Alicornutopia

MaggieoftheOwls wrote:Gloria had not been previously mentioned on this thread.
Gloria is actually one of several Things I Do where you have this character, or set of characters, where they have a set history up until a certain point and then at that point it branches wildly. Sort of like Standard Backstory Bells, except without having a single original starting point. In this case it's less Gloria and more Gloria And Klaudia And A Handful Of Hangers-On Including Jeanine-who-has-been-met-in-thread.

I was more curious to know if she is like from an original setting? For a moment people are thinking something like "nicer World of Darkness"

Setting is totally original. I know nothing about World of Darkness. I mean, it's got vampires and werewolves and other things that traditionally go bump in the night, so it could easily be compared to any other world characterized by having those things, but.
Oh, I'm not sure anyone caught the significance of Gloria specifying reproductive vampire when she and Bella were talking at cross-purposes, so:
Masquerade vampires have biological castes. The top five are technically reproductive, but it is super illegal for a class five vampire to turn someone without a ton of other vampires around, because they can only make ghouls. A vampire can be promoted by drinking the blood of higher-ranked vampires, but this takes a lot of blood, so it's not generally worth it to do systematically for anyone but ghouls. So if the only reproductive vampire you've got around is a class five, you have a have a lot of lower-class vampires around, and you need to turn someone right now, you won't likely get your head torn off for that. And only the top class can turn people into reproductive vampires, including the top class, but that takes a LOT of blood.

You really should consider changing the name, Masquerade is too confusing IMHO. I am not sure if understood what do you with "top class" is this like WoD vampire generations?

I was using class as a synonym for caste. So there are thirteen levels of vampire:
1. Can create any level of vampire, although the more powerful the new vampire the harder it is.
2. Can create levels 6-13
3. Can create levels 9-13
4. Can create levels 11-13
5. Can create ghouls.
6.
7. This is the point at which injuries start healing fast enough to be trackable by the human eye.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12. Have about the same strength, speed, whatever as they did when they were human. Recover from injuries at the same rate as a human, but will ultimately recover from more things than a human will and don't age.
13. Ghouls. Seem to be faster and stronger than a human, but this is an illusion caused by the fact that a normal person will stop before they get damaged and a ghoul won't. Have no higher reasoning faculty and little self-preservation instinct. Will attack humans and savage them to get at their blood. Not pleasant to be or encounter.

The lower your number is, the faster and stronger you are and the better you heal. 6-12 are usually lumped together as "normal" vampires, and 2-4 lumped together as "maker" vampires. Level 1 vampires are often the center of major vampire courts and have historically been attributed nicknames like "Emperor/Empress" vampires or whatnot.

Okay, the 13 levels of vampire is... a bit too similar to Vampire the Masquerade IMHO, instead of levels they have generations, "desceding" from the original vampire (I think it was Cain), anyway, it goes down to 13 and when generations 14 and 15 show up it is a sign of the end of the times.

I wouldn't think it is necessary to change the class thing, but using the term Masquerade will be so confusing.

On a different note, what can you tell us about mummies?

I know next to zip about Vampire: The Masquerade, but if my caste system wandered into coincidentally similar territory that is indeed a good reason to rename the world.
So to explain mummies I am probably going to have to explain magic in this world.
I haven't gotten the magic system fully fleshed out, but I have enough of an idea to explain some stuff.
There is nothing magic is absolutely known to not be able to do. The use of magic is a little bit genetic, but only as an aptitude--aptitude for magic might run in a family the same way that an aptitude for music or painting might run in a family. Historically, most magical traditions have been intensely insular, passed down from parent to child or teacher to student or within a small school that vets its students very thoroughly. As a result, there are a lot of Lost Ancient Magics. The magic isn't self-contradictory the way Sunnyworld magic apparently tends to be, but it's...imagine an incredibly vast lace sheet, and if you know a piece of the lace pattern you can do magic with it, and lots of different people have independently discovered lots of different spots on the sheet. Modern magic-users have been more proactive about sharing knowledge, but it's not like physics where it's working in literally everything and you can do a ton of experiments easily.
One of the Lost Ancient Magics came from ancient Egypt, and it involved funerary rites. Basically, if you were mummified and buried by one of these sorcerers, then when something disturbed your rest you would wake and assume a lifelike form in order to drive off the intruders, and then go back to sleep. But there were a lot of different practitioners, who had a lot of different requirements, and they dwindled during the intermediate periods (between the Old and Middle Kingdoms, and between the Middle and New Kingdoms) and the Ptolemaic period. Eventually (as far as anyone knows) they were wiped out altogether.
Through the millenia, tombs were ransacked and destroyed and even mummies who should have risen in their own defense were desecrated beyond returning. Today, most of the supernatural world believes that the Victorians, with their mummy-unwrapping parties and even cannibalism (not joking, this happened irl) got the last of them. In reality, there are less than fifty mummies walking the earth today, and possibly more left undiscovered.
The mummies who "survived" are ones who were designed to be motile and not bound to their tombs. For most of them, the magic is anchored in one or more amulets embedded in their body. Hepzibah has a heart-sized stone amulet in the shape of the heart heiroglyph in her chest cavity where a human heart would be. Despite this, she appears to most inspection to have a pulse.

Honestly just using the name "masquerade" in a universe with a non-zero quantity of vampires would cause comparissions, even if it is like... focused on some sort of fairy-masquerade-ball-that-lasts-forever or something.

So, I asked about Mummies, lets go with werewolves next? or we could talk about something else if you prefer.

Werewolves and other therianthropes I know exist but haven't fleshed out very much. I know that Gloria has at least one therianthrope of a more exotic variety working at the club, but I don't have a lot of details beyond that. The Monster Mash tends to attract things and people that are weird even for people "in on it."

I'd still love to do a sandbox with you sometime Maggie

I think you haven't been responding on google chat?