Populating a City with Kindred

When building a Chronicle, unless you are setting it in a City created by someone else, one of the first major jobs a Storyteller has before them is to populate that city with Storyteller Player Characters (SPCs). SPCs are the key mortals, with Kindred, with ghouls, with other supernaturals. Depending on the city size, there could be hundreds of potential Kindred - a ridiculous number. We deal with this by focussing on the characters that matter and leave others for later creation.

Population Numbers

First, consider the size of the city - the number of mortal humans that call that place home. Generally, consider the wider area - suburbs and so forth - that might be present in the downtown streets that are often prime feeding locations. We'll then take a ratio of those mortals and use that as our Kindred count.

The advice for how many mortals are needed to support a Kindred population safely varies - while you only need 30 or 60 mortals for a blood supply, V5 recommends a minimum ratio of 1 vampire to 3000 mortals to allow the vampire to remain concealed within the population. Previous editions had this number considerably higher, noting that the Camarilla insisted on ratios of 1 to 100,000 in certain instances and noting that Princes often enforced arbitrary ratios to keep control of the power to create progeny. Anarch or Sabbat domains may have a lower ratio, with more Kindred for a given city size. 

I find a 1:10,000 ratio in smaller cities and a 1:50,000 ratio in larger cities tends to give us a good number of Kindred for the player characters to interact with. In small towns, the ratio will have to be even lower - and that might flavour the campaign significantly. The PCs might be the only Kindred there in certain small towns - a very different kind of game. Being below the "concealment factor" may make the Masquerade the absolute centre of the game, similar to the situation in The Monsters, the canonical quick start for Vampire V5.

As for ghouls - each Kindred could have no ghouls or many ghouls, depending on their position, preferences, and needs. I would assume a ghoul population about twice the vampire population.

With regards to other supernaturals - we can assume there may be Werewolves on the outskirts, Mages and Warlocks of various flavours around, some Fae, some Spirits or Wraiths - the numbers don't really matter unless it is a focus on the Chronicle. If you want some of these in your game, consider ones that might interact with the Kindred and the Coterie in specific and set a number for those. This is completely up to the flavour of the game you want. Perhaps 0-6 is a good target range unless the story calls for specific numbers.

Let's look at some examples:

	Town	Small City	Mid-Sized City	Large City	Metropolis
Number of Mortals	15,000	100,000	500,000	1,000,000	8,000,000
Number of Kindred	0-5	10-15	50	70-100	160-200
Number of Ghouls	0-10	20-30	100	140-200	320-400
Number of other Supernaturals	0-6	0-6	0-6	0-6	0-6

To be clear, I am not suggesting the number of other Supernaturals in New York is the same as in Hicksville, USA. I am suggesting that the number of other Supernaturals that will impact the Chronicle, at least in the beginning, is likely to be the same, unless it matters to your Chronicle.

Creating the Population

Looking at this table, the numbers look daunting. If we were creating Amsterdam, Calgary, or Jacksonville (cities with roughly 1,000,000 mortals), we'd be creating at least 70 vampires and 140 ghouls. Are we really going to sit down and create that many stat sheets, personalities, descriptions, motivations, plots, plans, relationships and touchstones? Absolutely not. My advice, for populating out a city, for who to create and in what order:

1. Start with the Kindred on the top of the pecking order. In a Camarilla city, the Prince and Council and more powerful rivals of those Kindred. In an Anarch city, the Baron and/or Council and/or the influential Kindred. In a Sabbat City, the Archbishop and Bishops and other powerful Kindred. In a mixed city, do both.
2.  Then focus on ones who will directly interact initially with the Coterie - their potential Sires and the Sires' problems/rivalries/friends/enemies, things at the lower level of the hierarchy nearer to the Player Characters
3. Sprinkle in a few key interesting folks from the lower end of various rival groups - create some rival coteries if the city is large enough, create some individual Kindred at the Coterie power level if not. Pure rivals and enemies, frenemies, potential rivals. Don't lock these folks into specific friend/enemy roles - the players will let you know quickly who they like and don't like.
4. Pull together some oddballs - things to bring the City alive. The seers, the iconoclasts, the spies, the visitors. Some flavourful Kindred that don't necessarily fit in the power structure of the City.
5. Create key ghouls that the Coterie is likely to encounter early in the Chronicle to attach to these Kindred or to key locations, like Elysium
6. Create key mortals (or use the real ones from the real city) for some key positions - mayor, council people, police chiefs, and so forth.

After you have created these - balancing the number in each category with the number of Kindred and ghouls there are - in a mid-sized city or larger there will be plenty of Kindred left uncreated and even more ghouls. Great. Don't create them. They are your background players - or room to create the perfect SPC for the situation. They only exist when they are relevant. When you do improvise one, add them to your notes.

How to Create an SPC

I use three documents to keep track of virtually everything in my Chronicle. I use a relationship map; a plot document to set out plots; and a session log to track everything that happens in a given session. When a session concludes, I update my plot documents and relationship map as appropriate. You can use Kumu, Miro, Obsidian, Google Docs - whatever makes things clear to you. You can see my tools here.

My relationship map tracks everything about the SPCs (and PCs) except their sheet if they have one. MOST of the SPCs in my Chronicle do not have a sheet. At best, they have some notes about specific dice pools they have. They may just have a note about how powerful they are with the expectation that I'll use the Quick SPC stat method described below. The relationship map entry keeps track of how they are connected to other players, and its text describes their appearance, motivation and personality. If I do end up fully creating an SPC, it will be in Foundry for dice rolls, but for most SPCs, their personal traits are the important things. To make my life easier, if I do need to stat an SPC, I may steal a stat block from a published source. 

Quick SPC

Quick SPCs are described on the Storyteller Screen, part of the Storyteller Toolkit package (note, not in the PDF). I don't really recommend that product as a good value, so I'll quickly summarize the salient points here. Choose 4, 6, or 8 dice for a weak, medium, or strong character. Use that many dice for most things they do. Pick a few things they are good at - use 2 more dice for those things. Choose a few things they are not very good at - use 2 fewer dice for those things. Feel free to tweak dice pools up or down a dice or so if it feels right. And note down that dice pool on your character notes just to keep things consistent between sessions.

Introducing the SPCs

Once you've got all these characters, there's a temptation to rush into explaining everything to the players and their characters. Don't. Provide some background prior to Session 1 - who the Prince is, who the key SPCs are that their characters would already know, but during the first session, limit yourself. Don't have an Elysium where you are describing dozens of characters - your players eyes will glaze over. Trickle our SPCs slowly, so they each get a chance to make an impression. Your players need that time to develop relationships and so will their characters. This game is entirely about relationships, so give them time to grow.

Final Thoughts

With these tips, you should be spending your time where it counts - creating interesting, memorable SPCs that your players will enjoy encountering. You will minimize the effort you put in up front and maximize the return on that investment, and only creating further SPCs when you need them. As an example, my Chronicle (set in a city of 500,000) started with around 45 SPCs of various types. A year later (of pretty consistent weekly play), my relationship map now has 95 entries. But 50 of those I did not create until I knew I needed them. Efficiency!

"Splitting the Party"

In a lot of game systems, "splitting the party" is considered a bad thing, setting the group up for a painful encounter. In Vampire - and most other WoD games - it is just how the game is played, given the nature of the world. Let's talk about why that is and how to handle the challenges inherent in doing so frequently. I'm concentrating on Vampire here as far as flavour, but the techniques here should work with any game.

Why Split the Party?

In Vampire, the Coterie are often thrown together - oddly matched folks brought together by circumstance, by orders, by survival. The player characters are not together by choice, and they likely don't fully trust each other. Further, they have relationships with other characters that are private - their Sires, their mortal touchstones, other remnants of their mortal lives, allies, contacts, rivals, enemies. Bringing everyone along to have a touching conversation with the romantic partner who you now must keep at a distance just doesn't work. You as a Nosferatu skulking through the Warrens with a Toreador, a Brujah, and a Ventrue in tow just because you need to have a conversation with your sire is silly. Player Characters need their private scenes. The Coterie may divide and conquer, may have chats between just two of its members, any combination of characters is possible and likely.

This is largely a game of relationships, societies, politics, hunts, stalkings, escapes, rivalries, romance, obsession, and hunger - we (probably) aren't adventurers going through a dungeon (not that there's anything wrong with that - D&D is fun, too). We expect to live our unlives and that means time apart.

The Problems with Splitting the Party

When doing a scenes that do not involve the entire Coterie, there are a number of challenges. You have players who might be bored when not involved; there will be all sorts of interesting information that players will be hearing that their characters don't know; there will need to be balancing to make sure every character gets a chance to shine; and there may be players that struggle with character agency, either in general or for that session.

Bored Players

We need to keep the players not directly involved paying attention. The game suffers when folks are not engaged, even when they aren't directly involved. Some tricks we use to keep people involved:

• Make it an expectation - this was part of the very first set of conversations I had about this game, part of the original package of documents I created for it (see Introducing a Chronicle to look at my introduction documents). Talk to players - let them know they will have more fun if they get invested in each others' stories too
• Game chat channels - we play online, talking via Discord. When a smaller group is in the spotlight, we'll get relevant memes and side commentary in that chat channel from those not involved. That may not work for everyone, but it really lets me know that folks are following the conversation and what's happening. I'd be interested to know if someone tries something similar with in person play.
• Bribe them - I expect players to take notes and one of the ways I encourage that is by having someone give the session summary at the beginning of the next session. A good summary gets a 2xp bonus - and a good session includes all the activity for all the characters
• Keep it short - get that spotlight moment to a beat or a moment, keep the light on it for a few breaths to let it shine, then jump to another player or set of players. Alternatively, switch on a cliffhanger, that can be fun, too. 20-25 minutes is probably the outer limit for any one focus on a subgroup, but bouncing back and forth between a number of player subgroups can work well
• Talk to your players - characters can bring other characters when it is plausible, even if it isn't fully realistic - hopefully they like playing together, so they can be empowered to make opportunities to do so

With these techniques, we can hopefully keep our players inspired to pay attention even when the spotlight isn't on them.

Out of Character Information

First, definitions:

• In Character - things a character knows or does
• Out of Character - things a player knows or does that their character may not

This one, to me, is simple. The World of Darkness is a game for mature players. We have an early conversation to lay out the expectation that Out of Character information is only used to make the game better for everyone, never to gain an In Character advantage. There are tons of things that players will know - there's nothing that prevents them from learning the Lore of the world or reading books or finding out advantages in other ways.

So, pay attention, challenge on motivations when characters do things when it seems not to match up with character information, and talk to your players about this expectation.

Balancing Character Spotlights

Sometimes this is difficult - it is a normal night for some players and the culmination of an arc for others. This is where you earn your stripes as a Storyteller - use the normality of another character's moments as a contrasting element. Flip from extreme danger to extreme banality - this can be very fun. Add a mysterious thing to that normality after a few flips back and forth - maybe the Malkavian gets a premonition; maybe someone seems to have been following the Ventrue's limo, but no, they are gone now; maybe the animals seem spooked where the Gangrel is hunting. Some hint of something that will come to fruition later, get that subgroup's players thinking and invested. You don't have to (and probably shouldn't) try to match the energies, but definitely give some spark to every player's scene.

Remember that things need to balance out for characters over time - you can give a little extra time at the end of a story arc for one player, and have other players get their time to shine in a later session. You still can't have folks sitting not doing things for an hour, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about one extra spotlight moment for a given player, or lingering a bit longer when a scene is really working. Just make sure that this doesn't happen for the same player character all the time.

Reduced Agency

Sometimes you go to a player whose character didn't get brought along by another subgroup, ask what their character would be doing at that moment and they just don't have an answer. Or that answer is not very high energy and they seem uncertain about what they want for their character at that moment. There's two approaches here:

Something based on the plots and plans I have - I ask my players for the motivations, plans, plots, wishes, desires, habits of their characters. I have some notes for things that can happen to various characters - texts from touchstones, plots that SPCs are dragging them into. Often I'll pluck something from there - they want to know more about the Anarchs in the city? Well, turns out an Anarch wants to know about them. What a coincidence, they are getting approached. 

Something fundamental to the nature of the game - Do they need to feed? Actually play out a full feeding scene, give them a chance to hunt, linger over the actual monstrosity that is Kindred. Can they be tempted? Ventrue pushing to be Prince considers them a tool of the current Prince and wants to sow discord, offers a deal to this character for some information. Can some element of mundane life complicate their existence? Low resources Brujah finds a note saying they need to go down to the property office at noon tomorrow to sign a lease extension. 

This is tricky for Storytellers - the World of Darkness are collaborative storytelling games and this player is pushing more of that work towards you. Have conversations with them and prep for this situation. I keep some generic situations in my plot document that I have at the ready to spring on a character that needs some motivation. Weird occult happenings, annoying mundane things, strange mysteries. The World of Darkness is limitless in its weirdness, so you can improv something and figure out what it means later.

Getting the Group Back Together

The game should be a mix of spotlights on individual characters, small subgroups doing things together, and the entire Coterie all together. The same tricks you use to give folks things to do apart work just as well for things to do together. Hopefully, the Coterie feels stronger as a group, so "main plot" (whatever that means in a World of Darkness game) advancements happen often with the group all together. They became a Coterie for some reason, after all. 

Give them missions from the Prince/Baron/Pack Priest that they need everyone together to do. Host an Elysium and make it clear that the entire Kindred population is expected to attend. Give fragments of information to each that they will need to work together to combine and make sense of.

And work with the players, too, to have this balance. Again, this is a collaborative, storytelling experience - they have work to do here, too, to make sure everyone gets time to shine and everyone gets back together too.

Advice for New Storytellers

I answer quite a few Reddit posts about how to get started in Storytelling in the World of Darkness. Here's some advice that may help new Storytellers in general. This advice is biased towards Vampire, biased towards V5, but is largely version agnostic or even system agnostic. It is a list of 15 things. They could probably each be an article by themselves, but I tried to keep things short and sweet.

1. Have a conversation with your players. You are new to this system. You are doing your best. If they aren't willing to be patient and give you a chance, the Chronicle isn't going to work.
2. Talk about Consent. Use Lines and Veils or an equivalent system to set out what is and is not acceptable in the game. The World of Darkness is a game about terrible things, but don't let that be an excuse to be terrible to each other. People matter more than games.
3. Talk with your Players about the theme. Make sure that they know the sort of story you want to tell and are into it. If you want gritty street gang level conflicts in an Anarch run city and they want glittering Camarilla Courts, there is going to be a disconnect. You don't need to give things away, but talk about the themes and flavours you are looking to invoke.
4. Don't sweat about humour. Players will make jokes that break the tension. You can make jokes. Have the laugh. Then go back to building that atmosphere. We are here to have fun with friends, so don't police the mood. But see point 3 - if you are trying to build a tense environment, make sure your players are in for that and will co-operate.
5. Run a one-shot. The Monsters is a pretty decent start - the official Kickstart for Vampire V5 - don't try to create everything for your first go at the World of Darkness. That's doing things on Hard Mode and you really don't need to do that. There are lots of one-shots on Storyteller's Vault, too, if you don't like The Monsters or you are running a different system.
6. You do need to know how to call for a roll and the basics of the systems. The Monsters One-Shot has a good start, I also have my guides on this site if you are playing V5 - for other systems, see if you can find a good intro guide or a quick start.
7. When you call for a roll, do allow your players to suggest a substitute roll - but you don't have to accept it. For example, if you call for a Persuasion roll, a player might argue for Intimidation if they described their character's dialogue as being particularly threatening. Also - players don't call for rolls, you do. Call for a roll when things would be interesting if things go sideways.
8. Own your Lore. The World of Darkness has decades of Lore. You will not get it all right, even if you've been doing this for decades. If you are new, you have absolutely no chance. And that's fine. Embrace the unreliable narrator. Make it clear to your players that this is YOUR World of Darkness. The Lore in the World of Darkness comes from characters - they all have reasons to lie, be wrong, be deceived, be of unsound mind, be broken. That means that the Lore as printed can be just rumours in your game. If you contradict the written lore, you are right. Especially if you are a newer Storyteller playing with more experienced players, make sure your players understand this.
9. I have been heavily influenced by Jason Carl and Alexander Ward in my Storytelling of the Vampire world - consider checking out their work, but don't feel you have to copy it. Be your own version of a Storyteller. That said, here are some things that work for me - in Vampire, be the Beast - your players' characters are inhabited by an inhuman thing, a seething mess of survival and Hunger that seeks to drive them to abandon who they were and give in to simply being the instinctive predator. In Werewolf - be the wolf, be the Rage that boils in the character. In Hunter, be the fear and Despair and paranoia that drips through those stories. I love giving asides like "Do you really believe that?" when players are talking and asserting their character's humanity. "You could just kill him. Drink him dry. Nobody will miss them and you'll feel so much better." "They are corrupting things, tear them apart." "Is it worthwhile? Everyone dies sometime."  Remind your players how different yet eerily familiar the World of Darkness is. Their characters are inhabiting a world where things seem the same as our world but where things actually do go bump in the night.
10. You don't have to run every feeding scene. You don't have to even roll for every feeding scene. Sometimes you can just gloss over it and get to the meat of the session. But still - feeding is part of Vampire. Give it attention when you get the opportunity to and remind your players of the otherness of using a person as a food source.
11. Minimize combat - combat often reduces tension. The fear of it, the potential for violence ratchets up tension, and that means it always needs to be an option, something that can happen or the threats around the players start to fall flat. But once we're focussed on mechanics and dice and all the machinery of combat, you can lose hard-won fear and paranoia. Don't let combat linger too long, either - three rounds and out is a common idea. Base what happens next on those three rounds. I'll sometimes extend it a round or two if it looks like that will wrap things up appropriately, but combat in WoD isn't sufficiently tactical to be worth lingering on. That said, learn how combat works - there's a great guide on the V5 Homebrew site which I really like.
12. Don't feel you have to stat out every character. Consider using the Quick SPCs system from the Storyteller's Toolkit Screens (a product I otherwise don't really endorse) for improvised characters or for characters you weren't expecting to have to roll dice for. To summarize that system - choose 4, 6, or 8 dice for a weak, medium, or strong characters. Use that many dice for most things they do. Pick a few things they are good at - use 2 more dice for those things. Choose a few things they are not very good at - use 2 fewer dice for those things. Feel free to tweak dice pools up or down a dice or so if it feels right. And then add that dice pool on your character notes just to keep things consistent between sessions. Use SPC stat blocks when you do stat out a character, not a full character sheet. Steal SPC stat blocks from published material. You don't have to do all this yourself.
13. Take really good notes (or record your sessions and take notes after). Keep track of the relationships and the plots that develop. I use three main documents - Kumu for a relationship map / character info, a plot document, and session notes. I've got an article on the tools I use for Storytelling on this site.
14. Use Stars and Wishes or a similar system to learn what is working for your players (and you) and what isn't. Feedback is so helpful and Storytellers often feel like they have no idea if people are enjoying what they are doing. Ask.
15. Relax and remember this is supposed to be fun for everyone, including you. This is a game. Nobody will die if you mess up a rule or forget a character or miss a story beat. Pause. Reflect. Fix things the best you can. And carry on. Or start over. Or whatever you need to do. This is a game. Have fun with it.

Hope this is helpful! Go run an awesome game!