Requiem: Blood and Covenant

Today’s Requiem blog post will tackle Bloodlines and Covenants

Bloodlines

Bloodlines will be in play, but we have curated the list to present the dominant bloodlines in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the chronicle. These will help us support our themes.

Submissions for other bloodlines will be considered but, for the most part, daily unlife and the tapestry woven over the course of the Chronicle will largely feature these bloodlines.

Unmentioned bloodlines may be (secretly) reserved by the ST team or otherwise be considered too destabilising for our games.

There will be further information on the bloodlines in future blogs, where we will go through the clans one at a time.

We will be reviewing the bloodline powers before the chronicle starts and making sure the game doesn’t become too unbalanced. We’ll announce this on the blog, and they will form part of the addenda.

To gain a bloodline you must be BP 2 or higher, meaning that Ancillae and Elders may begin the game avused into a bloodline.

Covenants

Covenants remain largely unchanged in the new chronicle. The major change is we will be allowing a limited amount of dual covenant play. Dual covenant play will largely be limited by status, and some simple principles outlined below. We will dive into status in a later blog post, and will only briefly discuss it in this blog. You do not need to have more than one covenant, and gaining status and benefits will be easier if you only have one.

Guidelines for dual covenants:

1. You may at no time have the benefits of more than two covenants, even if you leave one and join another. One covenant is considered to be your primary covenant, and you may fully enjoy membership as part of that covenant. Your secondary covenant will more closely guard their secrets from you, and you will be unable to access disciplines, devotions, and other parts of the covenant unless you have sufficient status in that covenant – modelled loosely on the Goodwill mechanics from Changeling: The Lost. This will be detailed in future blogs on a per covenant basis.
2. You can’t gain benefits for being in the Invictus and the Carthians simultaneously. Being a member of the Circle of the Crone when you are also in the Lancea Sanctum is heretical but is not forbidden, it would just be a very hard way to play the game. Attending the Ordo Dracul is always suspicious to other covenants but rarely a deal-breaker.
3. If you leave the Invictus or the Carthians, you will then be in XP debt for any merits you bought at a discount. You may decide to abandon those merits, in which case you will get a refund. Otherwise you will have to buy yourself out of the debt before anything else. This represents your covenant support networks turning their back on you.
4. Once learned, Carthian Devotions, Invictus Oaths, Ordo Dracul rituals, Theban Sorcery, and Cruac can’t be unlearned casually (this list is not intended to be exhaustive). Coils represent a permanent metaphysical transformation of your character. Combined with the first guideline, if you have those benefits and then leave the respective covenant, you might find yourself limited in your future covenant choices.
5. You have to be known to be a member of a covenant, by the covenant, to benefit from it. ST teams should develop NPC covenant members as part of their world building.
6. You may not leave a covenant within six months of starting a new character. This is definitely a guideline and not meant to discourage genuine play. We just want to cover ourselves against several metagame scenarios that we think would be bad for the game.

Thank you for reading, and do come back and check on the blog regularly!