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!