Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Russell Bailey

Fantasy Heartbreaker is now the number five Google search result for “fucking dudes.”  Thanks, of course, to my recap of Dudes of Legend: How to be Fucking Awesome. And to you, the viewer.

You see what I did there.

Merit: Sympathy for the Devil ●

Once per scene, a player whose character possesses this Merit may roll his character’s Humanity, plus one additional die, instead of the character’s ordinary dice pool.

Hack: Exposure

(Hacks, introduced in Dudes of Legend, are special features of a character not governed by the character creation rules or experience system. They are offered to characters entirely at the Storyteller’s discretion.)

It’s not the burning, it’s the shining.

Some vampires think it’d be great to be able to walk around in the sun. They think the curse is that the light burns them. They’re missing the point completely.

Okay, so, say you step on a nail, right? You feel pain. It stings like a motherfucker. But do you go “oh my God, why have you cursed me with the eternal weakness that I must face pain when pierced by sharp objects?”

No, you don’t, because you’re not a dumbass. You go, “well, clearly, I’m not supposed to step on fucking nails.” If you think about it a little further, you consider that maybe you’re supposed to have intact feet, and not be bleeding all over the place, and you realize that pain is your body’s way of telling you not to do that shit.

That’s actually what that burning is when you feel the sun. The burning’s a defense mechanism, a warning response to stay in the dark. What’s it warning you about? That if you stay in the sun, the herd will know you for what you are. Might be pretty for a few minutes. You might shine like diamonds, but so do the teeth of the wolf. And the herd knows that. In the deeps, in the lizard brain, in the soul.

Now, some humans, they have a condition called congenital analgesia. They don’t feel pain at all. They have no warning when their skin’s being torn open, when their bones break, whatever.

So, too, some vampires. A flaw in the blood. No fear of the light, no pain from the sun. They have to learn to keep themselves hidden. The condition is transmitted, if unreliably, from sire to childe.

These Kindred families tend to shun the cities… their weaknesses are too easily exploited if revealed. And that’s if they don’t look like liabilities to the Powers that Be in the first place.

System

Instead of suffering damage from the sun, an afflicted vampire exposed to sunlight suffers an effect called Exposure. This phenomena allows humans to instinctively understand the vampire’s nature as a supernatural predator, and causes them to react to that according to their own dispositions. Some become obsessed. Others, repulsed.

The most obvious effect of Exposure is that, when seen in bright sunlight, the vampire’s appearance takes on an uncanny quality–a halo, a diamond shine, the appearance of well-carved marble. In lower levels of light, however, the effects are entirely social.

An individual character encountering a vampire in partial sunlight displays one of the following reactions, as determined by the Storyteller:

- Terror: Instinctively understanding the vampire’s predatory nature and overwhelming power, the character is driven to sudden and absolute terror. If the victim believes she can overwhelm the vampire with violence, she will. If she believes the vampire will overwhelm her, she takes any steps necessary to escape. (For those looking for a more detailed system, these effects closely mirror vampiric Fear Frenzy.)

- Submission: Recognizing an overwhelming threat, the mortal simply bows to death. Treat as the result of a successful Intimidation roll, with the additional effect that the victim will not physically resist the vampire for the remainder of the scene. In future encounters, the mortal may experience this effect again, or experience either the Rejection or Obsession reaction.

- Rejection: Sensing danger, the human will rationalize the vampire as “creepy” or “weird.” From this point forward, once per scene, avoiding or shunning the vampire allows the victim to gain a Willpower point, as if he had indulged his Vice.
This effect can only be removed as if it were a Derangement.

- Obsession: The mortal senses danger, but responds to it with intellectual curiosity or romantic arousal. From this point forward, once per scene, seeking out or discovering a fact about the vampire allows the victim to gain a Willpower point, as if she had indulged her Vice. This effect can only be removed as if it were a Derangement.

I tread fairly light on my day job here. There are a lot of reasons… mostly, I don’t want to focus as much on the business side of gaming here. I want to talk theory¹ and love and mad ideas.

Dudes of Legend changes that. Because this is a product that’s entirely made out of our love and mad ideas. Or possibly our love and bad ideas.

Dudes of Legend: How to be Fucking Awesome

Back when White Wolf did our Monday Meetings², we had this running joke. See, we had a product that was really hard to name, and Mike Chaney suggested we call it “Dudes of Legend.” Afterwards, he suggested that name for every untitled book.

When we were talking about what to do for April Fools, somebody cracked the joke again. And then somebody said “Mike Chaney’s World of Darkness.” And that brought back reminiscing about Mike’s previous joke product, Street Fighter: Contenders, and how derangedly awesome that was.³

And we were all like, “yeah, people⁴ totally played the World of Darkness like that, too. Why the hell don’t we ever do anything for them?”

Eddy’s a voice of both sanity and silliness, so he put his foot down. He was all “Okay, I’ll do your book of robots, strippers, and bears, but I’m going to do it proper. With a real author, and, like, real rules.”

Eddy had to present it to management. Even with our management ⁵, that must have been awkward.⁶

So Eddy took the project to Chuck “Beardmonger” Wendig, who’s pretty much the definitive World of Darkness writer. And his conditions were stuff like “it has to reference Parker Lewis” and “you guys are comping the pterodactyls.” But we could tell he was digging it.

And then this… thing… showed up. This lunatic rant of a sourcebook that’s everything we always wanted to say but never had the words. Like a Lady Gaga video of a World of Darkness supplement. Like, a supplement you could probably stat every Lady Gaga video with. Not to mention Ziggy Stardust. And Dar the Beastmaster. And then they could meet your vampires and play house.

My involvement in this one was very light, but it’s perhaps the biggest “fuck yeah” of my tenure at White Wolf. It says something about all of us who picked up this dark little game in the nineties and stared deep into our own souls and then rocked the hell out.

If you want to know who the current generation of people working the World of Darkness are, there is no finer $0.69⁷ you can spend.

____