World of Darkness - SAS - The New Kid - Innocents.pdf - World of Darkness - RPG

Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selish,

lazy, lighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in

expressing joy and sorrow, especially about triles, they’ll do anything to

avoid pain but they enjoy inlicting it: little men already.

- Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères

An adventure for World of Darkness: Innocents

using the Storytelling Adventure System

Written by P. Alexarnder Scokel Developed by Eddy Webb Special Thand to Matt Mcfarland

Edited by Genevieve Podleski Layout by Jessica Mullins Art: August Hall, Heather Kreiter, Thom

Ang, Phil Hilliker, Justin Norman, James S. Cole, Ken Meyer Jr., James Stowe, Doug Stanbaugh,

Eric Deschamps, Costas Harritas, Jaun Serrano, Cathy Wilkins, Travis Ingram, Avery Butterworth,

Eric Lofgren, Mattias Tapia

stOrytelling adventure systeM

Mental OOOOO

Physical OOOOO

sOcial OOOOO

WHITE WOLF PUBLISHING, INC.

2075 WEST PARK PLACE BLVD

SUITE G

STONE MOUNTAIN, GA 30087

Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selish,

lazy, lighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in

expressing joy and sorrow, especially about triles, they’ll do anything to

avoid pain but they enjoy inlicting it: little men already.

- Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères

An adventure for World of Darkness: Innocents

using the Storytelling Adventure System

Written by Alexander P. Scokel Developed by Eddy Webb Special Thanks to Matt Mcfarland

Edited by Genevieve Podleski Layout by Jessica Mullins Art: August Hall, Heather Kreiter, Thom

Ang, Phil Hilliker, Justin Norman, James S. Cole, Ken Meyer Jr., James Stowe, Doug Stanbaugh, Eric

Deschamps, Costas Harritas, Jaun Serrano, Cathy Wilkins, Travis Ingram, Avery Butterworth, Eric

Lofgren, Mattias Tapia

stOrytelling adventure systeM

scenes

Mental OOOOO

Physical OOOOO

sOcial OOOOO

XP level

o-34

WHITE WOLF PUBLISHING, INC.

2075 WEST PARK PLACE BLVD

SUITE G

STONE MOUNTAIN, GA 30087

© 2008 CCP hf. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and one printed copy which may be reproduced for personal use only. White Wolf, Vampire and

World of Darkness are registered trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved. Vampire the Requiem, Werewolf the Forsaken, Mage the Awakening, Promethean the Created, Storytelling System and Parlor Games are trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved.

All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by CCP hf. CCP North America Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of CCP hf. The mention of or reference to any company or product in these pages is not a challenge to the trademark or copyright

concerned. This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters and themes. All mystical and supernatural elements are iction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content. Reader discretion is advised.

Check out White Wolf online at http://www.white-wolf.com

No one has lived in the Mayfair House for as long as you can remember,

maybe even as long as you’ve been alive. Like a big gray toad nestled into the

woods, it gazes down on the corner, eyes empty and soulless.

But that’s all changed. You didn’t see the moving van yourself, but everyone

at school’s talking about it. There’s a new kid in town.

Introduction

What you are reading is The New Kid , a self-contained story for

use in your World of Darkness: Innocents chronicle. Innocents

introduces a new kind of character to the World of Darkness . While

not suave bloodsuckers, powerful shapeshifters or even humans with

extraordinary powers, the characters in Innocents are those with

perhaps the greatest potential of all: children. Though children have

limitless potential (and even a few advantages over the monsters in

the night), they have many more weaknesses.

These weaknesses are precisely what makes playing an Innocents

character a unique, suspenseful and ultimately fun experience. Chil-

dren do not have the physical strength or stamina of adults. They don’t

possess the same knowledge or experience, and they are not given the

same respect that adults are. If an adult goes to the police with tales of

a bloodsucking monstrosity prowling the streets of his neighborhood,

they might consider him a little off, but they are likely to do at least a

cursory investigation. If a child goes to the police with the same story,

they can be assured a quick drive back to their parents’ house. Children

do, however, have a huge advantage over adults in combating the super-

natural: credulity. Whereas an adult will ignore a threat, rationalizing

it away until it is too late, children know that there are things lurking

in their closet, just outside the window and in that abandoned house

on the corner. Adults turn a blind eye until the supernatural comes for

them. Children know, and some are willing to seek it out.

This product is intended for Storytellers, not players. It contains the nuts

and bolts of the story: the scenes, characters and creepy locales. If you plan

to portray a character who will experience this story, reading this means

that you will be robbing yourself of some of the pleasure of uncovering the

surprises, twists and the tension that arises from the unknown.

Think of this story as a box that contains all of the pieces that you need to

craft a strong story for your Innocents players. The tools you need to put the

story together can be found in Innocents . That book, however, is not strictly

necessary to run this story if you have the World of Darkness Rulebook . This

story can be used with those rules and the sample player characters provided

in the back of this story. Similarly, there is nothing stopping you from using

this product to tell a story for Mage: The Awakening , Changeling: The

Lost or any of the other World of Darkness games, though the Storyteller is

encouraged to keep in mind just what kind of questions are likely to be asked

of an adult found lurking around the schoolyard. While use of this product

can help you and your players get a taste for Innocents before you purchase

it, this story works best when used with that book. The context, rules and

advice contained in that product is indispensable for any Storyteller hoping

to portray the World of Darkness through the eyes of its smallest denizens.

What’s Inside

This story kit breaks down into four basic parts:

The Introduction , which you’re reading now, gives you the gist of the

story, the rundown on Storytelling characters and the history and back-

story necessary to help bring the setting and the characters to life.

The Scenes are the heart of the story. They detail the core actions

of the tale and help you improvise in the midst of your story.

The Player Characters are a collection of fully detailed characters

with the histories and stats already provided that you can give to your

players to portray so that you can get going straight out of the box.

The Scene Cards mark the beginning of in-play resources designed

for easy printing. If you can’t print this whole kit, just print pages 40-41

for the bare-bones outline you need to tell this story.

A b o u t t h e S t o r y t e l l i n g A d v e n t u r e S y S t e m

If this is your irst Storytelling Adventure System (SAS)

product, you’ve chosen a ine place to start. To keep this story

kit lean and focused, though, we haven’t included a lot of the

core premises and Storyteller suggestions that are at the heart

of the SAS. Whether you’re a new Storyteller or an old hand, be

sure to read the free SAS Guide , found at the SAS website:

www.white-wolf.com/sas

Here are some of the features available in The New Kid :

• Interactive links. Clicking on anything in blue will take

you directly to the section referenced, or to an appropriate

character sheet or prop. It can also take you to an external

website that could be useful.

• Storyteller characters. Clicking on a Storyteller character’s

portrait will take you to that character’s sheet. Clicking on

the sheet will take you back to the character’s writeup.

Treatment

Everyone knows the new kid. Everyone knows he’s a bit... off.

That strange way he talks, clearly from out-of-state. Those sweaters

he wears. How he doesn’t talk to anyone and spends all of recess

counting the bricks on the wall of the school gym. Everyone knows

that the new kid is weird... they just don’t know how weird. The

New Kid tells the story of a group of children as they uncover the

secrets of the newest student at school and the strange powers he

seems to wield.

The story introduces the player characters to Bradley, a youth

recently arrived at their school. The first act is largely non-linear,

providing a number of scenes in which the characters get to know

Bradley, sometimes helping him out of schoolyard trouble, but each

time discovering some new odd quirk about him or experiencing

some strange occurrence that happens in his presence. By the time

that the first act ends, the players should be invested enough in the

hapless boy and curious enough about his myriad quirks to follow a

clue that suggests that whatever’s up with Bradley stems from his

home life. The second act provides Bradley’s house for exploration:

a dilapidated, creaky, cobwebbed Victorian manse. Some of the

challenges here depend on when and how the characters decide to

enter the home, but there will be mysteries and dangers provided for

the characters to interact with. The second act culminates in the

discovery of Bradley’s father’s dark secret: that he is a scientist trying

to draw energy from another plane of reality who is forcing his son to

help him carry out his dark work. The third act involves confronting

Bradley’s father on his home turf.

characters make to enlist the aid of adults or other students will be

rebuffed; they can only rely on themselves. Dr. Carter is driven by his

own loneliness, throwing himself into his work in the hope that he

will escape the memory of his lost wife. Ultimately, The New Kid is

about the isolation suffered by those that delve into the unknown,

including the players’ characters, and the bonds that can form or break

between them.

Storyteller Advice

The most important piece of advice for running The New Kid can

be summed up in one sentence: Your players’ characters are children.

Each description should be given with that in mind. Children are small,

so things seem larger to them. Children live with fear constantly, and

they are not apt to question the nature of what they fear. They fear,

and that is enough. Children are more likely to cower than to stand

up to their fear, and more likely to make a break for it than fight a

monster head on. Remind your players when necessary that they are

portraying children, especially when they react to a source of fear or

danger as an adult might.

Children have a shorter range of experiences than adults, and

tend to assign undue importance to smaller, more personal events.

Work with this, blowing up the importance of things like who

Theme: The Unknown

The new kid in school is an outcast because no one knows him,

where he’s from, what his parents do or what music he likes. Bradley

doesn’t know or understand his own powers, or even his family situ-

ation and how it affects him. Dr. Carter is digging at layers of reality

that he doesn’t begin to understand, trying to mine an unknown power

source from an unknown universe.

Mood: Loneliness

Bradley, as a new student at the characters’ school, feels utterly alone.

By becoming involved with him, the player characters risk becoming

outcasts themselves, with only each other for comfort. Attempts the

is sitting with who in the cafeteria or what brand of backpack

the new kid wears. Allow the characters to focus on the unusual

things that happen around Bradley, but remember that the focus

of the story is on the relationships between Bradley, his father

and the characters.

Finally, unless you’re under a time constraint, take your time with

these scenes. Life often seems to move pretty slowly for children. Give

them all the time they want to play around in any given scene before

moving on. Most of the scenes below are ended by adult-imposed

time limits such as the ringing of a school bell, so when it seems the

characters are almost finished with the scene, interrupt them with

the bell and shuffle them to the next part of your story.

For more excellent advice on playing child characters or running a

story for children, pick up a copy of World of Darkness: Innocents .

A Chapter in Your Chronicle

Because the central crux of The New Kid is based on the arrival

of a new presence into the characters’ lives, the story can easily be

dropped into an ongoing chronicle. One day the characters are on

their way to school when Bradley gets on their bus, and that’s where

the story begins. Some of the actions the characters might take to-

wards the end of this story can have severe effects on your chronicle,

however. If your players’ characters committing arson would derail

your chronicle, feel free to discourage or disallow that course of ac-

tion. (Of course, if the characters end up with a several-year stint in

juvenile detention, it might serve as a perfect transition to a standard

World of Darkness game in which the players portray their Innocents

characters as young adults.)

The major location of the story, the Mayfair House, can be easily

replaced by any other haunted house that you have already used in

your chronicle, and The New Kid might even serve as the climactic

story that wraps up the characters’ interactions with the house.

A Story By Itself

The New Kid is designed to be run as a self-contained story. The Story-

teller can start it quickly by using the pre-generated characters provided,

or the Storyteller can use the character creation rules in Innocents .

Background and Set-Up

This product provides a lot of background and other elements

needed to run The New Kid . However, certain aspects of the

story such as what the school is like, what kind of neighborhood

the characters live in and even what ethnicity the characters are

is left deliberately vague. Before running this product, take a few

minutes to determine what the socio-economic situation is for the

characters. They might not even be aware of how relatively wealthy

or poor their parents are, but it is important for the Storyteller to

know in order to appropriately detail the environments. Think

about it: an inner-city school that’s all pavement, red brick and

chain link fences will feel very different from a wealthy private

school made up of well-manicured lawns and sandstone walls.

Where the story takes place affects every aspect of the story, from

the kind of principal Mrs. Hoffman is to the tactics and rationale

behind Max’s bullying.

The characters begin the story knowing one another. If this is the

launching point of your chronicle or if you are running it as a stand-

alone story, you should take a few minutes before the game starts to

let them discuss how they know one another and what they think of

each other. Ask each player to tell an in-character humorous anecdote

about each other character. Four of the pre-generated characters are

directly related to one of the other characters, so if you’re using them

or if any of your characters are siblings, make sure that you address

this before play begins.

World of Darkness - SAS - The New Kid - Innocents.pdf

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