The hungry corpses who have inhabited the Moulding Room these last thirty years have dedicated themselves to surveillance and subversion in equal measure, and that subversion extends to the flesh, both their own and others’.
The vampire can disconnect a shred of her fingernail which, on contact with living or undead flesh, burrows just under the skin. The owner feels a sympathy with it, and knows how far away and in what direction it lies, for as long as the effect lasts. A vampire with this power activated will never be able to lose track of the person implanted.
Cost: One Willpower
Dice Pool: Wits + Stealth + Detournement, opposed by the target’s Wits + Blood Potency.
The character must first touch the target (as per The World of Darkness Rulebook, p. 157) to use this power.
Action: Reflexive and Contested; resistance is reflexive.
A handshake or a brief brush is all a character needs to use this power. Unless the character rolls a dramatic failure, the target does not know that anything has come to pass.
A character can only use this power on one individual at a time.
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The target knows exactly what has happened, and feels a great deal of discomfort. The shred of fingernail itches like hell, but it can easily be removed from the target’s skin with a pair of tweezers, like a splinter. The vampire gains no information.
Failure: The character fails to implant the splinter of fingernail.
Success: The target feels nothing, and the character now knows how far away and roughly where the target is. If the character is within a hundred yards of the victim, she knows the victim’s location exactly . This power has a variable duration, depending on how many successes the character rolled.
Successes - Duration
1 success - One night
2 successes - Three nights
3 successes - One week
4 successes - Two weeks
5+ successes - One month
Exceptional Success: Apart from the enhanced duration, the character gains no extra benefits from rolling five or more successes.
The vampires of the Moulding Room have a terrifying ability to consume information. A vampire with this power seeps his blood over a book, CD, DVD or video tape. Then, he takes the blood back into himself, leaving the media blood-smeared and completely devoid of any of the recorded material on that medium. In this fashion, the vampire literally ingests the knowledge formerly stored on that item.
Cost: One Vitae to activate the power, though this point is regained when the blood is re-consumed.
Dice Pool: Intelligence + Stamina + Detournement
Action: Instant
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The character’s blood rejects the media. Upon consuming the blood once more, the vampire takes a point of aggravated damage. Additionally, the vampire does not regain the point of Vitae used to activate the power.
Failure: The character’s blood simply fails to imprint the information, and the vampire does not regain the point of Vitae used to activate the power.
Success: The character instantly knows the information on the media she anointed with her blood, as if she had read it, watched it or listened to it. The object is destroyed by the blood.
Exceptional Success: The character assimilates the information on the media item targeted by this power. Additionally, this process does not destroy the media item — the blood simply wicks away cleanly when the vampire re-consumes it.
The Residents of the Moulding Room are masters of surveillance, and part of this has to do with their fetishization of the camera, the Eye Behind the Glass. The Residents have turned the fetish into a fact. A resident with this power can literally remove her eye and install it with wiring, Vitae and spittle behind a camera lens or a mirror, meaning that she can always perceive that area as though she were looking out of the lens or mirror herself, wherever she is.
Cost: One Vitae. Also, the power inflicts one level of lethal damage on the character as she gouges out her own eye.
Dice Pool: Wits + Stamina + Detournement
Action: Instant
Anyone who finds the eye can destroy it automatically, causing the vampire intense pain and another level of lethal damage.
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The character gouges too deep, and inflicts on herself a point of aggravated damage. She ruins the eye, and suffers the penalties of having one eye until she heals the damage.
Failure: The character inflicts the lethal damage and spends the Vitae, but cannot empower the eye to see.
Success: The character can install the eye behind a camera lens, a mirror, or in some other vantage point, using her own Vitae as glue. The vampire can now see everything the eye sees. The duration depends on the number of successes rolled.
Successes - Duration
1 success - One night
2 successes - Three nights
3 successes - One week
4 successes - Two weeks
5+ successes - One month
While the eye is placed in this way, the character suffers all the penalties of having the Flaw: One Eye (see The World of Darkness Rulebook, p. 219). If the character heals the damage at any point, the external eye shrivels and ceases to work, while the character grows a new one. If the eye is ever hit by direct sunlight, it combusts quickly and is consumed in seconds, leaving only a slightly greasy blackened area where it once sat.
Exceptional Success: The eye works as above, but the character suffers no damage.
Faces are everything to the Moulding Room. The face of a celebrity in a gossip magazine, the newsreader, the head of state. Yet the vampire barely has a face at all, a blur at most. Even with the costly application of will, the vampire can only be seen in a mirror, or in pictures, or on film. But with the right application of knives and blood, the vampire can steal the face of a living human, allowing him to appear as that mortal. And the more famous the mortal, the easier that face is to remove – the more one’s face appears on screen, the less his face is his own.
With a human face over his own, the vampire has a reflection, and appears in photographs and film entirely normally, until the face withers away. If the character has the Hollow Mekhet weakness, he gains the stolen reflection, but still has no shadow and makes no sound on recordings or through telephones.
Cost: None
Dice Pool: Presence + Medicine + Detournement – victim’s Stamina + Composure.
Action: Extended; 10+ successes needed. Each roll represents five minutes of work.
The vampire needs a scalpel, and, more importantly, needs the victim to be helpless in his clutches.
The victim is permanently disfigured, if he doesn’t die of his injuries, since the skin of his face, his scalp and his hair are torn away, leaving only bloody muscle and tendon open to the air. It’s agony, and the victim suffers five points of aggravated damage, and may bleed to death if he doesn’t get medical help by dawn.
Using this power is always a sin against Humanity 4 or above. It requires a degeneration roll with a pool of three dice.
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The vampire damages the face, so that it is unusable. The victim is scarred for the rest of his life, if the vampire lets him live.
Failure: No successes are added to the total. The vampire makes no headway in removing the face or attaching it to his own.
Success: Successes are added to the total. The final number of successes determines how long the vampire will be able to wear the face.
Successes - Duration
10 successes - One night
11 successes - Two nights
12 successes - Three nights
13 successes - Five nights
14 successes - One week
15+ successes - Ten nights
Exceptional Success: The vampire makes significant headway towards removing the face. No other benefits come from rolling an exceptional success.
Suggested Modifiers: Victim has the Fame Merit (+1 per dot).
One of the founders of the Moulding Room discovered, back in 1976, that the human soul was, in fact, a small organ vaguely resembling a six-inch-long spermatozoon encased within the breastbone.
Or maybe he was making it up. It fundamentally doesn’t matter. This, the highest power of Detournement, makes it happen. With a scalpel, the character opens up the breastbone of a dead or comatose human and pulls the slithery, still-screaming object out. If the owner wasn’t dead, he soon will be. Residents of the Moulding Room with this power keep libraries of “souls,” preserved in formaldehyde.
When the time comes, they transplant these “souls” into other mortals, or consume them, in order to gain moral strength.
Cost: One Willpower to remove or transplant
Dice Pool: Intelligence + Medicine + Detournement to transplant or remove;
Stamina + Composure + Detournement to consume a “soul.”
Action: Extended to remove or transplant; five successes required to remove; another five to transplant. Each roll represents two hours of work. Consuming an already stored “soul” is an instant action.
The “souls” have their own unique characteristics. For example, the consistency and activity of the organ gives some sign as to the character of the individual. If it is firm, smooth-textured and moves strongly, its owner was someone of high moral character. If it’s flaccid and barely moving at all, it belonged to someone weak or evil.
The “soul” organ can be transplanted into another human body, replacing the implantee’s “soul.” The recipient of the transplant replaces his own Morality Rating with the rating of the previous owner of the “soul,” along with any derangements gained through degeneration (which, again, replace any derangements he might have). A journalist with a Morality of 6, for example, falls into the clutches of a Resident of the Moulding Room. The Resident drugs and performs surgery on the journalist, replacing his “soul” with that of a professional killer (Morality 2). Apart from the pain of recovery and the scar, the journalist doesn’t feel different. But later on he discovers that his conscience doesn’t bother him at all when he starts behaving callously towards the people he writes about and, later, brutally towards his girlfriend… and he starts hearing voices.
The vampire can also use the “soul” for his own purposes: eating it – and if he has this power, he can eat it – grants him an extra Willpower dot for the rest of the night. He can’t spend the dot on any power that requires the permanent expenditure of a dot of Willpower (such as creating a childe or joining a bloodline), but he can benefit from the extra points of Willpower the “soul” provides and the advantage of having a bigger maximum Willpower pool. The character can only use a number of “souls” equal to his Blood Potency or less at any one time. At the end of the night, the character vomits a pale, slimy substance as the power wears off.
Dead bodies without “souls” can receive the Embrace, but a new “soulless” vampire is always a draugr, with no dots in Humanity at all.
Using this power is always a sin against Humanity 3 (two dice).
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The character destroys the “soul,” whatever he is doing, and gains no benefit from it. If transplanting, the recipient of the transplant dies.
Failure: The character cannot remove, transplant or consume the soul, but does not destroy it (and if removing a “soul”, doesn’t immediately kill the victim).
Success: The character gains the successes needed, and the operation works as planned, or the character eats the soul.
Exceptional Success: The character gained ten or more successes on the roll to remove the soul or transplant it. The recipient of a transplant does not have a scar. The victim of a removal is sewn up perfectly, and the corpse does not show the signs of having been violated. If the character is consuming a previously stored “soul,” he not only gains an extra dot of Willpower, but his pool of Willpower points is replenished in full.
Suggested Modifiers: The character has access to surgical equipment (+1 to +3), the character is working in an unsanitary or unsuitable environment, or with inappropriate tools (-1 to -3), the victim is not dead (-3), the victim has been dead for more than 48 hours (-1), the victim has been dead longer than a week (-2), the victim has been dead longer than a month (-4).