ShadowRealms AI 0.15: ghouls, in V5 and in Classic

On 16 October version 0.15.0 “Blood servants” came out for ShadowRealms AI, my local AI Storyteller for World of Darkness chronicles. This one is about ghouls: the mortals who drink a vampire’s Blood and serve them. Until now a player could write a ghoul retainer only as a line in their Advantages. Now a ghoul gets its own sheet, in both editions.

A ghoul from your vampire’s sheet

On your vampire’s sheet there’s a new button, Add a ghoul retainer. It opens a forge for the ghoul, with your vampire already set as its domitor. The ghoul belongs to the same player, has no chronicle of its own and goes wherever its domitor goes. The domitor’s Storyteller can read its sheet and its PDF, and your vampire’s sheet lists its ghouls.

The AI Storyteller knows about them too: when you play your character, it sees up to two of your ghouls after your sheet.

V5 ghouls

In V5 the forge builds a ghoul in one of two ways:

• As a retainer, on the corebook’s mortal templates (p. 185), which is what the Retainers Background buys (p. 194): Weak for •, Average for ••, Gifted for •••, and a Deadly mortal for when the Storyteller wants one. Each template has its own Attribute spread, Skill counts, specialties and limits on Advantages and Flaws.
• As a player ghoul, by the Players Guide (pp. 140–142), with the same spreads as a vampire, 7 Advantage dots and Flaws of its own.

The ghoul gets one level 1 power of a Discipline its domitor has, the Merits and Flaws only ghouls can take are now offered, and the ones a ghoul can’t have (Domain, Feeding, Herd and the thin-blood ones) are left out. There’s a Blood Bond to the domitor, with its strength from 0 to 6 or left for the Storyteller; a second Bond only with the Two Masters Flaw.

What a V5 ghoul doesn’t have is a blood pool. In V5 a ghoul has no vitae to spend, no Hunger and no Blood Potency: a Rouse Check’s worth of the domitor’s Blood keeps it going for about a month (core p. 234). So the sheet only keeps a note of when it last drank.

The server checks a V5 ghoul with the same rules as the forge, as it does for vampires. A sheet that breaks them doesn’t go through, and the Storyteller can still approve one outside the rules.

Classic ghouls

Classic is different: there, a ghoul does carry vitae. The Classic Revised ghoul follows Ghouls: Fatal Addiction:

• Attributes 6/4/3, Abilities 11/7/4, 21 freebie points.
• Potence 1 and one more Discipline; for a ghoul who serves a vampire, one the vampire knows.
• A Blood Pool of up to 10, spending 1 point per turn. The starting pool is a d10 roll; an independent ghoul halves it.
• A Blood Bond counted in drinks, and the new Domitor Background for ghouls who serve.

The PDF is laid out like the old ghoul sheet: Potence on the first Discipline line, the Blood Pool boxes, and lines for the Blood Bond and for overdosing.

A Classic ghoul in the PDF: the Blood Pool, the Blood Bond in drinks and the Overdosing line.

A PDF that looks the same everywhere

The sheet PDF is fillable, so you can keep editing it in a PDF app. Some viewers, though, redraw the fields themselves and can lose letters, or worse. So there’s now a print version too (“Download print version”), next to Export PDF: every value is drawn on the page, with no form fields, and it looks the same in every viewer. That’s the one to share.

The fillable version now also has the Turkish letters and the other common accented ones, so names like Özdoğan or Şahin come out whole. And a long background or long notes no longer get squeezed into the box: they continue on extra pages.

Every change, one by one, is in the CHANGELOG, and the app itself is on the ShadowRealms AI page.