Vampire, who hates Priests, mass, crucifixes etc. Not because he is a vampire. He's Protestant.

That’s actually in the original Dracula book where a girl (Mina) that been bitten by Dracula grabs crucifix and it burns her and she starts to cry (it was a communion, wafer, not a cross)

He’s talking about a character for Vampire: The Masquerade, a setting which absolutely has religious vampires and has a place for them

I had a character years ago that started as a Paladin, she was of a faith from the church she served. One day upon her return to her church, she was taken to the catacombs and forcefully turned into a vampire by other church members. While she was away, the church had been completely overrun by vampire overlords without her knowing. It created this character that still wanted to cling to her faith bc it was all she had, but also now had to live with being a holy, unholy abomination and I was LIVING for it. The very next session our DM quit that campaign and I’m still really sad I never got to play out that tragic and complex story.

One of the fluff stories for VtM is about a vampire priest. His congregation loves him because he regularly heals them and seems to actually perform miracles. To celebrate a cardinal visiting the town, they drag the priest outside to present him. He burns up and they just assume God ascended him to heaven and he winds up a Saint.

Thing is vampires would have a better reason to be catholic because the fact that it works on them would be evidence of it being true. Unless in this setting all religious or faith based symbols work on vampires.

Brennan: "All of vampire society doesn't seem to care about religion" The Sabbat: "am I a fucking joke to you?"

"You have to have faith in order for this to work on me, Mr. Vincent."

I did a vampire campaign where one of my players specifically requested this because theyre quite Christian themself and now theyre slowly becoming Blade.

I love how simple things like this can create so much.

This worked really well for me the last time I played. When the dm was going over world lore he said the halflings got wiped out in a war. I told him I had been planning on playing a halfling and I was starting to worry I’d have to scrap it. He said “if she were a halfling she’d basically be the last halfling…” I said “what if she IS the Last Halfling?” So my character got a gritty reboot where she grew up as a pickpocket after her entire village and family died. She spent most of her time disguised as a human child but after some lucky loot rolls she also became a tiny little Batman 🦇

So a Catholic Vampire, an Orthodox Werewolf, and a Protestant half-devil walk into a bar

As a Catholic myself, the thought has occurred to me that the obvious solution to being a vampire is to convert to Catholicism, go to daily Mass, and frequently receive the Blood of Christ.

Them: NOOO you can't be a Vampire AND a Catholic Brennan: haha character sheet go brrrrr

Midnight Mass be like:

I would kill to see Brennan host an old school WoD campaign

Not to steal his shine or anything, but Catholic vampires is no shock to anyone who's played Castlevania. Dracula himself quotes scripture and even has a chapel IN HIS CASTLE.

This was literally the plot of the first Vampire The Masquerade game.

Vampire the Masquerade does not get enough credit for just how well it encourages this exact thing. It is underappreciated more-so than any other system I know.

called a Disat (Disadvantage for points). I once played a character that was morbidly terrified of chickens.

This was essentially established in the Anne Rice novels where faithful vampires psyched themselves into thinking they were vulnerable to crucifixes.

I can see this now as a Dhampir Cleric who still holds firmly to their faith, but is physiologically repulsed by crucifixes and other "holy" symbology.

Best advice I have EVER been given for DMing advice and play advice: your quest or story can be as simple as find your way home or as difficult as find your way home!

“What if I was a gamer, but also had a gf?” That’s illegal.

"Oh all of vampire society doesn't seem to care about religion or have an active way to worship." Brother, let me introduce you to the Sword of Caine. Our Messiah will end the apocalypse.

Vampires who don’t encounter humans with dots in Faith: “Religion is B.S.!” Vampires who first encounter Society of Leopold hunters that have dots in True Faith: “Holy Shit! How did you make that work?! That never works! What are you?”

I'm actually catholic myself, this idea actually speaks to me. I'd absolutely create a character like this. Like, that's a depressing life for sure. You want to maintain your faith while knowing you are eternally damned, which is a great juxtaposition on its own, but also you are ostracized by vampires, so it's a total lose-lose.

This makes me think of the Ixalan vampires from MtG. They''re very much religious zealots and while incredibly cold & cruel towards their enemies (as one would expect), they're also incredibly protective of their people and culture. Made a Ixalan vampire Grave Cleric who basically gave up their own life/soul to help others for eternity. He ended up being the party parent (because of course he did). Def one of my favorite characters I've ever made.

There's a vampire and vampire-hunters novel series where one of the main characters is a vampire who _can_ stand in churches and take communion, because he was training to be an ordained priest pre-turning. Great concept. EDIT: Crusade by Nancy Holder. It's been years since I read it- my mom's friend wrote it.

I did this! My character in Vampire: The Masquerade took a weakness to be harmed by holy water. He was a priest, turned by a vampire who thought'd it'd be hilarious for the moral quandary of a "Holy man with a bloodlust". The character evolved really awesomely and it was great fun! Its the little things. He went through the whole "Is this Vampirism a gift or a curse?" "Is it right to follow God when I do things to satiate my own hunger?" "Am I still worthy of spreading his message?" etc etc.

I did this with pathfinder 2e my character was an old sailor and one of the languages I could choose was signing I instantly decided his late wife had been deaf and since he seemed to be very protective of another character who was this young tiefling who wanted to go out and see the world I decided she must have been a tiefling it's cool how little things on your sheet or interactions you have in the first session can have such an impact on the history of your characters and the world

Me: Wow, that's so mildly amusing. That woman: THAT'S THE GREATEST THING I'VE EVER HEARD

Yeah, religion is a BIG deal for a lot of sects of Vampire Society in the World Of Darkness. In fact, it's a pretty major theme.

A Giovanni vampire being catholic sounds pretty normal, like the Giovanni are messed up but they’re pretty catholic too.

I can't tell you how many times a small detail even a trinket roll has helped shape my characters backstories in ways I would have never imagined when I started character creation!

Well in vampire age of darkness ( masquerade but medieval) it's one of the five path you could choose for your character, which implied if you were doing unholy stuff your character would get insane at some point.

I'm currently playing an Arcane Trickster Rogue in an 5th edition Eberron game with a few of my buddies. The Legerdemain ability granted by the mage hand adds so much mystique to the character, because it's not even a thing the Brainiac wizard in our party can do. My DM took this very simple ability, and connected it to this incredibly interesting plot hook involving ancient Elven magic passed through bloodlines. What Brennan is saying is something that I think can be a great way to expand upon a character's personality or history. By taking abilities granted by your character sheet, you can add a lot of really great depth to who they are.

Vampire:The Requiem had a strong answer to the question whether vampirism and faith go together 😁

Surely the whole reason that crucifixes even have an effect on vampires is because they mean something more than just a shape

It's like when your aunt feigns excitement at your hotwheels collection. Bless her heart

I adore building characters around mechanical implications. The last VTM I ever played was a Tremere who was assisting his Sire in a blood ritual intending to artificially improve generation (there's already a ritual like that on the books, so this was favored as an improvement on that), and it backfired. Suddenly this prodigy was 14th generation, thin blooded, and had this one other negative quality that meant he was crazy weak, but didn't take aggravated damage from the sun AND could conceive a child. So me and the storyteller worked out a whole character arc around getting the True Love perk and actually having a child, and all the implication for that not only as a vampire in Camarilla society, but also as a member of the Tremere Pyramid. It was easily one of the best VTM games I ever played. Playing this new father desperately trying to fight against all the systems of control that kept him down. I really do think that VTM is at its best when the players don't want to be vampires anymore. They didn't sign up to be the bottom rung on an immortal mafia totem pole, and they want out.

I used to have a Nosferatu character, my first ever. He was pious to the point that he earned True Faith, where holding a crucifix would harm him due to his OWN faith, he was also a knight, ordained in a Holy Order. He eventually achieved Golconda, or vampire enlightenment, after his selfless act of sacrifice while saving Christmas from demons. I miss playing with him. Hell, I miss roleplaying anything.

Kinda had that recently with my new Blades in the Dark character. I took the ability to speak with his dog, and I had to choose a vice, so I chose that he had become dependent on this one particular drug. As I was chatting with the GM about fleshing him out, 2 things happened: we got his motivation (find the chemist that did this to him and make him reverse it), and I discovered that the ability to mind link with his dog is an effect of the drug and he'll probably lose it if ever he breaks free. So I've got some stakes pre-built into the end of this adventure, all because I just wanted him to have a dog.

Yesss!! It’s the most amazing feeling when the pieces fall into place and make a really good character! I gotta start making up rapid fire prompts for myself so I can have more good characters lol

I love this. I had a character where i rolled really low intelligence but really high strength and then i saw a feat that was very cool where you took no penalties to non-lethal damage. So he became this absolute pacifist gentle giant who would use a club to knock people out if he was fighting them but never kill them and didn’t like the others killing people

So… Louie from Interview with the Vampire? Also, isn’t VtM’s whole schtick that Cain’s curse from Genesis was to become the first vampire? The Antediluvians are specifically called that because they were embraced before the Flood of Noah.

I made a vampire with no fangs. He carried a fork. Ya how jacked up is that lol

This is the beauty of tabletop games: one small thought can create an entire dimension for the character

PowerWolf walk in: hey, we’re Catholic Werewolf our self

A similar thing happened when I was thinking of “tiefling cleric who doesn’t want to look like a tiefling (monstrous/demonic traits)” It started as a little side-character but the more I let it sit and process I had a full story revolving that character and I’m excited to play them in a future game (possibly a long journey of internalized racism and body-acceptance)

This guy is awesome. His imagination and storytelling are masterful.

I GM'd a few Years ago in the WoD, and one Thing I was very fond of was that all Players complained about the Limit of Flaws you can have. That System (the old Version) enhance the Roleplay so much by Flaws and not the Virtues, it is amazing. Not because the Bonus Points but the Flaws are really well worked out for Roleplay. One Mage-Char worked soley around a Combo in Flaws allowing him literally do anything as long as the Surrounding People believe in it; so he could do anything, but only if it fitted to the Enviroment and the Plot, but as soon as he would try to exploit it, it would not work at all.

"a full three dimensional." -Brennan Lee Mulligan. I would have never known how much I needed this quote till the editors created it. Thank you for this contribution to things I didn't know I needed till I have them.

The Lasombra: Am I a joke to you?

I actually get this snowball effect too often and its just really nice. This is perfect.

This is made all the more hilarious when you know the lore behind the Giovanni Clan lol

The Lasombra clan would like a word.

I'm pretty sure the system he's talking about is VtM.

I love this in character creation. With my first role-playing game being a group of pretty rules heavy players and dms, I found it a joy to find one or two niche game mechanic stemming off of combat or exploration and blowing that up into why the character is the way they are and what drove them to approach combat in that particular way, and I feel like it's something that's not talked about enough.

Had a smart dumb half orc with high charisma once and multiclassed with sorc. No one understood why until one giant battle I used a turn to cast enlarge/reduce on myself because why not a be 14ft tall half orc? The best part was this glass cannon aspect where XX damage caused me to break concentration ending the spell, but then sending into a barbaric rage. Edit: I also rolled strength checks on all doors to see if I broke them off the hinges.

She looks like a goth Aubrey plaza, and now that I can't unsee it you can neither

I need to find myself a girl who looks at me like that when I describe my dnd characters

Talk about not aging well. One of the worst representatives of the gaming industry: her right there.

"A full, three-dimensional..." What?! Shortz too short! 🤣

This happens to me with almost every character I make, where I add one tiny little detail, and it ends up flowering into this beautiful story where the characters can develop and build upon that detail, and characters with those tiny details are often the characters with the most depth, so I highly recommend it if you want to tell a compelling story in your next campaign.

Stumbling across this I thought this might have been Mike Flanagan talking about Midnight Mass

She looks like she could eat his entire head in one bite.

I learned that Tremere Sorcerers could master levitation and flight, so I thought: “He doesn’t need operable legs if he can FLOAT…” so I took the Disadvantage “paralyzed.” GM LOVED the concept so much he gave me 20 bonus points in char gen.

This idea is very pleasant to me. Also, thanks for reminding me of the World of Darkness setting. THANKS KZfaq ALGORYTHM

She was like " 😃 wow that's crazy "

This has aged oddly

I had a similar experience with this, but it was because of an of an experience in a session. I was playing a barbarian with no real backstory yet and we were transported to a desert. My barbarian was extremely dumb (3s and 4s in int and wis but high teens in str and con) and so, in character, I decided to dig. I rolled a nat 20 and my DM decided that I had found a mysterious rock, I rolled to break it and got another nat 20 so I accidentally perfectly extracted a green gem from within. Later on in the session during a combat encounter we whete wholeheartedly losing I just decided to slam my barbarian’s hammer into the gem after throwing it onto the enemy’s back. I got yet ANOTHER nat 20 and so my DM decided the gem exploded, causing a surge of energy through the enemy and myself, hinting that it may have permanently changed my character. After the session I did some thinking and I decided to make this green energy a sort of power source for my barbarian. Long story short, me deciding to randomly dig out of stupidity ended with me creating a 20 page backstory about a barbarian who was cybernetically enhanced by a lich obsessed with gold to have a golden skeleton and mostly artificial muscles, it caused the birth of a homebrew subclass very reminiscent of terminator which gives insane buffs when on 1 hitpoint (worked well with my half-orc racial feat), and it even caused a radical change to the planned story of the campaign due to the fact that the DM loved my backstory so much he decided he BBEG should be the Lich fore mentioned rather than what he had planned before. Needless to say, I loved that barbarian and boy am I glad I decided to dig. TL:DR I was playing a barbarian, decided to dig and found a gem. This gem sparked a 20 page backstory, a homebrew subclass and major changes to the campaign storyline as a whole.

Reminds me of X-Men’s Nightcrawler and his faith. Such an interesting and cool character!

I've had this happen myself. I took a trait that was along the lines of "I put no faith in gods" simply because I thought it sounded badass, fast forward 2 year and my character has just devoted herself to a god in order to help stop a huge evil. Those small choices are often the most impact full.

That's like making an undead/resurrected character who remembers what it's like to be dead and will do everything in its power to not die and even try to stop its allies from making choices that could result in their deaths

That story would be sooo flippin cool!

Character reminds me of Lord of Shadows where Gabriel despite being the Prince of Darkness calls himself God's chosen one then while the man was chanting some holy spell, Gabriel or Dracula joins him too gradually being the one who finishes the incantation

Well....given that moast Vampires are acredited to the victorian era I would say a Catholic Vampire is not only possible but very and I mean very likely.

There is or was a rule that crosses only repelled vampires based on the belief of the one holding the cross.

To have your characters faith strengthened by his own weakness... a wonderful Catch 22... I used to know a malkavian artist that wanted to create the perfect work of art it was to be called " torpor" the grand plan was to stake a vampire, cover the body in a thin layer of cement, and then donate it to the city. He grabbed a bruja in a business suit and the guy who played him had to stop playing that character for a year because he was a statue in a playground downtown.

The "Confession" arc of the comic book Astro City features (spoiler) a former priest vampire who became a super hero as a form of penance, complete with a costume incorporating a cross symbol that causes him constant pain.

Reminds me of how in The Elder Scrolls universe vampires actually do worship a deity of their choice, which is usually either Clavicus Vile or Molag Bal. Basically anybody other than Arkay, Auriel, Stendarr, and Meridia since those ones hate the undead in particular.

This is just a perfect example of how to do creative character building. It should be in a tutorial video; make a character choice that puts you off balance (flaws and such), rationalize how it makes sense for your character, then extrapolate to the setting to understand how the character interacts with the world through this flaw.

She's gorgeous

This exact idea served as the basis of a revered storyline in the Astro City comic in 1996.

I had a similar thing although less extreme thing with the eat food merit where my semedi character was always carrying around candies and buying other vampires churros as this little passive aggressive way of making people who felt like he was less human then them feel like crap.

I do enjoy when realizing how mechanics can tell bits of the story

I made a joke character once who was a lizard cursed to be a human. Everyone loved her so much and the more I played her the more out of control and fun she got

I've only recently found out about Dimension 20, but Brennan needs to turn up in LA by Night as a Catholic Hecate, along with Santine Phoenix (and yeah, I know she was a member of the Ministry in season 1, but she needs to come back).

From the Book of Mulligan we reinforce the fact that imagination is not just an escape tool you use while bored at work, neither is it to only be used when stretched to its limit thereby increasing chances of writers block, but by proper use, even the lightest of touches it can move literary mountains

Faults in ones character sheet can be great jumping off points for creating an interesting individual

I love the titling it makes it sound like a buzzfeed interview

Someone needs to play Vampire the Masquerade Redemption

Hmmm... Cool character idea, but correct me if I'm wrong but I thought that in WoD religion was a big thing among certain clans and even crusades had a bunch of vampires participating.

This is why I almost always build my character mechanically, then figure out who they are as a person. I figure out how I want to play, and that gives me inspiration for who I want to play.

That's what the Lancea et Sanctum is for in Chronicles of Darkness/Vampire the Requiem. They're literally a religious/catholic-esque Vampire Covenant.

So, basically The Confessor from Astro City, only without the vampire society.

He sounds like a “motivational speaker” when he talks about this character

This reminds me of my dragonborn rogue character. He was supposed to just stay in an inn for most of his teen years until he set out on adventure. His whole deal was that he was cursed with an unpredictable madness whenever it got dark. So he always stayed in bright cities and towns. On a campaign, we had him stay at a temple before setting off. That one decision made Torinn have this huge backstory of finding solace in a church and performing good deeds using his rogue skills. He essentially became a daytime vigilante, resolving crime so that no one else will ever stay a victim like he was. The flaw I took with his Haunted One background was a default one: have to perform a certain ritual. That had nothing to do with religion beforehand, now it makes perfect sense. It would be so easy to have him multiclass into being a paladin or cleric, but maybe he multiclasses into warlock as a way of accepting his past. Who knows? Long story short: a campaign suddenly canonized my dragonborn rogue as a Catholic vigilante.

The fact that Brennan made a fucking GIOVANNI of all clans.