Merits are special capabilities or knacks that add individuality to your character. They’re purchased during character creation or with experience points over the course of your chronicle.
The Merits in this chapter are organized alphabetically into three broad categories: Physical, Mental and Social. Some apply to your character’s basic traits to enhance them in particular situations. Some have prerequisites that must be met before they can be purchased. For example, a character with the Gunslinger Merit must have a Dexterity of 3 and Firearms of 3 or higher to be able to accurately fire two weapons at the same time. By the same token, some Merits apply drawbacks that balance out their inherent advantages. A character with the Fame Merit, for example, is treated like a star wherever he goes — but has a hard time blending into the crowd when he wants to.
Each Merit has a number of dots (•) associated with it. These dots represent the number of points that must be spent to purchase the Merit. Some Merits allow for a range of dots (say, • to •••). These allow you to purchase a low rating if it’s appropriate to your character concept, or you can start with a low level and increase it over time with experience points.
A character is born with some Merits or develops them early in life, while others can be acquired through trail and error, training and effort later in life.
The first kind can be acquired at character creation only and are labeled as such. The second kind can be acquired during play with experience points.
Merit dots must be purchased sequentially with experience points. You have to buy • and then •• before your character can have ••• or more.
Each purchase of this Merit allows for the maintenance of one amulet at a time. Any number can be created, but only one can be active for every version of this Merit that the character possesses. The Merit comes in two levels, corresponding to the bonus it gives to the wearer. At two dots, it provides a +1 bonus to any single Attribute chosen by the caster at the time of creation. At four dots, this bonus increases to +2. This bonus cannot raise the character’s Attribute above 5.
The character can sacrifice one point of the amulet’s bonus during the amulet’s creation to instill the amulet with one Body Thief Merit like Morality Sap or Emotional Urging. The character may only instill in an amulet Merits that she knows. If used in this fashion, the amulet is typically given to an unknowing target, who is the victim of this Merit for as long as he wears or touches the amulet. If the Merit has a variable effect, like Emotional Urging, the amulet can only enhance a single emotion, which must be determined when the amulet is created. The instilled Merit works normally, except that it affects the target for as long as he wears the amulet. If an amulet contains both a Body Thief Merit and an Attribute bonus, both of these affect the wearer.
The character can also sacrifice one point of the bonus to craft an amulet that allows a body thief using mystic exchange to remain in her current body even after the end of that ritual’s duration. Characters who use this amulet instantly switch back to their original body one turn after the amulet is removed. A character can only benefit from a single amulet for each Merit or Attribute.
Dice Pool: Intelligence + Occult, extended. Each roll represents one hour of work. The total number of successes required depends on the level of the amulet. Two-dot amulets require only 10 successes and four-dot amulets require 20. Creating an amulet also requires an Intelligence + Crafts roll to create or modify a suitable object.
Duration: Permanent until destroyed. Note that this potentially increases the duration of any Body Thief Merit indefinitely. However, the effect ends immediately upon the wearer’s removal of the item. The creator can also perform a short ritual where he makes an Intelligence + Occult roll and spends one point of Willpower. If successful, he can instantly cancel the effect of the amulet, regardless of how far away it is.
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The object being used as the amulet is rendered useless and the caster loses one point of temporary Willpower.
Failure: The creator fails to instill any power into the amulet.
Success: The caster gains progress towards the amulet’s creation.
Exceptional Success: Additional successes are their own benefit, making for a faster creation.
Your character gains an additional dot of Chi. All purified begin play with one dot of Chi. However, more experienced and powerful purified have more dots in Chi. During character generation, each additional dot of Chi costs the character three Merit dots. See Effects of Chi (p. 99) for more information about how this Merit affects your character. Purified characters can purchase this Merit no more than twice, for a total Chi of three.
Your character can only purchase additional dots of Chi as a Merit during character creation. During play, Chi can only be increased using experience points.
Communication was not always as simple as signing into e-mail and clicking ‘send.’ In time before e-mail, even in times before standardized letter writing, body thieves sought ways to communicate with one another even over distance, since their practices could carry them almost anywhere. To reflect this, body thieves take this specialized Language Merit to reflect this form of communication that can only be understood by members of their society. This Merit muddles the thieves’ language with secrecy, and any person trying to discern the actual meaning of a conversation or written communication suffers a two dice penalty unless they know the same cultural language.
For the Archer family, it’s merely a derivative of their cultural Shelta language. For the Club, it’s a series of complicated metaphors often hidden in the text of school work or poetry. For those poor souls lost in the server of death.com, the Merit might reflect a deviant form of binary that once cracked, could allow her to communicate with the outside world and with it, a terrible warning.
There is nothing to which a thief will not stoop when it comes to survival, and once one has tasted immortality, even with the limitations presented to the body thief, little seems unreasonable on the quest for unending life. With this power, a thief has mastered the ability to drain away the very will of their target, making them pliable and weak in the face of any other attacks the thief might later inflict.
In some cases, like in the case of the Seekers of Knowledge, this Drain is part of an act of devoted surrender to a greater cause, and indeed, a charming or charismatic thief can convince her target that being subjected to this assault is part of a higher calling or maybe simply an act of love. Not all practices of Willpower Drain are as seemingly benevolent. A thief could just as easily strap a victim down to a chair, pull a chair up across from her and start barraging her with this assault; this technique is rarely pleasant for the victim and it is common for other more mundane torture to accompany its practice. The caster must be able to either touch the target or have a sympathetic connection with him to steal his Willpower. If this power is instilled in an amulet, the wearer also cannot regain any Willpower for as long as she wears the amulet.
Dice Pool: Intelligence + Presence versus Resolve + Composure
Duration: Instant
Possible Modifiers: Target believes she is willing (+2), no eye contact (–2)
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The power fails and the caster loses a point of Willpower and cannot use this power for one full day.
Failure: The power fails.
Success: The caster achieves more successes than the target. For each success in excess of the victim’s, the vic- tim loses one Willpower point. If the target is reduced to zero Willpower with this ability, she becomes listless and devoid of all will or volition until she regains at least one point of Willpower.
Exceptional Success: As above, but the caster also gains one Willpower point, not to exceed his maximum.
Every thief needs a con to keep their lifestyle going, and with it, their unending life. With practice and time, a good thief is able to manipulate the feelings of others around them. Time, conversation, or just sheer forces of personality are all tools to manipulate the feelings of others. In a blink of an eye or possibly a wink, the thief can push on the mild feelings of fear or passion and feed them, strengthen and empower them. Of course, this manipulation is not total. The thief cannot create emotions that are not already being felt by the target, but he can take those light feelings lurking and turn them to full blown wild fires. A body thief can’t simply focus his attention and force a strange woman to be instantly in love with him. However, over a romantic dinner with quiet music and dim lights, a thief could talk his target into the faintest flutter of a crush and then use this Merit to build that flutter into a rushing heartbeat. Similarly, a Club member hoping to push her quarry to give up on life entirely can’t just wish for it and have her quarry leap from a window. Rather, she’d have to wait until he was already feeling morose over a lousy test grade before using Emotional Urging to amplify the suffering to dangerous levels. The caster must be able to either speak to or touch the target or have a sympathetic connection in order to manipulate the target’s emotions.
Dice Pool: Manipulation + Persuasion versus Composure
Duration: One day
Suggested Equipment: An item of emotional significance to the victim (+1 to +5, depending on relative importance)
Possible Modifiers: Target fulfilled Virtue within last week (–3), target fulfilled Vice within last week (+1 per, up to +3)
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The power backfires; the caster suffers the full effects of a normal success.
Failure: The power fails. The target is immune to this effect for one day.
Success: The caster achieves more successes than the target. For the remainder of the night, the target’s most powerful emotion at the time of casting amplifies dramatically, becoming a driving force in the subject’s mind. If an opportunity to indulge in the emotion pres- ents itself, the victim must reflexively spend one Will- power point and succeed in a Resolve + Composure roll to avoid indulgence. If this indulgence would result in lethal or aggravated damage, the subject need not spend the Willpower point and can avoid indulgence with the successful roll. Each time the victim resists temptation, she gains a cumulative +1 bonus to her next roll to resist indulgence, up to a maximum bonus of +5.
Exceptional Success: As above, however, the victim must spend Willpower to avoid harm in their indulgence.
As beings that live for centuries and can die and later return to life, purified regularly require new legal identities. All purified are assumed to have a single legal identity and need pay no Merit dots for this privilege. However, if the purified has lived in a single legal identity for more than two decades, your character has almost certainly begun to have to use various minor forms of disguise to change his appearance so that it better matches his legal age.
Having a second identity allows purified to have an identity that matches his apparent age and it also allows him to easily vanish if any legal questions arise surrounding his activities. In addition, if your character’s body dies in such a way that others notice his death, he can use this alternate identity if there is no way for him to explain his perceived death. However, modern background checks, paper trails and bureaucratic scrutiny make acquiring a new identity far more difficult than it was in the past. Few characters have the skills to create a new identity for themselves. The vast majority must look for help, either from older and more experienced purified or from some mortal or supernatural source who is skilled in the various complex and highly illegal methods of acquiring such documents.
The number of dots spent on this Merit determines how convincing and in-depth the documentation surrounding this new life actually is. Alternate Identity (●) represents an identity that passes casual inspection, but not much else — a character can go shopping and get around in most daily situations, but any kind of trained scrutiny such as from a police officer or bureaucrat immediately identifies this identity as a fake. Alternate Identity (●●) creates an identity that will pass most forms of relatively cursory professional inspection, but cannot stand up to a sustained investigation. A police officer that pulls your character over will not automatically pick up anything unusual if she runs the character’s license plates or calls up his name in a database. However, if your character is arrested and the police begin a formal investigation his identity will quickly unravel. Alternate Identity (●●●●) represents an identity that is essentially as real as any identity can be — it takes a truly dedicated, competent and time-consuming search by trained professionals to uncover any hint that the purified isn’t exactly who he claims to be, at least as far as his documentation is concerned. This Merit may be purchased multiple times at multiple ratings, each time representing a different identity. Also, an identity may also be upgraded later with the appropriate in-game explanation and experience expenditure. In the case of certain Merits such as Resources or Status, it might also be worth noting to which identity these Merits are tied, since a character may not easily be able to access or maintain them if that identity is compromised.
Drawback: Although one-dot Alternate Identities require no maintenance, both of the more thorough versions do. If someone checks on a legal identity, they will immediately become suspicious if the person has no legal address or magazine subscriptions, pays no taxes and has no phone number. Similarly, if all of this data exactly matches your character’s primary legal identity, many people soon realize both of these identities belong to the same individual. Therefore, your character must take time and spend money to maintain any two or four-dot Alternate Identities. Having the identity make frequent trips to remote locations and similar inventive dodges can reduce the frequency of this maintenance. The amount of maintenance needed to keep a two-dot identity looking legitimate is fairly minimal, requiring only a few hours of work every month. However, keeping a four-dot identity believable requires at least several hours of work every week. Failure to perform this upkeep on an identity causes it to be reduced to the next lowest level. However, alternate identities never fall lower than one dot. Paying Experience Points to upgrade an identity represents the effort needed to build it back up. Characters can also pay criminal organizations to maintain alternate identities, but doing so causes its own problems, including both the cost and the possibility of blackmail.
We make our own luck, which is of course an easy thing to say but not a rational thing to count on in the real world. Or is it? In the case of the body thief, relying on the good luck that flows naturally to any one person in any given frame of time isn’t always enough. To the body thief who has developed the ability to drain the luck of others, the roll of a dice isn’t up to chance like it is with the rest of the world. This is handy because the risk inherent in stealing the bodies and lives of others grows exponentially with every passing year. Luck Drain ultimately comes down to robbing a victim of success on an action and taking those successes for themselves. Unfortunately, this ability does not work in conjunction with other body thief Merits or with any rolls to steal or borrow someone else’s body. In addition, dealing with these kinds of forces can be dangerous; attempting to use this power more than three times a day results in a backlash that reduces the success category by one. A success becomes a failure while a failure becomes a dramatic failure. The caster must be able to either see the target or have a sympathetic connection to steal the target’s luck.
Dice Pool: Wits + Subterfuge versus Resolve Duration: One day or until the effects are suffered and enjoyed
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The power fails and the caster can- not use this power for one full day. In addition, the caster’s next roll subtracts one success. This can turn success to failure. Also, if the roll fails, the caster instead makes a dramatic failure.
Failure: The power fails.
Success: The next roll the victim makes loses a num- ber of successes equal to the caster’s initial successes. The caster’s next roll gains one success.
Exceptional Success: As above, except the caster’s next roll gains three successes.
Traditionally, this fell power is a curse inflicted on a victim through some sympathetic connection. Although it is most useful to Magically Talented body thieves, any thief can make use of this power as it assists in lowering the victim’s resistance to proposals of increasingly vile deeds. Someone who might scoff at petty theft could be talked into anything, even murder if this power is used sufficiently often. There needs to be some kind of physical connection between victim and thief to make this power work. In the case of the House of Avalon, they create an amulet that is given to their would-be victim through which they cast their spells. In other cases, like a wild Mentally Talented body thief, he may need to steal strands of his victim’s hair to sap away her morality.
Dice Pool: Wits + Manipulation versus Resolve + Composure (extended and contested)
Duration: Permanent. Each roll represents one week of effort.
Possible Modifiers: Victim is a relative (+2,) caster has high Humanity (–1 for each dot over five)
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The power fails. The subject is immune to the power for one year.
Failure: Add no successes to the total.
Success: Once the total number of successes exceeds twice the subject’s Willpower, the victim loses one dot of Humanity.
Exceptional Success: No additional effect, beyond the additional successes.
Note: Consider the use of this power a sin against Morality 2.
The world is rarely what it seems, and it doesn’t take several stolen lifetimes to see that. To body thieves who have manifested this talent the difference between what you see and what you don’t see is just a matter of practice. The thief in question need only put her hands on a pair of inanimate objects, and if the power activates successfully, one object appears to be the other and vice versa. For example, a clever thief puts his briefcase down on the ground between herself and another passenger on the train. With use of this power, her briefcase appears to belong to the man next to her, and his appears to be hers, then it’s just a matter of knocking them both over, grabbing the one that appears to be hers and make off with the stranger’s things. A young artist walks into a museum with a sketch pad under his arm, and with a little leaning on the wall, he switches his pad with a one-of-a-kind oil painting under his arm and he walks out without a single witness.
Beyond the specific needs of thieves like the Archer Family to have personal items of their targets, this ability has a myriad of uses. Stealing a wallet is small time, but being able to lift a laptop with a room full of people certain that the thief wasn’t you can go a long way to setting up a new life in a new body. If it isn’t nailed down and the thief has a good enough replacement, she can walk out the door with her prize with no one the wiser.
Dice Pool: Wits + Subterfuge, minus the highest Re-solve of all witnesses
Duration: One scene
Possible Modifiers: Items are similar in appearance (+2), witnesses expect a trick (–2), each level of Size difference between the two (–2)
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The power fails, and all possible witnesses feel something weird, as if they all were possessed of the Unseen Sense Merit for the turn.
Failure: No effect. The items remain as they were.
Success: The caster simultaneously touches two objects. If successful, the two items switch appearances. For the remainder of the scene, appearances suggest the two items switched places. Any mundane scrutiny will suggest that an item is the other. Only mystical scrutiny can pierce the temporary illusion. The only limitation is that objects gain no additional functions and are no more durable than they were before. A yardstick disguised as a rifle can’t fire and is easy to break. At the end of the scene, the objects revert.
Exceptional Success: The items remain switched for one full day.
With the right skill or ability, even the most intangible of things can be stolen. With this Merit, the body thief is able to reach out to a victim and rob them of sight, hearing, taste or any basic sense. In fact, in the case of knowledgeable thieves, even senses that are neither obvious nor mundane are fair game. Among all kinds of thieves, robbing a victim of their senses is a common practice since the benefits for the thief are as strong as the hindrances to the victim. Among the Magically Talented, rituals that involve using puppets or dolls are common, whereas the Mentally Talented are considerably less flamboyant. The caster must be able to either clearly see the target or have a sympathetic connection to him in order to steal a sense.
Dice Pool: Wits + Empathy versus Resolve
Duration: One scene
Possible Modifiers: The sense is not one possessed by the caster (–2), the sense is supernatural in nature (–3)
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The power fails. Sensory overload causes the caster a –2 penalty on all perception-related rolls for the remainder of the scene.
Failure: The power fails.
Success: The caster achieves more successes than the victim does. Before the roll, the caster must se- lect one targeted sense to steal from the victim. The victim loses the sense for the scene. The caster finds her perceptions heightened. When making any roll pertaining to that sense, the caster can substitute the victim’s traits for her own and may roll all rolls with that sense twice, taking the best of the two results. If the sense is supernatural in nature, the caster must use her traits to utilize the stolen sense. This power can steal a person’s Unseen Sense Merit for a scene. The caster must know that the victim has the Merit before the roll is attempted.
Exceptional Success: As above, except the stolen sense lasts a whole day.
With this Merit, the character has access to a number of likeminded individuals who share in a particular depraved act. This support network offers sympathy that most could not. This Merit allows the character to spend a Willpower point to gain the usual three-dice bonus on the roll to resist gaining a derangement, if the action causing the roll is acceptable to the members of the group.
Drawback: The group expects the character to act as support for other members, and the group may call her in to perform other perverse acts in kind, such as body disposal. This can lead a character to an even quicker path to moral degradation.
To the other denizens of the World of Darkness, this is possibly the most dreaded and dangerous power body thieves possess next to or possibly including their ability to swap bodies. With this unique ability, the thief is able to rob a supernatural being of the very talents that make them inherently what they are. A thief does not need to be intimately familiar with what it is the supernatural in question is capable of, it takes merely an estimate of what they should be able to do to draw out the gift. Witnessing the power in use and an Intelligence + Occult roll will suffice.
Manifestation of this ability among a society of thieves who recognize it for what it is tends to carry with it a certain amount of esteem as many consider it the pinnacle of their craft, magical or otherwise. Those aware of the power still fear those with it, as their own supernatural skills are not exempt from this theft, including the unique specifics of their own body swapping powers. The caster must be able to either clearly see the target or have a sympathetic connection to her in order to steal a supernatural power.
Dice Pool: Intelligence + Occult versus Resolve + Supernatural Advantage
Duration: One scene
Possible Modifiers: The caster is familiar with the power targeted (+2), the caster has never seen the power before (–2)
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The power fails; the victim is aware of the caster’s intentions and identity.
Failure: The power fails.
Success: The caster chooses one supernatural power possessed by the victim. For the remainder of the scene, the victim loses access to the power and the caster gains access to it. If the power requires an activation cost (Vitae, Essence, Mana, et cetera,) the caster must pay this cost in Willpower. At the Storyteller’s discre- tion, some powers may not be available to a body thief. Examples include powers that necessitate a dead body to function. As well, at the Storyteller’s discretion this Merit may allow the theft of an inherent ability, such as a werewolf’s regeneration. If there is a question as to what this power can or cannot work on, the default answer should be “no.”
Exceptional Success: As above, but the power is stolen for one full day.
Few thieves get far in their careers as the center of attention, doing their deeds in broad daylight with an audience. Some do, but that’s another matter entirely. For the body thief, staying hidden and acting with subtlety can be the difference between escaping to the next lifetime and death or perhaps imprisonment as a lunatic. The thief who develops this ability has learned to excel in going unnoticed, blending and becoming a part of the background. This is not any form of invisibility, not even as much as the ability to create a fake invisibility by forcing others to ignore you. This power is simply the ability to be utterly un- interesting and avoid notice. Even on a successful roll, victims in the area will still be able to see the thief, they would simply think nothing ill of their presence. In a crowded restaurant, who notices the extra busboy rushing from table to table to keep things clean, and who would take notice of said busboy leaning over the table to take something from it? In a club full of club kids bumping into each other in a throng, what’s one more club kid?
In essence, this is not so different from donning a good disguise and acting unobtrusive. Though this is every bit as supernatural ability as the others listed in this section, as such a Storyteller should take that into account.
Dice Pool: Resolve + Stealth
Duration: One scene
Suggested Equipment: Inconspicuous clothing (+1), a crowd (+1), bright lights (–1), clothing that doesn’t fit environment (–2)
Possible Modifiers: Active pursuit (–2), Caster has Striking Looks (–1 or –2)
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The power fails. The caster is unaware of the failure.
Failure: The power fails. The caster is aware that she has failed, and can attempt again.
Success: If successful, this power’s successes subtract from any rolls to locate the caster.
Exceptional Success: In addition to the increased successes, the caster also enjoys a +2 benefit to any action where visibility may be a complication, such as pickpocketing.
This ability is the most primitive and primordial manifestation of the body thief’s talent. It takes the stuff of life from the target and gives it to the thief, reflecting the parasitic relationship between thieves and their victims.
In the case of Vitality Draining, there is no one social group that prefers it, although many hesitate to use it as it tends to manifest in such a flashy and over-the-top-manner that it risks exposing the thief to unwanted attention from the common people and monster hunters alike. This is not a subtle power; the victim of this power grows noticeably ill or weak while the thief in question grows empowered. (A Wits + Medicine roll allows an observer of the power to notice something amiss.) In the cases of thief and victim who are already injured, wounds might exacerbate or deepen on the victims face before closing up on the thief’s face a moment after. The caster must be able to either touch the target or have a sympathetic connection to steal the target’s vitality.
Dice Pool: Intelligence + Medicine versus Stamina
Duration: One day
Possible Modifiers: Victim is sleeping (+2)
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The power fails and the caster takes one lethal wound.
Failure: The power fails.
Success: Reduce the victim’s Health trait by one dot for the next day. The caster gains one dot of Health for the next day. The caster can only benefit from a number of extra Health dots equal to her unmodified Stamina at one time. A victim can only be victim to this power once at a given time.
Exceptional Success: As above, except the victim loses two dots of Health, and the caster gains two. This can exceed the limit a thief can benefit from by one.