trod years ago, but it benefits from the ensuing 30ish years of game design and evolution. It also doesn't get into the weeds on the lore and contains a lot of toolbox elements (rather than saying "here is what vampires are and how they work"), but it also talks about the practicalities of drinking blood, feeding from animals, and basically everything that would be involved in being a modern vampire. It's also presented with the assumption that you're going to be turned into a vampire and have to figure shit out on your own, which has always been a favorite way of mine to run Vampire (true facts about GMing: Players will remember shit they learn at the table a lot more accurately than shit they read or get in an infodump).
So with that in mind, let's make a bloodsucker. Cypher characters are sentences: I'm a [adjective] [noun] that [verbs]. There's a section in the chapter that goes through some of the foci (the verb bit) and contextualizes some of them, and when I got to "would rather be reading" I kinda had an idea. I want to make a character that really wasn't looking for any of this, but it quite literally crashed through his window one night.
Kim Newton was...you could call him rich. He wasn't, like, a multi-millionaire or anything, but he owned a townhouse free and clear. He made his money in a dot-com before the bubble burst (Kim has always prided himself in knowing where the exits are and when to use them, figuratively and literally), and he got to the point that he could live comfortably off his savings. He was a passionate reader and amateur historian and researcher, and spent his time either reading his own extensively collection or traveling to rare books libraries.
And then one night he was sitting in his study with a new first edition (were I playing this character I'd figure out what exactly, probably with some enthusiastic help from Michelle), and something crashed through the wall. Kim barely had time to register that the thing(s) that came through the wall were moving when one of them pounced on him, and then everything went dark.
So Kim's infection was a matter of accidental turning, I think - two vampires (both alike in dignity) were fighting, for whatever reason, they smashed into Kim's house, and one of them fed on him quickly to replenish. But of course, the vampire that did it didn't stick around, figuring he'd just die, and the fight raged on.
Since then I think Kim has had to liquidate a lot of his assets, and he's finding the requirements of living as one of the undead unpleasant. It's funny; it's not like he spent a lot of time outside during the day to begin with, but now he can't and it's making things very tricky, and he's watching his bank account dwindle...
OK, so, Kim is pretty clearly a speaker or an explorer (though you could make a case for adept). I think I'll go with speaker. For descriptor, Calm makes sense, but if I'm taking Would Rather Be Reading for my focus, maybe that's redundant? You know, let's take Guarded and assume that Kim was always kind of a private person, but it's gotten worse post-death. That makes him a Guarded vampire Speaker who Would Rather Be Reading.
So, going back and filling stuff in: Might 8, Speed 9, Intellect 11, and then 6 points to split up. Let's split them evenly, 2 into each. Effort 1, Intellect Edge 1, other Edge 0. I get four speaker abilities, and I just realized that the hardcover version of the Cypher book I have is different than the PDF (looks like the changes are just cleanup, but it's still annoying).
I'll take Spin Identity (Kim can always grab onto something he's read to make up a story). Babel, likewise, sounds like a good one for Kim. Terrifying Presence sounds like something Kim might have developed post-vamping, so I'll take that. And I'll take Enthrall; that's always handy.
Now, for Guarded, I get +2 to my Intellect pool (nice), I'm trained in Intellect defense, I'm trained in all tasks involving piercing disguises and detecting lies, but I have an inability in deception and persuasion (odd choice for a speaker, I know).
And then for Would Rather Be Reading, I'm trained in two non-combat skills. Let's say Kim is trained in research and history.
And then I get three "blood shifts," basically the same as "power shifts" (as seen in Claim the Sky), levels of Effort I can apply to specific tasks. Well, I'll put one into Terrifying Presence, one into Dexterity (meaning I get a free level of effort for things like speed and Speed Defense), and Healing (one extra recovery roll).
And then finally, I (rather, my hypothetical GM) would roll three times on the vampire aversions table to see what my weaknesses are. I wouldn't know them until they happen in play, but since it's just me, y'know, here we go!
And my aversions are...running water, religious power, and inhospitality. All vampires in-setting have an aversion to religious power, so Kim's goes up one degree, meaning he has a strong aversion to such things. He also takes damage if he enters a space uninvited (fitting, given how he was turned), and has to push himself to cross running water.
That's actually it! Kim is in his 40s. He wasn't anything special to look at before, but since death he's lost his hair and gained a kind of mystique. His eyes have that green fierce "Brad Pitt in Interview With a Vampire" thing, and of course he's deathly pale. He's working on moving his possessions into storage until he can figure out what happens next. In a group, I think Kim would wind up funding things for a bit, but only as far as the rest of the characters could teach him or be useful.
