VTM 5e: Not My Circus (100 City Situations + Envoy procedures)

 I've tried to use "Oblique Strategies" to encourage creativity before without much success. But on this project, I found they were really helpful.

 Visiting Other Cities

Ideally, you know how to contact the leadership of the other city to ask permission. This is usually friend-of-a-friend transmission, susceptible to misinformation and leaks, but securing an invitation can save your unlife.

If reaching out to a praxis you have no established connection to, roll etiquette+status, plus any kindred-specific contacts or fame, vs a difficulty the DM chooses based on distance and insularity. You can owe a favor to a better-connected or higher-ranked willing vampire to use their status dice as well. Mawla should do this for free, if they approve of whatever you’re doing. Elders, powerful kindred, and members of rival groups should get a big penalty to this roll— no one wants an unfamiliar methuselah showing up, even with an invitation. Generally they will send a less powerful envoy instead.

On a critical/messy success, the prince will roll out the red carpet for the petitioner, out of social obligation or for some hope of gain. On a success, an invitation will be offered, discretely setting out a duration and whether the prince claims a favor for the privilege. Useful information like “where to make contact” and “where you should plan on sleeping the day” are only sometimes provided, a security risk in indirect communication. On a failure, the request will typically be “lost in the mail”, as tradition considers a direct refusal rude. On a critical/bestial failure, the petitioner gets a response saying they are not welcome. Sometimes, a mailing address is provided.

Procedure for travel is well-covered elsewhere.

On arrival, if the petitioner has been told where to go, they can head there and pay their homage. Procedure done. Some domains intentionally spread word of a secure “eskaeraga”, a location that outsider kindred can go to make themselves known. Always separate from the main Elysia, and with no staff or ghoul presence in common, they are nevertheless falling out of fashion as the increasing threats of hunters and surveillance turn well-known “doorbells” into the start of an investigation.

Therefore, kindred in an unfamiliar city will often have to search for their hosts. Thoughtlessly trawling gothy night clubs and punkish house parties can take a long time when a small handful of kindred are intentionally hidden among millions of kine. Almost any means of finding kindred society a lick can employ can also be employed by hunters. 

For each night spent searching, select a method. If you forgo any time spent hunting, get +1 die. If you lack a haven and need to find one, get -1 die.

Methods

• Guess hunting spot: must determine somewhere specific, like a particular club. Resolve+insight for the stakeout. Success, if it is a hunting ground, brings an encounter with a kindred or one of their followers. -1 to the ensuing social roll, -3 if you actually fed here. Failure on the roll and success for misidentified hunting spots yield no information— it’s hard to tell if you’re wasting your time
• Follow vampire graffiti: wending up and down a neighborhood and interpreting secret signs. Wits+streetwise to get a sense of who made these marks and where they lead. Success beings an encounter with kindred on their own turf. Failure either proves there’s no message to find, or leads to a trap— either laid for rivals to the kindred who left the tags or hunters and the overcurious. A trap could be a dangerous street gang, a gun-ready ghoul, a haunted location, exc.
• Chase rumor: looking up odd crime reports, urban legends, hoaxes, and other stories among the kine that might point to a masquerade cover-up. Charisma+investigation to pick the wheat from the chaff. On a success, identify where to find a kindred or one of their people. On a failure, either determine there’s nothing recent enough or find a false lead.
• Research: going through local records to identify dynasties resistant to change or sites which have notable lack of surveillance and history. Intelligence+academics to find a number of leads equal to your margin of success, to investigate on later nights (see “guess hunting spots”).
• Draw attention: with a high enough body count, the prince will find you.

Discipline effects

• Feral whispers: use resolve+animal ken for guessing a hunting spot, chasing rumors, or doing research. Information of course is inflected by what animals know.
• Various auspex powers: give +1 to guessing a hunting spot and chasing rumors. Scry the soul gives +2.
• Various dominate powers: give +1 to guessing a hunting spot and chasing rumors.
• Awe/daunt: apply!
• Binding fetter: gives +1 to chasing rumors

Encounters

When you meet a stranger kindred who wasn’t expecting you, there’s the inevitable sizing-up and potential for violence. Some kind of quick social role should occur, based on circumstances, with a +2 dice bonus if you’ve secured an invitation from the prince (and they’re not keeping it secret from this vampire.) Being of the same clan doesn’t count much in the great political game, but gives a +1 on this first impression. On a success, they connect you with the prince to present yourself— procedure done. On a failure, they respond with disbelief or territorial hostility. At best, you're unlikely to get help from them, but they might notify the prince.

City Situations

 It may happen that PCs pass through one or more cities you haven't done much thinking about. Accordingly, here's a hundred ideas for what a given city-by-night's "thing" is, rather than just being a stable and generic vampiric demesne with a prince, a primogen council, and perfunctory anarch fringe. Though some ideas will lend themselves to a particular sect, you can apply them to any, and in fact it might be interesting to play against type. Accordingly, replace generic terms like "ruler" with Prince, Bishop, Emir, consensus, the most powerful Baron, whatever. These situations tend towards the dramatic and many are obviously unstable.

d100:

1. Denizens use the proximity of lupines as an excuse to hunt kindred they don’t think will be missed. Visitors are enticed by a small library of Noddist texts the ruler maintains.

2. Ruler is an infamous bondbreaker and fraud, for now only able to hold their territory by accepting losers, dregs, and well-compensated bruisers.

3. Ruler insanely protective of their childe, the other dwindling residents either buying into their almost cultish devotion or politely pretending. The childe, for their part, either privately yearns for freedom or has totally bought into their own importance and abuses their privileged position.

4. Seemingly endless frivolity, with balls and parties multiple times a week, sustained and arranged by overworked and histrionic ghouls. Tensions ready to graduate to violence as soon as a crisis comes.

5. Nominal ruler totally ignoring their domain, preferring insular study. This was embarrassing when it brought caitiff and drifters but has become actively dangerous as lupines have been spotted along mainstream and a challenger organizes a crew to “clean the streets”.

6. Classic blood cult, emphasizing personal loyalty to the leader, whose blood is most delicious, over clan and sect. There’s rumor the leader is a Salubri, but that can’t be possible, right?

7. Company town. The nocturnal society is wholly made up of a particular clan, in pursuit of a project they’re keeping secret from outsiders. Visitors are restricted and constantly surveilled.

8. Ruler and cadre of scholars claims praxis is a close reconstruction of the laws of the Second City. Blood-bonds are profuse, the masquerade is in places a fig leaf, and ceremonies precede all courtly business. Incredible PR about efficacy— too good to be true.

9. Secret praxis, with the identity of ruler and their council unknown. Edicts are instituted by word of mouth and enforced by masked executioners. In truth, the author of this arrangement was discretely killed two years ago and multiple competing puppet-masters are pulling strings while still unaware that their main rival is already dust.

10. Ruler approaches the destruction of a sizeable thinblood population not with a scourge’s red deeds but with scientific efficiency, boxing them in with bureaucracy and bought police and tightening restrictions on where they can go.

11. Hunter’s honeypot. The whole kindred population was taken out in a single night, with just a handful preserved to lure unwary visitors in. This situation would have blown up in the hunters’ faces already, but it’s been kept up by the machinations of a diablerist who turned the tables on them almost immediately, using them to source and conceal new meals.

12. Ruler doesn’t influence human institutions directly but draws power from the personal relationships and graft of a political party’s patronage machine. This would make them vulnerable if the party is ever dislodged from government, so their rivals are funding and providing wetworks for the other party’s attempts to gain electoral ground. The volatile campaign environment has drawn mortal dark money and out-of-state backers whose impact totally dwarfs what either kindred group can wield.

13. A ruler has relegated an unwanted population— thinbloods and caitiffs, but also disliked clans and their ghouls— to a piddling hunting turf of chemical plants and shuttered slums. The investment of their out-of-town allies plus several devil’s bargains have turned the tables, and they are thriving in this unintentional toehold the ruler has given them. Even so, the ruler would evict them if not for their protection by unauthorized visiting kindred the ruler has the authority but not the strength to destroy. Riot and assassination threaten.

14. Rumor claims that long ago, a methuselah places their hair in a pin so their lover could command them when the beast overtook them. Whether that’s true or not, the ruler of this city seemed to be able to command a wasailing elder of immense strength with just a drop of blood and a pin. A brute with no political talent, they maintained power by loaning out the pin until, obviously, one of their supporters used it to destroy the ruler and take their place. Several repeated mistakes later, and the pin has been lost. An expert ancillae has been brought in to handle the crisis, made difficult by the fact that everyone involved wants to use the pin to become the new ruler.

15. Ruling council serves an enlightened Golconda-seeker. Access to this serene saint is tightly controlled, as they are so lacking in desire that the strong emotions of those around them are infectious. Palace intrigues surround this oddly humane figure.

16. Neonates are taught communally, even undergoing rituals like vaulderie to maintain cohesion as they reckon with their new existence. The curriculum established by the city’s faith leader seems comprehensive and progressive, but conceals a hidden agenda.

17. Ruler has taken an unlikely confidante, whose advice drives much of their praxis. Some suspect a blood bond, but in fact the advisor simply has ironclad blackmail, and the ruler hasn’t figured out a way out from under it yet. Until then, the harsh whims of two rule.

18. When the ruler first achieved their praxis, they granted rights and privileges to those who had helped them topple the previous ruler, including the right to freely embrace. If you can believe it, this right was used irresponsibly, and the two biggest power blocs are the childer of two of the ruler’s longtime allies. As tensions increase and the blocs embrace more and more to crowd each other out, the ruler seeks discrete means to destroy the heads of both.

19. Currently expanding into another domain’s territory. The defenders aren’t strong enough for a direct confrontation but engage in guerilla tactics. They consider outsiders acceptable targets.

20. Leadership allows for performance of diablerie under experimental conditions, leading to a surfeit of captive-seeking and stringent enforcement of other laws. The ruler claims to have been given dispensation by higher-ups in their sect. Obviously an ill-fated and short-sighted fig leaf on excuses for amaranthe. The ruler seeks to become stronger, but their main advisor is attempting to recreate their dead mentor from the fragments of personality and memory left as wreckage from destruction of the soul.

21. Straightforward kleptocracy, where the ruler is willing to transgress boldly for the right payout. They update power-players from out of town of any developments, like newcomers or rumors, to solicit bribes to detain, redirect, or crush.

22. Cadre of hedonists carelessly embrace infants and toddlers, and insists on introducing you.

23. Animalism is privileged here, and animal minds and intuition are considered both more honest and more valuable. Rather than legibile contracts or the exchange of favors, the laws of local praxis are interpreted through animalistic simplicity, with territory, allegiance, and obligation understood but approximate.

24. Remote and unloved. This is where you get sent if you join the sect, but no ruler trusts you enough to invite your residence. The ruler here is nominally tasked with easing transitions and indoctrination, but they’re mostly focused on rooting out spies. There’s at least one traitor they’d never expect.

25. As above, but rather than refugees from other sects, the residents are abducted and dominated members of other groups. Their black sites are secret, their subjects names replaced, the only evidence of anything amiss being their suspiciously wide territory and high-ranking allies. Those passing through only notice an eerily quiet court and oddly serene kindred. The traitor in their midst has subverted the project utterly, making an army-in-waiting on behalf of their own sect.

26. Degenerated primogen council. Few clans have a deep roster in this city, so “advice” dictated to the middling ruler is decided between a trio of actual elders and the young primogen who they easily court.

27. Ruler offers turf to anyone who can explain their childe’s wracking and painful visions of being burned from the feet up. In fact, this is a prophetic warning about a classic sewer cult preparing a chemical rite that will allow them to set much of the city ablaze from the sewer lines on up, which they desire out of hope for advancement and also religious fervor.

28. Rather than allotting territory to each coterie, the city is divided into broad districts where multiple coteries are impelled to peacefully coexist. The frequent issues this creates are handles by each district’s chief in a system that keeps the ruler’s potential rivals busy.

29. Most kindred of consequence reside in a compound-resort just outside the city, fearing to make a haven in the mage-infested urban center.

30. The ruler’s two enforcers are of radically different clan, appearance, and approach. Everyone shaken down by both, an organized resistance has arisen to get the ruler to be rid of one or the other, an opposition created by the ruler to funnel dissent while making out like a bandit.

31. The residents of this city are simply depraved, engaging in the worst acts appropriate to your chronicle. Their leadership runs interference and makes up excuses.

32. City’s inner circle props up an auteur to entice world-class performers so the undying can sample their blood. To make one a kindred would be foolish and utterly forbidden, but perhaps there’s a Mozart or Paganini kept in a pit offstage somewhere, sustained for centuries by vitae.

33. Feigned policy of tolerance actually bait to get a hated minority out of hiding, but a hardliner traditionalist is at risk of ruining it.

34. Residents stigmatize “the undead look”. Rather than cultivating humanity, they use rouge and affect human mannerisms to play their status games. The baffled ruler is only so-so at this, while a thinblood alchemist is just barely pulling off the con of the century.

35. Following a massive offensive by hunters, lupines, or a rival sect; survivors of a nearby city have petitioned to be entered under the ruler of this city’s praxis, to protect them and reclaim what they’ve lost. The ruler hastily accepted this plea, and now is engaged in a bloody war beyond the operational reach of their influence.

36. As above, but the ruler has contemptuously denied their plea, and now fleeing kindred are targets of blood hunts as the border is fortified against incursions of the initial foes.

37. The ruler’s most open challenger is just the catspaw of their sire, who has been successfully kept away and must correspond with their childe by phone.

38. The recent destruction of a neonate has totally upset the balance of power, as they were smuggling a vital message that never got delivered and at the same time being suborned into a plot to burn down another coterie’s haven.

39. Following an attack that destroyed high-ranking residents in the city, the ruler has commanded that every kindred office have a designated successor, unwittingly inspiring a coup plot planned by their own heir.

40. By custom, one’s bloodline and clan are hidden information in this city, with some even going so far as to wear masks to allow the possibility that they are Nosferatu or Salubri.

41. Social harmony at court is prized here, while the authority of the ruler is flouted without punishment. A “hugboxing” culture keeps praxis unrelentingly.

42. The ruler is secure in their power, with no complications except for one gallant and elusive bandit.

43. Willful childer have bonded themselves to a very dangerous kindred as a form of protest against their sires. This won’t end well.

44. As above, but that went down fifty years ago, leading to a protracted jyhad-in-miniature. Now the childer have childer of their own, which are actively being courted by the elders.

45. Residents going to ground following succession of hunter raids powered by cluster analysis and tapping into civic surveillance network.

46. Praxis closer to a palace economy. The ruler not only distributes territory but havens, allowances, and rich gifts. However, other sources of income are interpreted as ungratefulness and disloyalty.

47. The city is in a delicate moment as one sect retreats from it and another hasn’t realized it already possesses it. Most inhabitants are holdouts and commandos, surrounded by a profusion of traps. Mortal government in disarray as ghouls are killed rather than turned over.

48. Kindred gangs exist in a war of all on all, but a charismatic boss attempts to unify them into one big gang. Another considers assassinating them for a thrill.

49. After a neonate embraces their mortal love’s baby, the powers that be are stymied in their move to punish them by a faction who claims the infant is actually a kindred-kine “chimera”. Violence ensues as a neighboring blood cult takes this child as a messiah of the Final Nights.

50. The sect’s nominal structure and hierarchy has been totally subsumed by one of the moral “paths” popular in the Dark Ages. Elders are largely unsatisfied with neonates’ larping attempts at medievalism, but some, raised in a walled garden, show promise.

51. The ruler and their childe are so hot it’s a constant problem. They encourage suitors into drastic action, promising their love as a prize, then shower the successful ones with favor while inculcating jealousy and soliciting “rescue” from other kindred. Currently the ruler’s lover and their childe’s lover are at complete loggerheads.

52. Prominent autarkis undergoes some dramatic transformation, is visually changed and possesses different abilities to what disciplines they were known to possess. Kindred weakness, including the burning of the sun, no longer afflict them. They offer to make others as they are and foment rebellion.

53. A mole determined to be somewhere in the city’s communication network. With foes close at hand, the network is junked, leaving them silent and deaf to the outside world until new methods are devised.

54. The ruler’s palace is undergoing extensive renovation, forcing them to hold court on a rotating basis in the venues of their subjects. Meanwhile, their enemies smuggle firebombs into the palace, to set off during its reopening soiree.

55. Entire city declares one big Elysium in cynical measure to cut enemies down to size with selective enforcement.

56. Two different “reception coteries” scan the main points of egress into the city to direct incoming kindred (detected with disciplines) or strike at lupines. They compete for prestige and favor.

57. The destruction of kindred is forbidden in all circumstances, even by the ruler. There is a resultant “ossuary” of staked troublemakers, from which its guardians smuggle blood.

58. Widespread violation of the masquerade as powerful kindreds’ ghouls are supplemented by a penumbra of mortals imbedded in institutions who are “in the know” to varying degrees.

59. Uncharacteristic cooperation is the order of the day here. Outsiders suspect widespread domination and blackmail— turns out, they’re right.

60. “Tags” are purchased directly from the ruler, a license to kill a mortal. The ruler may not ask who or why. Those killed without license are considered “poached”, and punishment is severe.

61. Some artifact or grand discipline suppresses the Beast here. The ruler is famed to be even-handed and allow for debate. Upon leaving the area of effect, the Beast is much stronger, for a duration and effect proportional to the length of time spent affected by the artifact. A challenger seeks to destroy it.

62. Preserve. A stronghold of hunters or other enemies, with just a couple kindred to operate a safehouse waystation and spy.

63. City contained a cache of grimoires owned by a presumed-destroyed blood sorcerer. Multiple parties search to uncover the cache, especially as the sorcerer was rumored to possess a rare and potent ritual to (e.g.) embrace ghouls from any distance.

64. More than age or general power, skill with a particular discipline is the primary indicator of pecking order among kindred society here. A precious few who lack the discipline have risen based on other talents, but they are the exception. Any conflict will not only include high-level examples of the discipline but developed countermeasures and countermeasures to the countermeasures.

65. Traditionalist court evocative of the dark ages, with formal etiquette, a tyrannical ruler, and frequent blood bonds. A courtly romance threatens to rupture the ruler’s hold.

66. Seemingly moribund praxis, the ruler letting problems simmer too long and refraining from any unnecessary action, allowing ill-fitting policies to linger. Perhaps the ruler is luring out the snakes, perhaps they’re distracted, or perhaps they’re simply stuck in the past.

67. The center of society is an ornate catacomb deep under the sewers, a series of tunnels and chambers decades in the making. Some engineers suborned and later mind-wiped still dream of its shining black caverns, and have begun a survey seeking something they can’t quite name.

68. Cleaning house— a massive fire attack against kindred society is under way, orchestrated by the ruler to cut down potential rivals, confident nothing could go wrong and make the situation spiral out of their control

69. The central power of this city is a former Gehenna cult, officially secularized, which rather than dissolving with the death of its doctrines has adapted its structures to keep the denizens of the city emotionally dependent on it and cut off from the rest of kindred society. A minority of the inner circle advances the old goals in secret.

70. A powerful kindred has won the loyalty of a sizable population of thin-bloods by offering to “make” them, providing captive kindred for them to diablerize. Their cover story is a new formula that makes thin-bloods into full kindred, which has swollen their ranks, but has also drawn way too much attention from powerful kindred.

71. Formerly insular and exclusionary. Walls have come down in the last decade to reveal a society where sires “reclaim the blood” of their childer more often than not within the first year, the sun is worshipped as a stern mother, and a unique dialect has emerged, with kindred called Iadata, embracing called tasking, ghouls called tains, clans called affirms, and so on.

72. Residents perform trepanation and other forms of exposing their internals, finding that it soothes the beast. They’ve found ways to make their brain fluid musk intoxicating, turning those who spend much time with them into languid and agreeable friends. This is how existence always should have been, they argue.

73. Ruler’s disastrous polycule politics becomes everyone else’s problem.

74. Tale as old as time— a powerful kindred from another city, strained by an increasingly on-guard populace, has taken up residence here without permission and is in the process of seducing the current ruler’s supporters. Attempts to destroy the interloper’s new havens have only revealed the depth of their planning.

75. The emergence of a rare or new discipline— perhaps related to flight, telekinesis, or telluric energy— has been met with calls for support and high-minded research. A ploy to draw out the freaks and put them in cages.

76. Residents here rarely speak, and when they do they employ roundabout language and euphemism. They are coordinating to destroy a powerful torpid elder, whose auspex is so potent they can hear anything uttered in the city and influence others through dreams.

77. Decades ago, the ruler formed a streamlined advising council composed of one “high clan” and one “low clan” representative, with the usual measure of idiosyncrasies about which clan counts as which. By modern nights, low clan representatives have managed to wrangled this arrangement into social parity with the high clan bloc, leading to calls to replace the council with something more typical, fiercely refused by the low clan coteries.

78. Use of disciplines “unbecoming of one’s bloodline” is forbidden by social custom and the ruler’s law. Over time, local definitions have become far more complicated than simply restricting out-of-clan disciplines, resulting in the research of novel amalgam powers. A visiting kindred who came to study such a power has run afoul of the prince and these customs on an edge case, and the situation is at risk of escalation.

79. Several kindred here claim an important and noble bloodline, and thus shape their childer in name, appearance, and personality to emulate themselves. It’s creepy.

80. The ruler maintains a “Preserve of Sentiment”, a catalogue of each resident’s mortal attachments and a broad ban on other kindred’s interference with them. Nominally a form of truce-seeking and limitation on conflict, it has become a primary theatre of competition. Though disclosure of mortal attachments is a requirement of residency, many fake and maintain attachments to conceal their true weak spots from enemies.

81. Cohabitation. Two prominent rulers, perhaps of different sects, both claim the same praxis and yet don’t directly attack each other, leading to constant issues. Residents who want to play it safe seek the permission of both.

82.  Because the city is underpopulated by kindred, and rather than granting large hunting turf that would ruffle feathers to abridge later, the ruler allots territory to ghouls, especially prospective embraces. Though widely unpopular, it creates a class of vessels dependent on the ruler.

83. Denizens have organized into cells, with only a couple members of a cell having any regular contact with other cells. Few know who the ruler is, other than a code name. To reduce the value of pre-cell intelligence, the ruler has swapped out some kindred for those from other cities, accidentally including a fugitive kindred with a dark secret.

84. The city boasts a yawning underground crevice, anomolous portal, or other space connecting the real to the unreal. Those in power wield its gifts in showy displays, and hide what the cost is to be.

85. The ruler, an out-of-touch ancient, has designated their much younger childe to keep abreast of politics and the developments of modern nights, leading the power players of the city to undertake a constant charm offensive against the young consul.

86. After a kindred diablerized an elder, they were swiftly put down. But both the victim and diablerist remain as psychic echoes in the city, like intrusive thoughts or hypnotic commands. It’s unclear what their goals are and whether they are opposed to each other.

87. Languid and friendly. Will band together to eat any visitor who stays for more than three nights. This practice is more out of gleeful disdain than to protect some great secret, but perhaps it provides cover to some kindred who deeply desires privacy.

88. The screw-ups and failures of kindred society are accepted here, where personal standards are lax but loyalty to the ruler is king. Largely sadsack transplants with nowhere else to turn as the ruler makes fun of their insecurities and gives them another task.

89. Some new advantage gives the residents the upper hand against lupines, and they now maintain havens outside the city proper to capitalize on their gains.

90. Residents have empowered the local “blood doll” scene, using them as gophers, smugglers, and informants in addition to disposable feeds. Within the nascent organization, formidable figures are starting to rise.

91. Thawing autocracy. The ruler took extraordinary measures when repelling a major threat— bonding other kindred’s childer, reassigning territory at will, and exercising domain over others’ havens. Now that the trouble has passed they will have to give up most of their emergency measures or face total revolt. However, exactly which measures and along what timeline greatly impact the balance of power, leading to politicking among the most powerful denizens.

92. Easy-going ruler installed by their mentor or sire, an imperious stickler who holds praxis in the next city over. Residents collude to make their ruler look good and like their have a handle on things so the frightful sire doesn’t decide their childe is slacking and come over to crack the whip.

93. Ruler attempting classic move of installing an unpopular and cruel scourge to achieve their goals, then executing the scourge for excesses to win back support. However, the scourge has figured this out and is laundering their reputation, securing favors for leniency, and preparing to turn on the ruler.

94. City home to a project to recreate and adapt the disciplines and guiding ethos of the Salubri, or other nearly-extinct bloodline, despite having no members of the Salubri to work with. Work has bourn fruit, but old issues are resurfacing too.

95. Lacking a firm leader, powerful figures indulge in senseless destruction. The likeliest candidates for authority are either sadists themselves or openly tolerant of these indulgences.

96. All formal business is conducted in total darkness, as is much of the social functions of the residents, out of a belief that kindred are creatures of the dark. Use of disciplines to thwart darkness is discouraged outside of emergencies.

97. The primo hunting turf is designated as a free-for-all, where kindred risk deadly encounters with each other to get the easiest and most succulent mortals.

98. Visitors, as well as those who offend the ruler, are fitted with collars that can remotely sever the spinal column as insurance against poor behavior. The ruler is discretely investigating the destruction of one of their lieutenants due to an apparent collar malfunction.

99. The ruler keeps a corps of mortal “guides” to hand out as valets to visitors and during functions, blood bags and welcoming committee in one. They are used to spy on subjects, but using some weird ritual or uncommon power, not acting as standard informants.

100. Prestigious haven is awarded every year to the victor of a pageant trial. Residents compete with shocking determination to possess this property, which though ornate and well-placed is not uniquely ornate or uniquely well-placed. Rather, it has become synecdoche with regard and renown far beyond its actual value.