The use of supernatural disciplines can make a vampire a deadly hunter, fearsome foe, or dreadful prankster. The combined use of these powers can make one even more puissant, particularly when used simultaneously, through splitting of the dice pool or through use of Celerity. Here I offer some strategies and systems for combination discipline use. The following discipline combinations do not need to be purchased with experience points, as they are simply strategies that combine the use of existing powers. These combinations are drawn from the official lore and rules of Vampire: The Masquerade, providing players with advanced tactical options for their characters.
Understanding Combination Disciplines
Combination disciplines are advanced applications of existing vampiric powers that allow for more nuanced and powerful effects. Unlike standard disciplines, these are not new abilities to learn with experience points but rather innovative ways to layer and synergize existing powers. The source material provides a comprehensive list of known combination disciplines, detailing their requirements and descriptions. This allows players to explore strategic depth in their character builds without the need for additional resource expenditure.
The core principle behind combination disciplines is the strategic pairing of powers to achieve effects beyond the sum of their parts. For example, a power that provides information can be used to enhance the targeting or effectiveness of another power that manipulates or attacks. This synergy requires careful planning and an understanding of how different disciplines interact within the game's mechanics.
Key Combination Disciplines and Their Applications
The following is a curated list of combination disciplines based on the provided source material, categorized for clarity. Each entry includes the required disciplines and a description of the resulting effect.
Mental and Sensory Combinations
These combinations focus on enhancing perception, manipulation, and information gathering.
- Aura Reading + Passion (Auspex 2 + Dementation 1): Normally, when using the power of Passion to inflame the emotions of a target, the user is unable to determine which emotion will be affected, or to discern what effects have been produced, short of observing them in the target's behaviour. By preceding the use of Passion with the use of Aura Reading, however, the user can target a particular 'colour' in the target's aura, and thus choose which emotion will be affected. The emotion has to be noticeably present in the target's aura, however, thus making it impossible to produce an emotion that is against the target's nature to feel. The user of this combination must first gain at least two successes in their Aura Reading roll, enough to discern the colours in the target's aura.
- Lifesong (Dominate + Auspex): This power allows a user to assess a person's Demeanor from a single sentence. It combines the perceptual aspects of Auspex with the analytical and interpretive capabilities of Dominate to glean deeper psychological insights.
- Psychic Double (Auspex): This power allows a user to let their astral form interact with persons in the physical world, providing a unique method of communication and observation that transcends physical limitations.
- Measure the Will (Auspex): This power grants a user an impression of the Willpower rating of a target, combining sensory perception with an understanding of metaphysical resilience.
- I Know (Auspex): This power allows a user to appear as if they know something the subject would rather keep secret, a subtle form of psychological pressure that leverages perceived omniscience.
Physical and Combat Combinations
These combinations enhance physical prowess, defensive capabilities, and tactical advantages in conflict.
- Eye for the Weakness of Steel (Auspex): This power allows a user to sense weak spots and openings in another's armor during battle, turning Auspex's perceptual abilities into a direct combat advantage.
- Scalpel Tongue (Celerity): This power allows for a clever barbed quip that shames the target into silence, using the supernatural speed and precision of Celerity to deliver a psychologically debilitating verbal attack.
- The Humberside Panic (Celerity): This power grants another vampire whose blood you tasted your Celerity for a short time, allowing for the temporary transfer of physical speed.
- Focused Reflexes (Celerity): This power allows a user to read the movements of a single target to react accordingly, enhancing Celerity's speed with predictive perception.
- The Rod Raw Rending (Fortitude): This power allows a user to punch through armor, combining the durability of Fortitude with the offensive power to overcome physical defenses.
- Blessed Resilience (Fortitude): This power enables a user to recover lost body parts, showcasing a profound application of Fortitude for healing and regeneration.
- Elemental Stoicism (Fortitude): This power grants higher resistance against fire and sunlight, two of the most potent threats to vampires, by enhancing the user's innate resilience.
- Halo of Steel (Willpower): This power allows a user to ignore any pain from their wounds, demonstrating a mastery of will that overrides physical sensation.
Animalistic and Nature-Based Combinations
These combinations leverage the connection to the Beast and the natural world, often through Animalism.
- Goddess Among Beasts (Animalism): This power allows a user to appear as an irresistible force of nature to an animal, commanding their respect and obedience on a primal level.
- Call the Wild Hunt (Animalism): This power causes a user's ghouls to fall into Frenzy while lowering the user's own risk to Frenzy, channeling chaotic energy outward while maintaining personal control.
- Unchain the Wrathful Beast (Animalism): This power allows a user to infuse their Beast into a host, where it assumes the zulo shape and falls into Frenzy, effectively weaponizing their inner chaos.
- Beast Meld (Protean): This power enables a user to fuse themselves to an animal, creating a symbiotic and formidable hybrid form.
- Power Animal (Animalism): This power infuses an animal with the user's Potence rating according to the animal's natural Strength, creating a supernaturally powerful animal companion.
- Bird in Ear (Animalism): This power imbues an acoustic message into a small animal, using it as a living, mobile communication device.
- Steal the Terrible Swiftness (Animalism): This power allows a user to move over land at 20 miles per hour until they stop, a remarkable application of Animalism for travel.
Illusion and Obfuscation Combinations
These combinations focus on deception, concealment, and manipulating perceptions.
- Waking Dream (Chimerstry): This power allows a user to employ a simple illusion as if it was real, blurring the line between perception and reality.
- Nightmare Curse (Chimerstry): This power creates an illusion of the target's greatest fear that will haunt it, using Chimerstry to attack the mind directly.
- Tenebrous Veil (Obfuscate): This power conceals a user within shadows, enhancing the standard Obfuscate powers with a more specific and potent form of concealment.
- Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (Obfuscate + Animalism): This power extends Obfuscate powers to animals under the user's control, allowing for coordinated deception involving both the user and their animal servants.
- Shadow Mark (Obfuscate + Obtenebration): This power grants the ability to Shadowstep to a dominated target, combining the concealment of Obfuscate with the shadowy travel of Obtenebration for rapid, targeted movement.
Blood and Vitae Manipulation Combinations
These combinations delve into the mystical properties of vampire blood and its connections to other realms.
- Blood Apocrypha (Auspex): This power allows a user to communicate information through vitae, using blood as a medium for metaphysical communication.
- Pulse of Undeath (Auspex): This power enables a user to sense any physical Disciplines a target might possess, reading the supernatural signature within their blood.
- Charon's Oar (Auspex): This power converts a user's flesh to plasm to enter the Shadowlands, a profound application of Auspex for traversing spiritual realms.
- Hatch the Viper (Serpentis): This power allows a user to create a ghouled serpent out of their own blood, a creative use of Serpentis for creating minions.
- The False Drink (Vicissitude): This power allows a user to compartmentalize foreign blood in a discrete cavity within their body to avoid Vinculi or blood bonds, a defensive use of Vicissitude against the addictive nature of vampire blood.
Mystical and Thaumaturgical Combinations
These combinations involve more esoteric and magical applications of vampiric power.
- Devil's Mark (Vicissitude + Presence): This power infuses Presence powers into a tattoo, creating a permanent, magical brand that carries supernatural influence.
- Animus Ligature (Auspex): This power allows an Inquisitor to detect signs of deep attachments upon an individual's aura, such as Vinculums, blood bonds, codes of honor, soul bargains, and sworn oaths, which appear as scarlet flares.
- Theft of Will (Thaumaturgy): This power allows a user to usurp control over a nearby thaumaturgical effect, demonstrating a high-level application of magical manipulation.
- Corpse Projection (Mortis): This power reanimates and possesses a corpse at a great distance, extending the user's influence and presence through necromantic means.
- Becoming Kupala (Koldunic Sorcery): This power allows a user to diffuse themselves through the earth of their domain to act as its guardian, bounding the inhabited earth to them in the manner of the Tzimisce Clan Curse.
Utility and Support Combinations
These combinations provide strategic advantages in planning, information gathering, and support roles.
- Nikolai Steen's Acuity (Auspex): This power allows a user to learn what derangement their target suffers, providing critical psychological intelligence.
- Guardian Vigil (Auspex): This power allows a user to enter a trancelike state that lets them react quickly to any changes around them, a heightened state of awareness for defensive purposes.
- Stone Sight (Auspex): This power allows a user to see through stone as if it were glass, providing a unique scouting and infiltration tool.
- Ears of the Bat (Auspex): This power allows a user to grow their ears to gain echolocation, enhancing sensory perception in dark or enclosed spaces.
- Read the Winds (Auspex): This power allows a user to get an impression from the senses of all animals in the area around them, acting as a distributed sensory network.
- Spectral Puppeteer (Auspex): This power allows a user to take possession of a target for a limited period of time, a powerful form of control and manipulation.
- Doubletalk (Auspex): This power allows a user to speak a full sentence very quickly and softly between words spoken normally. To listeners, the sentence appears as a regular conversational placeholder, enabling covert communication.
- Eyes of Blades (Auspex): This power allows a user to defend themselves against a multitude of incoming attacks, using Auspex to predict and deflect threats.
- Blessing's Warning (Auspex): This power allows a user to sense persons with True Faith, relics, followers of the Via Caeli, and Salubri, identifying potent spiritual threats and allies.
- Random Patterns (Auspex): This power allows a user to anticipate their opponent's next move based on previous actions and lines of probability, a tactical application of predictive perception.
- Tune Out (Auspex): This power allows a user to tune out background noise, focusing their senses on specific stimuli.
- Bloodied Hands (Auspex): This power allows a user to sense which person the target has killed last, providing forensic insight into a target's recent activities.
- Test the Road (Animalism): This power determines the Road rating in the Road of the Beast of a vampire through dialogue, assessing their moral alignment.
- Call upon the Blood (Animalism): This power allows a user to sense the presence of the vampiric Beast inside a person, identifying their predatory nature.
- Mask of Cathay (Animalism): This power allows a user to appear as a yin-aspected Kuei-jin, a sophisticated form of disguise.
- Chaining the Beast (Animalism + Dominate): This power allows a user to use Dominate more easily against a vampire in Frenzy, exploiting a moment of weakness.
- Aspect of the Beast (Animalism): This power causes a target to display the mien of an animal, a form of psychological and visual manipulation.
- Bestial Presence (Animalism): This power causes the presence of the Beast within assembled vampires to form a gestalt that puts vampires on edge, manipulating the collective predatory aura.
- Aura of Accursed Rage (Animalism): This power lowers the Self-Control of present Cainites, enhancing the possibility of Frenzy, a tool for inciting chaos.
- Mortal Terror (Animalism): This power sends a target into Rötschreck with a gaze, a direct application of fear induction.
- Under the Skin (Auspex): This power analyzes a person, determines his or her weaknesses, and then reveals and attacks these weaknesses, a comprehensive tactical power.
- Respite of Lucidity (Animalism): This power allows a user to take their derangement to their Beast, freeing themselves from it when it is drawn out, a therapeutic application of Animalism.
- Cloak the Beast (Animalism): This power allows a user to masquerade their current Humanity/Path rating, hiding their moral state.
- The Beast’s Transmogrification (Valeren): This power restructures a creature's body and decreases or temporarily increases their Road or Virtues, a profound application of Valeren for alteration and influence.
- Penitent Resilience (Valeren): This power allows a user to walk through the sunlight by allowing the sun to burn away their vitae, a desperate but effective survival tactic.
- The Bloodsoaked Saint's Resurrection (Valeren): This power resurrects anyone or anything from death as long as you possess a piece of their earthly remains, a legendary application of Valeren for overcoming death itself.
Strategic Considerations for Combination Disciplines
When employing combination disciplines, players must consider several strategic factors. The first is the requirement of possessing the requisite disciplines at the necessary levels. This often requires significant character development and resource allocation. Secondly, many combinations require specific conditions to be met, such as gaining a certain number of successes on an initial roll (as with Aura Reading + Passion) or having a piece of the target's remains (as with The Bloodsoaked Saint's Resurrection).
The tactical application of these powers is also crucial. Some combinations, like Scalpel Tongue, are best used in social or diplomatic settings, while others, like Eye for the Weakness of Steel, are designed for direct combat. Understanding the context in which a power will be most effective is key to maximizing its potential.
Furthermore, the use of combination disciplines can have narrative and thematic implications. Powers like The False Drink or Respite of Lucidity deal with internal struggles and personal demons, while powers like The Bloodsoaked Saint's Resurrection or Becoming Kupala touch on the deepest mysteries of vampiric existence and the boundaries of life and death. Players and Storytellers should consider how these powers fit into the character's journey and the overarching story.
Conclusion
The world of Vampire: The Masquerade is rich with supernatural powers, and the strategic combination of disciplines offers a pathway to unprecedented versatility and potency. From enhancing sensory perception to manipulating the very fabric of reality, these combinations allow vampires to transcend the limitations of their individual disciplines. By understanding the requirements, effects, and strategic applications of these powers, players can develop more nuanced and powerful characters, capable of facing the myriad threats of the night. Whether used for subtle manipulation, overwhelming force, or profound mystical insight, combination disciplines represent the pinnacle of vampiric power synergy.