Hunger, Feeding & the Hunt
Every splat gives you a meter, and the vampire's is the one that never sleeps. Hunger runs 0–5 on your sheet's meter field; new vampires start at 1. Hunger never falls on its own — only feeding lowers it, and feeding is never a line in a scene's margins. It is a scene of its own, and usually the best scene of the night.
How Hunger rises — the Rouse check
A Rouse check is a single d10 the body pays for its expenses: on 6+, nothing happens; on 1–5, Hunger rises by 1. You Rouse when:
- activating a power whose cost is a Rouse check (most powers, per their file);
- mending wounds with blood;
- Blush of Life — 1 Rouse check buys a night of looking alive: warmth, breath, a heartbeat, food that stays down;
- Blood Surge — 1 Rouse check pushes the blood into one mundane roll for +1 die;
- rising at nightfall after a night without feeding — the starve check, and the reason skipping a night always costs something.
What the Beast does at Hunger 4 and 5
- Compulsion (Hunger 4+). At the start of any scene at Hunger 4 or 5, roll Resolve + Composure against difficulty 2. On a failure, the Beast sets your priorities for the scene — feed now, corner prey, destroy the thing that shamed you. You still play it, but every choice must serve the compulsion, and defying it costs 1 Willpower per turn.
- Hunger 5. Two rules take over from every roll you make. A Bestial Failure — any failure showing 1s — means the Beast did the thing instead of you, savagely and visibly. A Messy Critical — any margin 3+ success — means you won brutally: exposed fangs, collateral damage, a witness you did not count.
- Frenzy. Provoked by fire, sunlight, humiliation or blood in the air at Hunger 5, you roll Resolve + Composure (difficulty 1–3 by how grave the provocation is). On a failure the GM runs the Beast until the stimulus ends, you feed deeply, or dawn falls — and you remember all of it.
The hunt
Feeding takes a scene, and the scene is the hunt — run in your predator type's grounds, the way your type hunts. The Sandman cases a sleeping house; the Siren works a nightclub; the Bagger slips into a blood bank. It comes down to one roll, the hunt check: Attribute + one of your type's specialty skills, at difficulty 1 on an ordinary night, 2 on watched grounds, 3 when the city is alerted to your kind.
- Success reaches the prey, and the feeding rules below decide the rest.
- Failure reaches nothing. The night's complication — your type's file names it: a witness, a wounded victim, a fraying cover, a cut-off supply — plays out as a scene of its own, and it may cost you a Stain or a Masquerade breach. And the starve check still comes due at nightfall.
The feeding
| The prey | Hunger |
|---|---|
| Willing, sleeping or trusting mortal | lowered to 1 |
| Unwilling mortal — a contest: Manipulation or Dexterity + a fitting Skill vs the victim's Composure + Resolve | −1 per solid success |
| A kill | to 0, and always Stains |
| Animal blood | to 2, no resonance |
Feeding from the unwilling is always a contest, and losing it wakes the prey. Killing a donor slakes completely and is never clean. From Blood Potency 3, nothing lowers your Hunger below 2; from 5, below 3 — elder blood truly slakes only on your own kind. A Herd background (willing, maintained vessels) feeds without a hunt check, a quiet scene to Hunger 1.
Blood Resonance
Mortal blood is flavored by what the vessel felt when you drank. Every time you feed from a mortal, the GM names the resonance, and until the next sunrise you gain +1 die on power rolls of that resonance's families:
| Resonance | The vessel felt | Bonus to |
|---|---|---|
| Choleric | anger, aggression | Celerity, Potence |
| Sanguine | desire, passion | Presence, Blood Sorcery |
| Phlegmatic | calm, drowsiness | Auspex, Dominate |
| Melancholic | sadness, fear | Fortitude, Obfuscate |
Animal blood and bagged blood carry no resonance at all — the moment is gone. Occasionally the GM marks a vessel acute — someone feeling something enormous. Draining an acute vessel to unconsciousness grants a Dyscrasia: a deeper vintage (+2 dice), one free activation of a level 1–2 power from that family, or 1 bonus XP at the story's end. Draining anyone to unconsciousness is careless feeding, though — a Stain unless they offered everything freely.
Predator types
Your predator type is what your hunger does, chosen at creation. It grants one skill specialty (record it), one bonus level-1 power from its families (even outside your clan's three), one Advantage and one Flaw, and sets your starting Humanity — 7 for most, 6 for the Alleycat.
| Type | The hunt | Specialty | Power families | Humanity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alleycat | Ambush and robbery in the dark | Brawl or Intimidation | Potence, Celerity | 6 |
| Siren | Seduction: prey charmed willingly | Persuasion or Subterfuge | Presence, Dominate | 7 |
| Sandman | Feeds only from sleepers | Stealth or Larceny | Obfuscate, Auspex | 7 |
| Bagger | Cold blood from bags | Larceny or Medicine | Blood Sorcery, Obfuscate | 7 |
| Farmer | Feeds only on animals | Survival or Animal Ken | Animalism | 7 |
| Scene Queen | A subculture's devotion | Etiquette or Politics | Presence, Obfuscate | 7 |
| Cleaver | Keeps their mortal family, who never knew | Subterfuge or Persuasion | Dominate, Potence | 7 |
Each type's full writeup — the culture of the hunt, concrete Advantage and Flaw picks, the price it charges — lives in its own file in the world's /Predator Types/; the GM reads it when the hunting scene comes up, and so should you, at least once, before your first night out.
The Vampire splat module is the law on all of this — where this chapter sums up and the module details, trust the module. But the shape holds: hunger rises, the hunt earns the feeding, and everything you take from the night takes something back. That tension is the game.