The New-Look Autopsy. Cleaned up and expanded blog articles, support and other material for a variety of games in a more screen/tablet friendly format.
This issue:
Buy it HERE
Since 2008 the world of the Bloodsuckers has been subjected to a terrible, terrible scourge. Seemingly out of nowhere marauding gangs of ‘women of a certain age’ have taken to vampire hunting. Not out of some misguided and inaccurate religious outrage or personal horror, but for an altogether more sinister and disturbing reason.
Sex.
Needless to say this horrifies a great many Bloodsuckers (save those who can’t get dates or a bit of the old slap and tickle other ways, or who prefer ladies with experience – and it is always ladies). Great lengths have to be taken for young male Bloodsuckers to avoid their attentions and to escape with their honour intact.
Puma Crepusculum are just normal women, mostly in their 40s and 50s. They typically have statistics of 3 and a wide variety of life-experience skills at rating 2 and 3. What marks Puma Crepusculum apart from your normal, run of the mill, mundane mortal is their lust for young, male, vampire flesh and their peculiar abilities to be immune to, even invigorated by displays of vampiric power.
Puma Crepusculum can absorb a Bloodsucker’s Juice. Whenever a Bloodsucker uses a power upon or within sight of a Puma Crepusculum they lose a point of Juice and it goes into the Puma’s pool. They can each store up to twenty points of Juice.
A Bloodsucker who succumbs and sleeps with a Puma loses all their Juice, and she takes it all. Any going over her maximum pool is lost.
The darkness hides many terrors for our kind and there are many who hunt the hunters. There are those who seek your blood, your magic and then there are those who seek something more. They desire your innocence, your very essence. There is nothing so deadly, so feared as… ladies who lust.
The basic version of Bloodsucker: The Angst lets you play teeny-goths and emo kids who have become caught up in the vampire subculture and ‘turned’ but you might want to play an ‘elder’. Someone who came up and changed during the goth revival of the 1990s, or even the original movement uncounted years earlier!
How might you do that then. How might you play an older character in Bloodsucker and what differences might there be when you’re an OG? (Old or Original Goth).
1. Sample Schticks: World weary, office goth, weekend warrior, Peter Pan, Creeper, drunken sot, worker drone.
2. Cliques: The cliques are the same as usual. OGs tend to be aloof from the whole cut and thrust of politicking though and tend to be a force unto themselves. Individual and somewhat self-focussed.
3. Check your concept with your GM. OGs tend to only work if they have a strong link with the group (a son, daughter or sibling) or if the whole group is OGs, a group of friends who exist outside the politicking and fighting.
4. 90s revival goths have 70 points to spend on statistics. 80s goths have 80 points to spend on statistics.
5. 90s revival goths have 80 points to spend on skills. 80s goths have 90 points to spend on skills.
6. 90s revival goths have 12 points to spend on powers. 80s goths have 15 points to spend on powers. OGs have some extra options when it comes to the various powers, alternative versions of the existing powers.
7. Choose merits and flaws.
8. 90s revival goths have a starting juice capacity of of 8. 80s goths have a starting juice capacity of 10. They start at half this total, the same as other Bloodsuckers.
9. 90s revival goths start with 6 Angst. 80s goths start with 7 Angst.
10. Select equipment.
11. Work out your cool. Reduce the total by 1 for 90s revival goths and 2 for 80s goths. Don’t trust anyone over thirty.
12. Double check everything.
13. Fill out your details.
14. OGs have an additional stat called ‘Meh’ which represents the extent to which they really, really can no longer be bothered with stupid games. This applies as extra difficulty for tasks and rolls as determined by the Games Master. 90s revival goths have a Meh of 1, 80s goths have a Meh of 2. Meh can go up and down but this should only be the result of really, really getting involved or showing supreme indifference. Failure when you DO get involved in a plot or scheme can increase Meh. Should Meh ever reach 5 the OG completely withdraws from Bloodsucker society and tries to forget what they are.
Dramatics – OGs get to roll an extra dice when using Dramatics as they have the benefit of years of experience.
Ignored – OGs use their ignored powers in subtly different ways. Rather than sneaking and hiding Level 1 ignored provides them a bonus to fast talking, lying, making excuses and otherwise wriggling out of social situations they’ve gotten themselves into. Level 2 lets them spend points to make themselves memorable (albeit as ‘that freak’) rather than forgotten. Level 3 remains the same.
Transmogrification – OGs turn into the more typical vampire forms of wolf and bat. Something that irritates the younger Bloodsuckers, who can’t.
Venom – OGs get a bonus to their Venom rolls equal to their ‘Meh’ score.
Mehgic – OGs have their own power, Mehgic. At level 1 this costs 3 juice. At level 2, 2 juice. At level 3 one juice. When spent it allows them to add their ‘Meh’ score to resist any supernatural power used against them because they just really, really don’t care any more.
The Loligoth Clique
Bloodsuckers are pretty universal for the most part, the organisations that they’re a part of define them more than where they are in the world. Sure, there’s a few differences here and there according to local culture but usually that doesn’t manifest as any sort of huge difference. Sometimes however…
In Japan, and increasingly elsewhere, a new independent Clique has sprung up separate to the rest of Bloodsucker Society. Mostly insular the Loligoths have been unknown by the other Bloodsuckers until recently. With more and more of them turning up at conventions, clubs and other places that Bloodsuckers are known to hang out it was inevitable that there would be clashes and encounters.
Now the Loligoths are trying to find their place in broader Bloodsuckers society or to understand if there even is a place for them in it. Many of the other Cliques are trying to lay claim to them as part of their own, the Batshit in particular are keen to draw them to their side since they seem to have independently manifested their Cloth Crafting power.
Loligoths form their own little groups of five or more to compare outfits and hang out together. It’s almost all about the costume – and posing – but for the costumes to have the best impact they must be seen and, hopefully, they will outdo the costumes of their compatriots.
The anime craze has waned a little, which is weakening them, but they’re still exposed and the Clique is spreading beyond the borders of Japan to other nations with many obsessed white-girls (and boys, or so some people think, it can be hard to tell sometimes, other times, well, Man Fae or a bearded Sailor Moon).
Loligoths tend to either conform to or to confound racist and beauty stereotypes, to be intensely body-concious or blithely ignorant of their own physicality, to be truly gorgeous or unintentionally hideous.
Clique Power: Cloth Crafting
Loligoths have the power of Cloth Crafting, which was originally thought to only be a Batshit power, it’s a source of some consternation that they know it and that they seem to have developed it independently.
Clique Weakness
Loligoths have a unique ability to attract the attention of drooling perverts. At least once per game the Games Master can, will and indeed must inflict a drooling perv upon the Loligoth player, usually a creepy anime fan or a dirty old bastard. This is usually only a minor inconvenience, but it can turn serious and stalkerish if not dealt with with a firm manner.
Clique Strength
Loligoths get twice as much bonus from any clothing that they wear that can be construed to be ‘costume’. Cosplayers who dress up as vampire characters can also become ‘Loligoths’ though they don’t necessarily like the term. This is where the few genuinely and obviously male (though bishounen) Loligoths tend to come from and since pretty much everything they wear is costume, they get a truly powerful set of bonuses.
Shadow World Shizzle
Rant about ‘A Certain Young Adult Fantasy Author’.
Alternate origins for Chav powerz.
Tough Justice Tosh
Character Concept Competition
LARP Information
Play by Post Rules
Courtesans Crap
Actual Play
More Actual Play
Origins
Admirers
Kiddywinks
Investments
Advanced Rules
Frothington Road
You can find a shiny review of Wizkid over HERE
Wizkid is the next (Xpress version) game in the Shadow World series and this time the satirical sights are set upon wizards, witches, magical boarding schools, fan fiction, slash fiction, ‘otherkin’, teen-witches, young adult fiction, MMORPGs and supernatural romance.
Wizkid is also a fully featured game that could be taken more seriously and used to emulate many of these things – if you were so inclined. Otherwise it expands our gameworld and is fully compatible with Bloodsucker: The Angst and Chav: The Knifing.
Contains no egregious references to chuffin’ Atlantis either.
WARNING
Since we’re making fun of fanfic and slashfic this book, despite being about magical schoolkids, contains adult references and fiction.
You can buy it HERE
It will be available at the other outlets soon and is already up on Lulu if you want hardcopy.
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As previously intimated Wizkid: The Cheapening is almost ready, it’ll be out tomorrow in fact – so keep an eye out for it.Why should you buy it? Well, it’s a further progression in the rules and development of The Shadow World games and a bit of a return to the original concept behind Bloodsucker, namely that while these groups like to THINK that they’re supernatural powerhouses, they’re actually a bunch of useless bastards and wannabes.
Wizkid is obviously centred around the ‘magical school’ concept but it goes a lot further than that and takes the piss out of a huge number of different things from MMORPGs and Disneyfied Wicca to fan-fiction, slash-fiction and otherkin. It’s these last few things that I think are going to cause our ‘trademark’ controversy. |
| Ian’s written a good book with an interesting magic system but because we’re taking the piss out of slash and fan fiction and given the creepy and sinister nature of a lot of that shadowy world, the obvious problem of SEX rears its purple head and, given that we’re talking about schoolkids you can already hear people sharpening their pitchforks.I’m a little concerned due to recent experiences with dribbling morons being unable to read subtext or get the point but I’ve decided to go ahead with it anyway. It’s not necessarily integral to the game in any case and mostly only appears in the in game fic but I did – and do – feel that no target is safe and hey, people were at it like bunnies from the age of 14 when I was at school and if the Daily Fail is to be believed, things have only gotten worse since.
Nothing and no-one is safe from satire, least of all people like this. |
Postmortem Studios 