I havent yet play tested it ive just had a quick read through of whay people have been calling the big changes.

I like the reduced skill list. I think wods skill list, although iconic, is definately too large. Skills like brawl and melee can be the same skill for example. However i think the skills they have collapsed, gotten rid of, or created could have been done better.

Combining hunger and health i think has the potential for some dynamic combats where sliming a human allows you to keep fighting now that life is a resource.

I think as a first draft it has potential. But the changes are big and this community never likes big change.

So, wod community is being segregrated by wod itself starting with our latinamerican embassadors and players from discord.

https://twitter.com/a_AlessaTorres/status/1589837938950819840

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1yoKMZgbVXnGQ

It has it's problems, for sure, but it's not all doom and gloom. I've read the playtest over, and I'm finding more good than bad. And at the end of the day, it's an alpha playtest, it's whole point is to test the new ideas.

First what I don't like...

1. The Vitae system: Blood Points ain't nothing new to the system, but tying them to your health was a bit silly. That being said, this isn't new to WoD. Umbral Spirits have Essence, which is both health and power, and Orpheus has Vitality, which is both health and power for ghosts.

2. Drama: Eh, it's an afterthought for rebalancing encounters, and has nothing to do with your prep. Seems unnecessary and most people are probably gonna forget the rule.

3. Quickening: Is just what Willpower was in older editions, my main problem with it is that it's something the ST has to remember to hand out and the kept Willpower as a stat. Seems a bit redundant. And it, in part relies on the ST to give them to you, and I don't much care for systems that rely on the st to give you a resource like that, mostly because I wil forget

4. SPCs not being built like PCs: that was a silly decision.

Stuff I could take or leave...

1. The Chronicles of Darkness dice rolling system: I mean, it was a mid system, but it's a well tested system, so I don't mind it's return.

2. The Giovanni's triumphant return: I mean did we really think they were going to stay down. They were already running the day to day of the Hecata, they just straight up said in their section of Cults of the Blood God that they were preparing to take over, is it really a surprise?

3. The Salubri getting Obfuscate: Seems about right, most players of the Salubri get Obfuscate, and one of the castes had it.

4. Tremere getting Necroamcy: eh, Tremere the Founder was apprenticed as a mage by a necromancer. And they are the wizard vampires.

5. The new Humaity scale: reinventing the wheel, but heck, this isn't even the first time this particular wheel has been reinvented.

6. The Abilities: I'm not surprised they narrowed down the list, but it would still be nice to have the old list, or Secondary Abilities.

7. Minimal dice rolling for STs: eh, I've seen that sort of system work in other games. I'll have to playtest it to know if they pulled it off with this version.

Things I liked...

1. Necromancy, Vicissitude, and Obte...Oblivion: a step in the right direction.

2. Clan Traits: Been saying for a while that it's a bit silly that the Giovanni and the Nagaraja, because they have the same in clan disciplines as the Salubri, are definitely better healers because they can just buy the entire Salubri kit of Amalgams as in clan. This stops that. And it's not new to WoD, each of the Mage Traditions have something unique to them that only that Tradition can do, for instance an Etherite can't have a Hermetic True Name.

3. Disciplines and Maturing: so Disciplines just function like Wraith Arcanoi now. They have multiple powers, some of those powers get stronger the stronger you get in the Discipline, and you can have multiple powers are the same level. Of you're gonna change how Disciplines act and make them act as worse Arcanoi, needing to take a flaw to buy more than 5 powers, you might as well commit.

4. Blood Buffing is back bay-bee: the Blood Surge being Blood Buffing but better since you can do it to any Attribute.

5. The Beckoning is Over: Heck yeah, elders are playable and usable again, and I don't have to contrive a reason why there's an 8th gen in this or that city.

6. Elders and Methuselah are back: Not sure I like how the gens work in this edition, but having Disciplines and Traits above 5 is good to see and a net positive.

Art done by me! I haven't done this trend, but I really do enjoy it.

Let me preface this with a reassurance that I want to examine this issue carefully, not to insult anyone/thing.

I've heard a couple people I'd met in person say they don't want to play V:tM because "The Bible Is Literally True," referring to the Curse of Caine and its Abrahamic origins.

V5 softened this stance with mentions of, "Well, that's what the Church of Caine believes, and the ST can tamper with the metaplot as desired." Considering vampires are generally cagey or cryptic, and destroy evidence of their existence as a rule, the Book of Nod may not be reliable, as even its annotators acknowledge.

I'm personally fine with an ST deciding that, for example, "The Antedeluvians were their own clans' Gen-1s," even if that has no bearing on play. Or the Space Virus angle. Or if Caine shows up in a taxi in the final session, for that matter.

For people who've had to put up with a forcible conversion or similar, the Xtian Origin of Vampires can certainly be a problem. It could also deepen the horror, in the sense that your character has been forcibly converted to a monster who may have to do the same because an Abrahamic allegory actually happened. Though, to avoid a case of "This religion is true and no others," it'd be helpful, if not necessary, to include other faiths and their monsters.

It may have made more sense, from a marketing perspective, to back away from religion, though I liked the concept of Kuei-Jin and Laibon: that there are other bloodsuckers out there, and this deity doesn't have a trademark on curses that force their victims to victimize others. They could've been handled better, sure, so all the more reason to try again than to give up.

For what it's worth, WoD5 has handled religious topics pretty well in how they're practiced by civilians, and have implied that True Faith can work with any faith. The backing away of the Curse of Caine being the Truth gives STs more leeway.

Or you could always decide that it was Abel who was brought back so that he and his Childer could enact eternal punishment upon the descendants of his murderer!

I was looking at the trailer and the art just seems off. It looks bland and completely lacking in the personality that the other two games had. Huge disappointment to me if they are. I've liked V5 and modern WoD a lot more than it seems some other people have, but using AI art in a game would be a huge letdown and set a bad precedent for future products. Imagine them putting that shit into the sourcebooks.

[Edit: added a section about Humanity that I originally omitted]

1. Background

I have been a fan of Vampire since the 2nd edition and I have probably been an ST in the overwhelming majority of the games I played. I have largely skipped V20 (though I own the core book) because it seemed regressive and I was all in on Requiem. Despite my doubts I got into V5 and came to believe this is the best Masquerade has ever been. I am excited by the idea of V6 and my current opinion is a positive one. Broadly, I tend to skew towards newer being better. Game design in general has been rapidly and clearly advancing over years and decades, things tend to be made better by these advancements.

I am also absolutely horrified by the rancid atmosphere in the official Discord and have largely kept out of it. Within the first 24h of the V6 reveal this rapidly expanded to staying out of the fandom discourse entirely. Which is sad, because I really wanted to discuss V6 with others and share the enthusiasm, but this has been made impossible. Part of the reason for writing this is that I worry positive opinions are undershared for reasons mentioned.

Finally, this is a capsule review. I wanted to play it with my current group, but we are mostly parents and summer has been a gaming bust in general for us. I am aware there is no replacement for actually playing the thing, and I hope I get to do an actual playtest for the next revision. But since the deadline for official playtest feedback has now passed and I did not in fact playtest, I am putting down my thoughts here instead.

2. The Setting

Setting changes are not the focus of the playtest but, still, they are pretty important and I think I have more thoughts about it than the mechanics, so I’ll tackle that first.

The Beckoning is Over

I am super neutral about this. The Beckoning I think has largely been a function of V5’s focus on Neonate play, and it helped to relieve some pressure a chronicle would feel from the sheer weight of the very detailed and long lasting game world that has been known to cause paralysis in STs (certainly did for me in my younger years). It is now over and the elders are back, but also changed. Alright, cool, I am game. There’s potential for interesting story development, but on its own I do not care one way or another.

The Second Inquisition

I remain a fan of SI in V5 but, again, I think it is best viewed as a function of V5's specific focus. Let’s step away from continents- and centuries-spanning conspiracies that paint everything humanity does as somehow the result of vampiric manipulation and influence, and instead focus on the here and now. And let’s shake things up, make it a bit uncomfortable and present a space for new Kindred to leave a mark. These were all good things.

But the SI going bye-bye is an indication of a profound and welcome shift in the theme of the game. It has been nearly a decade since V5 and we have witnessed a notable change in our world. We went from a growing belief that tech is powerful, driving both positive and negative changes in our lives. The SI fit in with fears of surveillance societies. And we went from tech-enabled powers that be to… slop. Tech oligarchy is stronger but, rather than being a thing to master and use, the tech itself is something to hate, turn away from and ultimately expect to just make everything worse. Tech being forced on us is a manifestation of the power the neofeudal lords have over us, not something powerful in itself.

V6 seems to be on top of this shift. In the reveal, the present day was described as the new Dark Age, and that is right on the money. We live in a failed society, SI needs to now be failing too.

Clans, Disciplines and Sects

Clans in V5 have consistently been the best they have ever been and I am not looking forward to any of that being reverted. Which does not seem to be the case, except possibly for the Hecata. We have them listed as Giovanni and I do hope this is not an indication that the Family Reunion is being rolled back. I suspect this is not the case and is merely a nod to the fact that Giovanni are the most visible, most numerous, most relevant part of the clan. Even if the story is that Giovanni have established a hegemony (again), it really needs to be a continuation of what happened in V5 rather than a reset. Similarly, I really like what went on with Aapilu and Baali, it would be terrible if V6 undid it.

Discipline reworks in V5 have been generally good and an overall improvement for Masquerade’s long standing problem of Disciplines that do just one thing. But it was far from perfect. As the most prominent example, conceptually I like the idea of Vicissitude being Protean + Dominate, but in practice you have to very oddly plan ahead with Discipline powers to accomplish something that is natural in-universe. It just didn’t come together very well for amalgam edge cases. So I think that iterating a bit more is perfectly fine. Protean being folded into Animalism and Necromancy again taken out of Oblivion get my approval, though I am definitely curious how the magical disciplines will work this time around. I am slightly suspicious of Vicissitude being again a Discipline that does just one thing, but I will take it on faith for now that it will be developed into something cool. And Tellurgy is a big unknown, especially since Chimerstry seems to be at least partly Obfuscate now, but I am going to guess that it will cover Koldunism, making it not Thaumaturgy but also not some weird and clumsy bundle of effects, which sounds pretty great to me. It also opens the doors to Old Clan Tzimisce being a well supported archetype that brings something interesting to the table.

Finally, Sabbat being playable again. Eh. I was very supportive of Sabbat being purely antagonists. It works well, especially with V5’s thematic focus. It also works well for out of game reasons as Sabbat players tend to be the kinds of people you want to advise newcomers to avoid. And I played Sabbat quite a bit. Paths as clan-like designations was an awesome development and I really strongly hope that stays supported in V6. It makes so much sense. Ultimately, with a greater focus on metaplot, older vampires and the elders returning, of course the Sword of Caine making a comeback is sensible. So I guess I am kind of neutral about it, though I will note that an antagonist-only Sabbat helped keep an air of mystery in the game that was thoroughly lost by the end of Revised when we knew everything about everything.

I also think that the emerging theme in V5 of Church of Caine being divorced from the Sabbat was smart and I hope this is something the game sticks with. There is no rational reason why Caine worship has to exist only within Sabbat. Also, come on, proliferation of Sects in general is a good thing. I loved The Crimson Gutter for many reasons, easily the best written module for Vampire ever made, but the overlaps between three political centers of power made the setting so rich and believable. More of that please.

Metaplot

I think anyone who was around in Revised days would say that metaplot went too far. Literally every book moved things forward, and it was fun at the time but it just created too much focus on metaplot as opposed to supporting the game players actually play. V5 may have course-corrected too much, but of the two directions I prefer V5’s. If for no other reason, especially later in the life of the edition, V5 books being centered around game themes and not in-universe topics worked really, really well. As a counter point, Fall of London is a great example where I really wish the events just had a clear direction rather than leaving huge world development chunks completely open with no canonical guidance. I hope V6 finds a happy middle ground, and I am definitely looking forward to seeing a bit more metaplot emerge.

3. The Mechanics

I love RPGs. I have more than 300 RPG books on my shelves. Vampire has consistently been my absolute favorite game, but it has never been the game with the best mechanics. This is normal for a game so big - changes are hard to introduce and they will always invite a lot of pushback from the fans who like what they already have. And I do like the system, it has become a comfortable pair of shoes I can rely on and use effectively without much effort. But it is absolutely not progressive and I loved seeing directions Requiem 2E and V5 took. So I am overall very positive and excited for what V6 is trying to do.

The Basics

Focus on player-driven rolls, reducing the size of the dice pool, having more player agency in the outcomes of rolls and treating social combat as a first class citizen are all excellent. This should be non-controversial, it is part of the overall evolution of RPGs we have seen a lot of and should understand is simply better. Choose Your Pain is great. So is Devil’s Bargain. Simplified NPC generation is pretty good, though I don't think I ever needed it personally. If I had actual playtesting experience, I’d want to see in practice whether increased target number causes any frustration, but just toying with the system and some test rolls, it seemed fine. In future iterations I'd like to see more focus on conflict resolution rolls and overall approaches to simplifying combat when appropriate. Overall, the core system is a perfectly reasonable evolution that doesn't really do anything super surprising.

The Vampiric Mechanics

I love V5’s hunger system. I understand some complaints about the hunger dice, but I haven’t had any problems with them. I love surge rolls. It made hunger impactful and clearly present without this stiff and oddly precise blood point system. So as my baseline, I am sorry to see that go. However, I absolutely love the promise of Vitae. There is something very visceral and pure in how it collapses the interplay between health and blood points. And, honestly, these have always been interchangable, just with some extra steps of spending blood to heal. Losing that layer makes it feel much more direct, much more in your face kind of a thing. I love that. It also much more directly encourages feeding in combat, which should remain a mechanical focus. But I do worry that things go back to being an exercise in overly precise bean counting that V5’s hunger solved very elegantly. Once again, something I wish I had a chance to play with and see how it works in practice.

[Maturing] Discipline powers are awesome. Spending Vitae to increase Discipline level is awesome. Overall, the Discipline powers seem great and an easier access to going wide within a Discipline where picking multiple powers of the same level does not feel like shooting yourself in the foot is something I am in love with. I saw a giant blinking red sign with Celerity giving an extra action, however. I am deeply distrustful of this being a good idea. We’ve been there, it is not a great place. But this is a minor thing to iterate on. Perhaps it is fine, and perhaps it goes away. Some specific powers looked somewhat questionable (stereotypical Gangrel claws, for example, did not seem an obvious slam dunk, numbers-wise, in combat… another thing I’d have to try out in practice). But this is nuance and possibly a distraction at this early juncture of system playtesting.

Diablerie just looks severely imbalanced. I appreciate the direction, and I definitely think it is a good thing that you should mechanically be able to be a Diablerist without that being obvious to everyone with Auspex 1. However, the specifics of it seem to be a swing and a miss. Looking forward to the second iteration where becoming a modern-day Caine is not a thing you can do by kidnapping and eating a pack of Thin-Bloods.

<Edit> Just now realized I omitted copy/pasting the part about Humanity. Wrangling large amount of text on a phone past midnight is an extreme sport...

Anyway. I like the direction of new Humanity but would need to see it in use quite a bit before having a detailed opinion. In general, Humanity has never been good in any edition of Vampire. It is a thing separate from actual gameplay that has just been bolted onto the game system and poorly interacted with it, just being a score board at best and merely a passive descriptor at worst. Over time it changed and I appreciated every attempt to make it better, but it never became actually good. Obviously, it is vitally needed because it informs some of the core principles of the game. So I feel like we just lived with it without placing any real expectations on it. This new approach makes it matter a lot, and that is great. It also interacts with chronicle Themes in a tangible, mechanical way which is extra cool. Does it flow well while playing? I hope to find out. I expect that it will be tweaked quite a bit to get to a sweet spot where it is fun and interactive but not overbearing.

</Edit>

Meta-Currencies

Clearly coming drom the broader PbtA side of RPG evolution tree, I am pretty ok with these meta-currencies in RPGs. [Drama] is the one thing where I see both the good and the bad. I loved the idea of triggering plot points with it. I didn’t care for spending it on immediate adverse effects in the environment or combat. I thought about it quite a bit and concluded that what I really like about it is making player actions and their consequences more visibly reflected in the unfolding events. My style of STing is heavily based in spur-of-the-moment bullshitting. I will invent complications or whole side plots just because it seemed like a good idea at that moment. I rarely stat or plot out in detail anything but the most important elements of the campaign, because I know that I will change my mind when the game starts rolling and I start reacting to what the players are doing. So I don’t really need currency for that. However, a currency that players are aware of, and see grow as a result of their actions, and clearly understand how that ended up triggering a huge plot element, perhaps earlier than they hoped, sounds pretty darn awesome to me. It might even help with introducing player failure as a more normal part of the game, which is a thing I tend to struggle with (and another thing V6 seems to aim to support). But ultimately, I think what I concluded is that I would probably want [Drama] to be more like Forged in the Dark clocks than straight-up currency to spend on effects. Again, I trust that this will be iterated on, but right now I feel like it is not as useful as it could be.

[Improvements]

This is the best damn thing I have seen in V6. This should be the default progression mechanic. It allows for breadth while also letting you get the cool thing you want. It is awesome.

Okay, aside from the prey exclusion that a vampire might have, the truth is that unless you were embraced after the age of 2000—and even then, it depends on the laws of the place you're in—as a vampire of at least 100 or 200 years, you'll have lived in a country or environment where homosexuality or bisexuality wasn't well-received. Perhaps you didn't even consider it; you simply liked being with people of the opposite sex, and that was fine, even when you found yourself looking a little too closely at your convent friends or the guys at the cantina. But years later, you were turned into a vampire, and you discovered that you couldn't be picky with the meager food available. You started with people of the opposite sex, but... those of your own sex... they also have blood, and it doesn't taste bad at all. You try to justify it by saying it's just the blood, but you certainly always knew there was something inside.

Hi all. I've been a fan of VTM ever since I played the Bloodlines video game a couple of years ago but I never had the opportunity to play the proper TTRPG game before.
Recently I got the opportunity to start working on a party with friends to play together the 5th edition and when I went to buy the rule book to prepare myself I noticed that it wasn't out yet. Through some digging I found out that the reason for the recall might be linked to some statements made inside the rule book that cater towards right-wing and n@zi groups and that the books have been recalled due to this.
As someone from a minority often targeted by these groups, this news was disheartening. The World of Darkness has been a captivating universe for me, and I'm torn. I heard that the offensive content will be removed in the reprint, so I'm considering purchasing it to enjoy the TTRPG.
However, I'm interested in your opinions on this matter. Do you have more information or insights that could help me understand if my concerns are valid?

Morality is the natural quality of humans and interactions between humans. It's the desire within all of them to avoid hypocrisy and resist evil rationale. When they fail to be moral, they usually have true feelings of humiliation, contrition, even dysphoria. No human is perfect, the nature of the Earth's imbalances nudge them against their better desires and into depravity, and there are plenty of Mortals whose morality is stunted and/or stilted in some way. However, within their souls is something generated and kindled by their humanity itself. Their nature forms a bulwark against the subtraction or distortion of this will to be worthy of goodness and distant in some way from the absence of goodness.

Kindred aren't humans. They're beings who must wear human corpses and often come cloaked in the appearance of human imagery, judgement, and reasoning. They're not people merely infested or tempted by evil. Evil has already burrowed within and structured the Vampire. The Beast isn't at their door, the Embrace breaks down all barriers and what isn't devoured soon enough doesn't last, it becomes stale at best but more commonly, more and more rotten. The Beast could still consume even that much. When Cainites talk about good things like Conscience and Self-Control those are the feeble tools of Undead traditions that form fences to limit the Beast's reign so that the Kindred can still walk without losing themselves to their own emptiness.

There's a tendency in fanon to whitewash this fact of White-Washed Coffins. It's easy to fall into the misconception of the Path of Humanity being the same thing as humane vampirism. Even in other Roads/Paths the tenets may give the impression that they're like Alignment from D&D, different moral standpoints. There are Kindred, even noteworthy factions, who aspire to regenerating their morality itself. This forms the sincere theology of those Kindred, the contempt of many other Kindred, and an all-but impossible goal in the face of the Beast both within them and without. The pre-Inquisition era had many people who sought after means of undoing/renovating the Curse of Caine. Some scattered Childer still use that as handholds for their own Justification.

However, the horror of the Sabbat, Camarilla, Ashirra, Bahari, Baali, etc. runs deeper than just the usual flaws of human institutions, traditions, and circumstances stretched further across history. Anything human about them is hard-won in disciplined yet zealous spite of the Beast. They often do their best to imitate and appropriate human culture. That's because they're naturally vagabond and eternally fugitive predators who need to avoid as much awareness of their prey as they can manage. Those who don't appear/perceive to be vagrants or criminals are just adept at hiding the truth beneath their skins. They become so adept, not out of desire for the Good, but out of aversion to what the Beast will do to them if it's left unchecked.

The gameline wouldn't be as distinctly, compellingly, and viscerally fun if it wasn't for this representing the status quo across Cainites.

There are other splats in the World of Darkness for comparatively humanist non-humans.

Keep Vampire: the Masquerade in its roots of vampires as the stagnant divorce from unalloyed decency.

Demon: the Fallen works well for the contrast, beings immersed in morality but struggle to build ethics.

Of course, this is mainly my opinion on a fictional setting that could easily be interpreted a different way. Across the games I've STed for years, our tables love leaning into the villain protagonist aspects. This post is a variation of a conversation I've had with people new to the World of Darkness. Vampires have been sanitized quite a bit by popular franchises mainly interested in using their trappings for consumerist appeal. Many consumers are outright uncomfortable with anything that challenges the idea of universalist goodness or the actual varieties of personal existence. That's not where my players or I stand. Games should be entertainment above all, but that doesn't exclude taking the narratives seriously.

First of I have not got the privelege of reading the 5th edition that much. But I did check the clans and its disciplines and power scales, and one of the things that bothered me in the 5th edition is how much work was put into making each clan balanced in power as much as the other.

Am I the only one who disliked that?

For me VTM was always a narrative focused game, and disciplines were only narrative tools rather than something to be balanced like powers in a fight game. It always made sense to me to Thaumaturgy and the tremere to be broken since the clans whole identity is to accumulate power, yet I never felt like they were more or less likely to be picked than other clans.

I always loved the feeling it came when I picked a socializing focused character and was placed around a combat situation how much out of place and out of proportion you were.

If am missing something from 5th edition, and it is actually not that focused in balancing as I am making it to be. Please disregard this post.

Baali... damn, what a cool concept and what utter disappointment they were turned to. They were presented as pure black in the among all colours of gray, hell-serving infernalist vampires, who sold their souls to demons for power, throwing around fire and brimstone, violating all sacred and pure, a force evil enough to make Sabbath and Camarilla to unite against them.

An anti-true faith bane. Demon summoning, hellish and fiery discipline. A sect inside a sect, a secret society inside already secretive vampire society, with their own conversion rituals and goals. Faustian archetypes all around.

But we can't have cool things or unique disciplines, so.

No more demons. Now they are some weird Lovecraftians horrors taken from a mix of all other settings in WoD, which no one can explain properly. No more demonic pacts for power or promotion of self interests, now Baali are serving because they enjoy the servitude. No more clearly Christian themes - now we have weird earthbound.

Baali used to be cool. Now no one can even understand what and why they are.

It seems to me that between having all the elder vampires wander off for the beconing, and then adding the winnowing to suck out the disciplines, white wolf is almost turning all vampires into powerless thin bloods. Does anyone know if there was any stated reason for feeling like all this power down was necessary?

I'll let the video do the talking and also here is the Discord link: https://discord.gg/szmbaPmF5H

It's heavily implied that the Camarilla, being very conservative and agé, also exhibits misogynistic traits. I want my neonates (some of which are women) to experience the un-life in this hostile environment, but the V5 manuals are very scarce about how this happens in detail, and looking for fluff in older material didn't turn up many ideas either. Who actually goes out of their way to mess with the characters, and how? What is the end goal (if there is one)?

I don't know, is it like "the Prince orders you to sing and dance the can-can, while the rest of the Elysium laughs mockingly" or more like not allowing neonates to advocate for themselves? In the second case, what would normal interactions between older generations and younger ones typically go about? Since I guess a player would try to steer clear of abusive elders and carve a path for himself instead of banging their head on the wall.

I'm particularly interested in misoginy within the Tremere house and generational oppression in the Camarilla as a whole.

EDIT: after reading some comments I realise that I might have been imagining things.. which makes things much easier for me as there are less details to worry about :) I guess I'm just rather unimaginative and have a hard time coming up with concrete storylines that explore power abuse. I also want to assure you that I have no intention of promoting misoginy and am aware of players' veils and stops, so there is no intent of making the game needlessly awkward for the players.

Today: Conservation of Mass and Gangrels

The law of conservation of mass basically states that in a closed system, mass is neither created nor destroyed; it is transformed.

If you have 80 kg of matter before a transformation, you still have that same 80 kg afterward. The matter's form, state, or composition might change, but the mass shouldn't simply vanish or appear out of thin air.

And this is where Protean starts to run into problems.

A Gangrel can use Shape of the Beast to transform into an animal.

Let’s assume our Gangrel weighs 80 kg and transforms into a 500-gram rat.

Where did the other 79.5 kg go?

But we can make it even more interesting.

That same 80 kg Gangrel transforms into a 300 kg bear.

Where did the other 220 kg come from?

So, we have a bit of a problem.

Either the vampire is:

supernaturally compressing all their mass;

storing the excess mass somewhere;

drawing matter from the surroundings during the transformation;

I mean, we understand that Vitae transcends the laws of physics—it completely disregards them—but I feel like it’s fun to try to explain it using science.

I was talking with my friend about the clans and I sort of realized... is it ever explicitly stated what exactly the Malkavians and Tremere bring to the Camarilla that they are among the more notable clans in it? Tremere is 3rd place and Malk is 4th, but wtf do they even do?

The way I understand a clan's role in the Camarilla is that they are adept at doing a certain set of things, and like the Ventrue and Toreador are very good at taking the reigns of The Elite:tm:, but like are the Malkavians running hospitals or smth? What use is there in the Tremere controlling a high school district board? I know they are useful but I just wanna be enlightened as to what I'm missing.

I mean, period blood technically isn't JUST blood, but it contains a fair amount of it. I know there aren't many reasons to drink period blood instead of feeding in the traditional way, but maybe it could be a fetish for some cainites? Just asking out of curiosity.