On Resonances

You Are What You Eat

The juice fuels every activity in your unliving body. All Kindred, even an Anarch pissblood like Case here, needs it to keep awake, keep moving. These are the basics, like sleeping or eating when you were alive. Blood gets you through the night. That’s how we like to talk about it. But that’s not really how we roll, is it? Pure hunger doesn’t explain all this baggage, all the things done to score good juice and get away clean. It doesn’t account for the wild chances we take to get a taste of that special boy: the callous manipulations we use to groom, scare, or seduce him. Remember Latisha, the zero-fucks-given construction worker we had locked up in the bathroom of the Rainbow? Behind the buzz of booze, there was this sickly sweet, musky warmth, right? That’s because she was turned on by you. You were already a quart into her when my mask slipped, so you must have noticed how the juice changed. Bitter wormwood and sandalwood ashes. Goes so much better with who you are, no? Feeds the raw power in your dead muscles. That was fear. And yes, I let the mask down on purpose. It’s not just a hunger; it’s an addiction: a complex urge to gorge ourselves on the infinitely varied essence of man. Where a human body digests amino acids and proteins to grow, us Kindred digest emotion, history, trauma, and obsession to cook the blood and feel alive. We eat what it is to be human, and over time we become what we eat: condensed shadows of their fears and fantasies. It’s always been this way. Blue Bloods fixate on a specific fix – the blood of mortal relatives, blondes in heat, fitness-freaks, or consumption victims. It gives them all they need and reveals this unspoken truth – not all blood is the same. The rest of us are mixed-substance abusers, looking for the kick that will take us where we want to go. I go for angry, violent, or frightened: choleric blood. So, I’m a terror when I feed, and they always see me coming. Makes it easier for me to sleep at day. My prey knows exactly what’s going on and feels the jungle deep inside – I’m all about the pure fight or flight. More honest that way, yeah? But at the end of the night it’s the kick I’m after, not the moral justification. I live off raw strength, and I swear I could have cleared Hollywood Boulevard, rooftop to rooftop, if I had Latisha’s blood pumping in me now. It’s not a subject for polite company, and you’ll want to keep your particular taste a secret from your enemies, but knowing what you like and how to get it is key to fast, raw power for our kind. It’s not neat and it’s not right, but you better learn to soothe or scare, isolate or groom love in your victims. Alwaysbe prepared to strike; you never know when the perfect victim will come along. You fade from sight, right? Could be that guy with the laptop is all alone in the world, writing a last desperate letter to a Midwestern mother who was never right with his life choices. That’s loneliness: melancholic blood. No one sees the lonely, the socially inept, and the isolated, and so you will be hidden, your insides wrapped up in his cold, smoky plasma. Go find out. Just don’t make him feel a real connection with you, or you’ll spoil the sad-juice. Happy… eh, unhappy hunting I should say.

The Blood Is The Life

Human blood powers a vampire’s body. Without fresh juice, a Kindred lies still, torpid, and powerless. Its dead heart beats only when fueled by the stolen essence of life. Its eyes only work when the corona and the viscous body flows with Blood. All vampires know vital fluids consist of far more than plasma, blood cells, and platelets. Some unknowable link to a kine’s soul gives every person’s red rum its particular kick and effect. Perhaps it’s just hormones and the traces of the incessant bio-electrical current of mind, but a victims feelings profoundly affects the Kindred system.
Drink deep enough, and the Resonance of a victim rises to the surface: first as a sharp taste in the blood, then as images, whispers, and feelings; clots of unresolved trauma or clusters of rising hopes. Crisp memories, a ghostlike presence, or visions of heart-rending moments can occur just as blood loss nears the fatal amount. A kill always gives the strongest, most lasting rush, so the temptation is always there.
The rush of blood is not just a high, it’s a state where the blood changes a vampire’s own Resonance a bit. Plain melancholic blood is a good buzz to be on when Obfuscating, but that uniquely subservient dogwalker with deep mommy-issues owns a special breed of submission that makes Dominate possible without eye contact. That’s what Kindred call a Dyscrasia, licks call a clot, and players call a “must-drink” SPC.

Resonance

Blood type is expressed as Resonance. Unless looking only for survival or fuel, a drinker should care what prey they feed from and how. Vampires drink blood. Mortals eat food. Resonance flavors the blood, turning drinking into dining. It’s not about genetics, even if family often does carry a tendency toward a certain Resonance. It’s more about a combination of the vessel’s temperament and the victim’s state of mind in the moment of feeding. Kindred employ dozens of different frameworks to describe Resonance, from Japanese adolescent bloodtype astrology to American business-school MyersBriggs phrenology. Indian licks talk about ayurvedic gunas, decadent Toreador fans of Gurdjieff map their meals on the Enneagram; a Sewer Rat in Geneva claims to use Jung’s original notebooks to construct a “unified theory of Blutfunktion.” But the most common method, used by Tremere thaumaturges and Duskborn street cookers alike, relies on the four humors of classical medicine and medieval alchemy. The Crucible of Alchemy, say the Warlocks, limns a metaphor for the vampiric body. The salts and metals in the crucible represent the elements of the blood, refined by the fire of the emotion in the moment. According to these Tremere, alchemy is all about scaring or inflaming kine in just the right way and drinking at just the right moment. It may be medieval mystification, but as the Mercurians can confirm, it does reliably get you high. To vampires whose Blood does in fact hold magical ingredients and shape personalities, these latter-day alchemists make a compelling argument.
The Four Humors: The four humors go back to ancient Egyptian and Babylonian medicine, but Hippocrates codified them for the West around 400 B.C. He described them as Choler or Xanthecholia (yellow bile), Melancholia (black bile), white Phlegm (not just modern phlegm, but also saliva, lymph, and the liquids of lungs and brain), and red Hema (blood). Thus, as the various humors predominate in the human system, people turn Choleric, Melancholy, Phlegmatic, and Sanguine. Modern alchemists point out that a blood sedimentation test demonstrates the existence of all four humors in the blood: black platelets and clots at the bottom, red blood cells above that, white cells governing them, and finally clear plasma colored yellowish with bilirubin. Licks more thirsty than scholarly just break the four humors down as “angry, sad, lazy, and horny.”

Humor	Element	Jungian Function	Hormone	Emotions And Conditions
Choleric	Fire	Feeling	Adrenaline	Angry, violent, bullying, passionate, envious
Melancholy	Earth	Thinking	Thyroid	Sad, scared, intellectual, depressed, grounded
Phlegmatic	Water	Intuition	Pituitary	Lazy, apathetic, calm, controlling, sentimental
Sanguine	Air	Sensation	Testosterone/Estrogen	Horny, happy, addicted, active, flighty, enthusiastic

Temperament And Dyscrasia: Resonance comes in three temperaments: fleeting, intense, and acute. Fleeting temperament occurs in the moment, thanks to momentary stimuli. Humans in basic emotional equilibrium (“well-adjusted”) experience fleeting bursts of all four Resonances in their day-to-day lives. An intense temperament indicates a human with a very strong tendency toward one or another Resonance. This connection might be due to mental illness, age, past trauma, drug addiction, or just a very active reward loop; a good-looking person who enjoys sex can easily become intensely Sanguine, thanks to seeking and getting their kicks every night. An acute Resonance is so intense that it creates a self-sustaining reaction in the blood. Kindred have adopted Hippocrates’ term Dyscrasia, or “bad mixture,” to refer to this effect. Younger licks, careless of alchemy and hematology alike, refer to it as a clot.

Resonance And Disciplines

Why should a lick care about Hippocrates? Because Resonance gives blood more than flavor and savor – intense Resonance gives it power. And a Dyscrasia, well, that gives the best hit of all. Resonances don’t just give flavor to the victim’s blood and personality, but also blend with vampiric Blood to energize Disciplines.

Resonance	Disciplines
Choleric	Celerity, Potence
Melancholy	Fortitude, Obfuscate
Phlegmatic	Auspex, Dominate
Sanguine	Blood Sorcery, Presence
Animal Blood	Animalism, Protean

People all taste and kick different, and certain people make certain powers easier while a vampire is drunk on them. After hundreds of victims, patterns begin to emerge to any feeder. The sad kills help you fade from sight, the horny kills boost the pull, and the angry ones fuel the punching. Blood accretes though time, combining and subliming through the strange alchemies that generate the supernatural effects of the gifts of Caine.  This is the way the Kindred overtly learn and develop disciplines: with a combination of feeding from a teacher and practicing conscious and often learned feeding habits. Vampires complement this process with undead biofeedback, pushing vitae through the vampiric system, revivifying Kindred organs, chakras, or nerve clusters at just the right moment. What you eat lays the foundation of what you can do.  And that goes for your enemies as well. Smart fangs study feeding habits and figure out the strengths and weaknesses of other Kindred. Every drinker in the world has their own pattern of feeding: changing or static over time. Perhaps all vampires, irrespective of age, generation, skill, and learning, intuitively look for the kind of blood that hones their curse and their disciplines to perfection.
Effects of Temperment: Fleeting temperament provides storytelling juice and savor to the hunt, but it has no immediate mechanical effect except as Thinblood Alchemy ingredients. That said, even fleeting temperaments flavor the blood sufficiently to justify buying dots in their associated disciplines.   Drinking blood with intense temperament gives the drinker one additional die for dice pools involving a discipline that corresponds to that Resonance. This bonus lasts until the vampire’s next drink of blood dilutes it, or until the vampire’s system empties of blood when their Hunger reaches 5.
Tapping a Dyscrasia: Vessels with an acute temperament provide the same Discipline bonus as an intense Resonance. They also incorporate a Dyscrasia, which conveys a more sublime or powerful benefit to the drinker.   The requirements to gain its effect varies between different Dyscrasias, but unless otherwise stated the vampire must kill and drain the vessel or feed from them over the course of three nights. Some Dyscrasias can only be tapped once before leaving the blood of the victim, others linger and can be gained on repeated occasions.   The effects of a Dyscrasia usually lasts until the Kindred feeds again or reaches Hunger 5.

Hunting and Humors

Determining what Resonance a vessel has makes feeding more than just a pit stop. Most vampires observe their victims from a distance or engage them in conversation to feel them out. Roleplaying should give a pretty good idea of what Resonance a victim’s blood carries, but after stalking or talking for a scene, the Storyteller may allow a Resolve + Insight test to clarify matters.  Tasting the blood of a human dispels all doubt; the Storyteller’s description of the taste, texture, and kick of the blood should give the leech a clear indication of what Resonance the mortal carries. If the mortal harbors a Dyscrasia, the Storyteller may hint at its nature. When the character slakes a level of Hunger from a victim, they feel the rush of the essence locked in their victim’s blood. This rush of Resonance may kick vampiric powers into overdrive or manifest as a unique condition.  To determine the temperament of a potential victim that the Storyteller (or scenario author) hasn’t created and detailed before the session, roll a d10 to determine a random temperament. If you get a 6+ on that die, roll again to determine the human’s Resonance. The Storyteller should absolutely shift the numbers dependent on the surrounding environment: nightclubs encourage the Sanguine and don’t attract the Phlegmatic; Protestant churches perhaps the opposite.
Changing Resonance: Characters can change a victim’s Resonance through roleplaying or through the various social systems of the game. If the character successfully scares, seduces, or drugs their victim, the Storyteller should shift the victim’s Resonance to match. If a vampire seduces a scared victim, for example, the human gains the Sanguine (fleeting) temperament while their Melancholic Resonance is (temporarily) submerged.  Intensifying a victim’s Resonance follows a similar process to increase their temperament by one step (from fleeting to intense, or intense to acute) on a successful social test or following a cool roleplaying scene. Once a victim acutely feels a Resonance, a properly callous vampire can begin the long process of manipulating them into a Dyscrasia. A love affair with a mortal lasting for months or years may lead to them developing an appropriately Sanguine clot; keeping a victim locked up for months to endure repeated waterboarding or brainwashing could develop a Melancholic or Choleric Dyscrasia depending on the precise sequence and nature of the confinement.  Such long-term grooming and abuse of victims is not a scientific process, and likely incurs plenty of Stains. Chronicle Tenets more likely forbid torture, but some may excuse themselves for seducing a mortal into a Sanguine-farming love affair. Humane vampires find it all distasteful; it’s up to the Storyteller to determine what works and how much Dyscrasia farming damages a Kindred’s Humanity.
Sample Dyscrasias: I'll do these later man.