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View Full Version : DM Help Vampire Dark Ages, Help Designing Enemies



ajp1011
2015-07-16, 02:34 PM
So I'm running a fairly long term Old World of Darkness Vampire Chronicle starting in the Dark Ages. I plan to eventually take the group all the way to modern nights. One thing I have trouble with, and that takes up a ton of my time is giving the players good balanced enemies to fight. I'm much more used to DnD/Pathfinder and the like where there is a nice bestiary with challenge ratings to just pull monsters and various enemies from. Pathfinder even has d20pfsrd.com where you can just pull NPC enemies... I want a Bandit Lord... Boom no problem, I want a couple feral wolves... Boom no problem.

My players enjoy the high politics, subterfuge aspect of the game but they get a little uppity if there isn't at least a bit of combat in a session. So this begs the question, how can I spontaneously generate simple balanced combatants without having to fully stat out an NPC?

P.S. Tonight they will be sneaking onto a Crusader ship that just came into the port of Marseilles to steal some stuff. There should be some guardsmen, maybe a few sailors, and possibly a tougher Christian Knight or two that they could run into, the year is 1246 AD. Any help and advice would be appreciated.

Berenger
2015-07-16, 03:13 PM
Stat out a few very generic NPCs on index finger cards.

For example, make an "Rabble" template and use it for all sailors, street thugs, punks and angry peasants. Then make a "Soldier" template and use it for all viking warriors, renaissance pikemen and WW II soldiers. Then make an "Elite" template for knights, berserkers, SWAT members and the like. Nothing elaborate, physical stats plus a quick notation of dots in athletics, brawl, primary weapon [melee or ranged] and secondary weapon [ranged or melee] will do. The rest (for example a knight templars dots in ride or a SS officers dots in presence) will come up seldom enough to improvise them on the fly.

Edit: On second thought, don't write them down on your finger. Gosh, im tired. :smallannoyed:

Pilo
2015-07-17, 07:25 AM
There are a few books of kindreds, you can try this link : http://mrgone.rocksolidshells.com/pdf/rev/lineofcaine.pdf There is a lot of vampires in it, you might find one that suits you. Children of the revolution is an other book with vampires stats and background.

In the core books, there are also sections where vampire's foes are described.

Mr. Mask
2015-07-17, 08:11 AM
I have some tricks for doing this. As Berenger says, you can have some general categories of combatant, and just use those, adjusting slightly as needed. You can also have a skill range table, to remind you how much a really capable person should have in a skill, and how much a semi-capable person should have, etc. (in case you need to work out the rope untying roll for a musician on the fly).

The question is how many combat stats there are to track, and how much they vary (been a while since I had anything to do with the Masquerade game).

ajp1011
2015-07-17, 03:13 PM
Thanks for the feedback guys, I've ended up doing what Berenger said a number of times and it works pretty well, coupled with Mr. Masks suggestion I can see that taking care of 90% of the cases I would run in to. Pilo that resource you just shared though is amazing! Is there anything else like that for werewolves or mages or other supernaturals? It'd be nice to find something for Inquisition members too, I'd like to flavor them up a bit instead of just saying he has True Faith 2... so I grabbed the Dark Ages Inquisition book and built out a few BBEG's for the players to encounter but my problem is I'm a little OCD about not fudging the rules when stating things out... I figure the game designers created them for balance reasons and I'd rather not throw that out of whack... consequently building BBEG's takes a good deal of time.

If any oWoD players/storytellers would like to share stat blocks for any of there vampires/werewolves/mages/hunters/inquistors that could be useful for other DM's too. I'll post some of my creations here in a little bit.