The character has a reciprocal relationship with a Storyteller character, in which he has at least some emotional investment — the more dots, the more significant the relationship.

This relationship is a source of strength and aid. It could be a parent, a sibling, a child. It could be a lover or an ex-lover. The relationship doesn’t have to be a positive one: that ex-wife who you’ve got to see every week because she’s got custody of the kids is still important to you, even if love turned horribly sour long ago. Your feelings for your going-right-offthe-rails teenage son may be appallingly conflicted, but he’s still central in your world.

Each purchase of the Merit counts for a relationship with one specific Storyteller character. The character can be human or supernatural.

Once per scene, you may add your dots in the Relationship Merit to one, and only one dice pool, provided that you can give a plausible rationale as to why the relationship should aid you. If it is plausible, the Storyteller must accommodate the rationale.

It can reward any dice pool at all. You can even get the bonus relationship dice while using supernatural powers (if you have any), but only in a circumstance when the player can justify the bonus.

Be creative with your rationale for getting the dice.

Sometimes, this is simple: when you’re trying to convince your ex-wife that you need to see the kids a day early because you’re going to be out of town (and no, you can’t tell her you’re off risking your life), add your relationship dice to your Manipulation + Persuasion roll.

The relationship might be at stake in some way: you’d get the bonus while trying to convince the head teacher at your deadbeat teenage son’s school not to expel him for truancy and the stuff they found in his locker.

You might decide that the object of the relationship is doing something to help your character (or hinder your character): you’re trying to talk a vampire you know out of coming into your house, and you say “my five-year-old daughter calls down the stairs and says ‘Daddy, who’s that?’ and I decide that I mustn’t let her see him…” And you take the dice for your relationship with your daughter.

You might even take the bonus for a person with whom you have an adversarial relationship turning up. You’re desperately fighting a horde of zombies; you declare: “But each zombie carries an amulet around his neck, exactly like the one (my arch-enemy) wears! He sent them! He must have learned how to make them!” And you take the dice, and if the Storyteller hasn’t already decided that your character’s archenemy did send the zombies, he has to re-jig the story to cover that.

Drawback: Relationships are reciprocal and complicated. The Storyteller character with whom you have the relationship gets the same bonus on dice pools when it’s relevant to you. Also, relationships need to be kept alive. You actually need to have some contact with the character with whom you’ve got the relationship — phone, face-to-face contact, running arguments, office conflict, whatever — or risk losing dots in the Merit. The Storyteller can decide what constitutes a reasonable interval for lack of contact (perhaps if the character doesn’t engage in the relationship once per game session, a dot in the Merit is thrown into jeopardy for the next session). Finally, if the subject of a character’s Relationship Merit dies, the Merit is lost.