The Kindred who believe that eating a mortal’s liver can substitute for a period of normal feeding have it wrong. Devouring a human liver, still hot and dripping from the victim’s body, merely enables a vampire to subsist on less potent forms of blood. A vampire whose Blood Potency restricts her to human blood can subsist on animal blood once more; Kindred who must drink the Vitae of their fellow vampires can go back to merely mortal blood — for a while.

Liver-eating carries a number of restrictions. First and foremost, the vampire needs a living, human victim to kill. Aside from loss of Humanity, the character faces the practical difficulties of committing a murder, hiding the body and making sure the police can never tie the crime back to her.

Once the vampire rips the liver from her prey, she has to eat it and hold it down. To consume anything except blood, a character must expend one Vitae to keep from immediately vomiting what she swallowed (as described on p. 157 of Vampire: The Requiem). It isn’t enough to hold the raw meat down for a scene before eliminating it, however. To gain the benefits of liver-eating, a vampire must also expend a Willpower point to keep the meat in her stomach until she sleeps. When she rises the next night, the liver is burned away by her Vitae and she can feed on weaker blood for a number of nights equal to 10 + twice her Stamina.

Liver-eating takes practice or training from someone who already knows the art. It therefore constitutes a three-dot Merit. As a character tries to develop the art, however, the Storyteller may ask the player to roll Stamina + Resolve each time the character attempts to eat a liver; failure means the character vomits up her cannibal feast (possibly just as she slipped into her daily sleep) and gains no benefits for the attempt. After the character succeeds three times (or so), the Storyteller can grant that the character has mastered liver-eating and no further rolls are needed.

“THE CRONES WHO RUN THAT PLACE PAY GOOD MONEY FOR LIVERS. NEVERMIND WHAT THEY ’RE FOR.”