Domain Merits and Flaws
To enhance your domain, you can spend points on merits or gain points through flaws. These can add flavor, advantages, and disadvantages to your domain mechanically and in story. These simple options may shape storylines through politics and battle, or give storytellers opportunities to define NPC locations for the intrepid Camarilla coterie or aggressive invading Sabbat pack, and so on.
Merits enhance the property, people, and haven under your control. Typically, you buy these merits at domain creation. Flaws detract from your domain or haven, injecting issues while mechanically providing points for spending on your domain.
Typically, merits and flaws are typically selected at Domain creation. Storytellers may assign these options permanently or temporarily as earned through game play, allow you to earn them, incur them due to battles and intrigue.
Domain Merits
Merits include minor to major benefits for your domain, allies, and herd.
Housing
Power backup (1pt Merit)
Be it a generated, stored power from solar panels, or lines from other blocks, your property has an alternate source. You can go a few hours before it finally dies.
Hand-built (1pt Merit)
You have completed work on a full remodel of an existing structure, or finished building a new haven. Complete control over the specifics and information for the home are in your hands: blueprints, secrets, and know all there is to know about your place. It’s yours, no one else’s. You may even gain additional advantages when dealing with people in your home. For example, +1 to all detection and stealth rolls.
Craft room (1pt Merit)
You have a room set aside with tools needed for your crafts. For example, if you are a cook, you have an assortment of pots, pans, knife set, and state-of-the-art appliances. If you are an artist, you have generous space and tools to stretch canvas, hold paintings, turn clay, a kiln, a weaver’s loom, and the like.
Advantage: While crafting in your specific room with your tools, you have a +1 to Crafts.
Up to code (2pt Merit)
Everything about your domain is up to city code and fully maintained. All city and county regulations have a seal of approval: power, water lines, AC and heaters, windows, security doors, fire escapes, elevators, trash management, no holiday lights up during the summer. No amount of influence can send in the troops to check out your property.
Advantage: +2 Influence – Bureaucracy for domain matters or other such positive options.
Stormproof (2 pt Merit)
Every possible entry is sealed, waterproofed, reinforced against high winds, and has extensive sprinkler systems to ensure any natural disaster will not impede your daytime beauty sleep. You are protected against lightning strikes, floods, bee infestations, and most other problems. But for earthquakes, you just have good insurance.
Advantage: During intense weather or natural disasters, you will not lose power or herd. Those in your care do no suffer from the storms. Magical storms may cause damage, verify with Storytellers.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous (5pt Merit)
You have moved into or built the haven of your dreams! It includes every convenience desired: spacious living, extensive meeting rooms, fantastic wifi, and luxury fitting your idea of comfortable. Points spent in this merit range from a highrise with incredible luxury in deep downtown, to a large brownstone with room for guests and ghouls in an artistic neighborhood, to a ranch at the edge of town with a barn and horses, and even a castle...why not? You have every convenience you ever wanted, and then some.
Advantage: Influence - High Society x2 when hosting parties and events, Resources x5 décor, higher chance for new contacts, hottest/most interesting kindred of the year award.
Supernatural
Magical workroom (2pt merit)
A room, wing, or building in your domain has extensive supplies, warding, and support for peforming magical rituals. The objects and setting of your workroom depend on your character’s specialty and discipline.
Advantage: You may have a reduced difficulty for performing rituals, enchantments, and research. The workroom differs per clan and discipline, such as blood magic and obtenebration.
Haven
Shielded from the sun (2pt Merit)
The sun will not invade your sleeping chamber and fry you to dust. You may have a permanent magical protection to fill the chamber with darkness (like the ritual) or have reinforced window shields and walls. Or for full effect, you sleep in a smaller cube of steel and locked from within to keep you from being burnt if someone takes a jackhammer to your home.
Advantage: Safe place to sleep within your haven and domain
Panic room (3pt Merit)
You have a special panic room in your domain with magical wards against being summoned. If you remain in this room, you cannot be summoned. However, the moment you leave, you can be summoned and may pay the price for tardiness.
Hidden haven (3pt Merit)
No one can locate your personal haven where you sleep within your domain. Perhaps it is fully underground, in the center of a building, not on any blueprint, or requires special doorways to find. Your sleeping area, personal chamber, most esteemed possessions and collections are beyond conventional locating. If you welcome other kindred into your haven to spend the day, that’s your choice. If they remain in a guest room, your personal chamber remains hidden.
Advantage: Difficulty to find your haven is increased by 2 in your domain. If you use Secrecy for your domain, this merit further safeguards your haven in it.
Neighborhood
Neonate tenant (1-3pt Merit)
You have one or more neonate tenants as quests in your domain. You allow them to use a small part of the domain as theirs, if they continue maintaining and protecting the area. They owe you a minor to moderate boon depending on your negotiated terms. Or they can act as part of your security.
The Johnsons (2pt Merit)
You are beholden as the greatest neighborhood, the household to emulate, and well-received member of the community. You could practically commit murder, and your neighbors would find a way to blame to creepy guy down the street. No one pays attention to your visitors, the cars parked out front, or the odd smells from your backyard grill. You are the Johnsons, always receiving praise and initiations to cookouts.
Advantage: Total trust in your neighborhood
Domain Flaws
Selecting flaws provides points but causes issues minor to major on you and your domain. Review with your Storyteller.
Housing
Storm path (1-3pt Flaw)
Rare freak natural disasters occur and cause issues for your domain once a year or two. Earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornados, blizzards...your domain is the Bermuda Triangle of natural disasters. Increasing this flaw incurs higher wrath and constant issues from storms. For example, a 3-point flaw may be a domain in tornado alley, suffering disasters every summer. For 1-point, you have high rainfall every couple of years due to hurricanes landing at near coastlines or flash flood zones.
Disadvantage: During a selected season of the year, your domain suffers from issues and damage.
Hidden stashes and secrets (2 to 5pt Flaw)
Storyteller choice. No matter the size of your haven and domain, there is always a secret somewhere. You could have any number of strange issues: the builders added hidden rooms, the last tenant was murdered and left in the walls, it was built on an Indian burial ground, or the homeless are living in the attic. Some of these secrets may help you (like a hidden fortune) or become a serious issue (the previous vampire owner is staked in a walled-up room).
Disadvantage: YOU WISH YOU KNEW! But you don’t.
Infested with vermin (2pt Flaw)
You have a serious issue with infestations from bees and fire ants to rats and racoons. All sorts of vermin gnaw at your building and tenants, leave violent waste in their path, drive down the worth of your domain, and become a nuisance to mortals.
Disadvantage: 1 dot in Resources tied up every month to deal with the infestation. You cannot block any Influence used to investigate and charge your property.
Utilities on the fritz (3pt Flaw)
Your domain is plagued with problems. Human waste receptacles overflow, trash fills the streets, power browns out or dies for hours at a time, the water runs brown and lethal or not at all, and so on. Your utilities for the domain are constantly in trouble and hamper any ghouls, blood dolls/herds, live-stock, and mortals in the area.
Disadvantage: One utility is constantly breaking down every couple weeks: power, water, waste, garbage pickup, etc. This can cause various problems, get attention, and tie up 1 dot in resources to repair.
Wireless/Wifi dead zone (4pt Flaw)
Regardless of boosters, fiber, cable, or satellite access, your domain has a serious dead zone for wifi, cell signals, and more. You cannot get phone or internet access in your domain. Visitors also cannot access their cells, emails, or any other device requiring a signal or reception. Only hardline phones work. The reasons can be a mix of things: leylines, ghosts, metal in the earth, strange pylons in the walls, embedded signal blockers by a government agency, or all of them at once. Storytellers are encouraged to build adventures on solving this issue.
Disadvantage: You, residents, and visitor can’t communicate with the outside world unless by a landline phone. You don’t know why. Cell phones, wifi, hotspots, satellite access…none of it works!
Condemned (5pt Flaw)
Your land, property, and everything in range of your domain is condemned. You must find a way to fix this situation, or you will lose everything on your domain and haven including control of the land, people, and buildings. Storytellers can create quests, enemies, and a deadline for the condemned status. When it happens, you lose everything.
Disadvantage: You will lose this property unless you undergo serious questing in-game. Storytellers are encouraged to make you play this out, not just buy it off with experience. You can suffer from reduced status, incurred fines, sick ghouls, and more.
Supernatural
Haunted domain (2pt Flaw)
Your domain is haunted, suffering from poltergeists, overwhelmed by paranormal activity, or filled with the angry dead. A lost Indian burial ground, the site of a terrible calamity, a serial killer or other dastardly reason has a number of ghosts terrorizing your neighborhood or just a few buildings. Depending on the level of haunting, your domain may be on the local city haunting tours incurring a lot of attention.
Holy rollers (2pt Flaw)
A few true believers of some faith lives within your domain and visits fairly often. They may seek to convert or welcome you to prayer and their faith. Or they have an understanding of the occult and supernatural things that go bump in the night. They may not have True Faith, but they have a fine sense of what is strange and wrong, with strong ties to their community.
Haven
Nightmare Haven (1pt Flaw)
Perhaps it’s that mural on the wall you can never paint over. Or the stories of dead bodies boarded over in walls and floors. Something about your haven gives you and your guests nightmares.
Disadvantage: Anyone who sleeps in your haven has the Nightmares flaw temporarily.
Haven not in domain (2pt Flaw)
Your haven is not part of your domain, lying outside of your security, secrecy, and accepted region. Unlike a hidden haven, you are at the mercy of others in your haven.
Neighborhood
Domain herd exclusion (1pt Flaw)
All the available bloodpoints of your domain herd are excluded to one type of prey. This blood may only feed others, but is not something you enjoy, or tastes a bit off to your palette making you feel unset-tled and ill.
Disadvantage: The domain blood supply suffers from a form of the Prey Exclusion flaw.
Domain newbie (1pt Flaw)
You are new to creating, holding, and controlling a domain. You have a high possibility of upsetting the locals, causing trouble for yourself and your neighbors, or incur kindred constantly invading and leaving a mess in your domain.
Domain Tenant (1-3pt Flaw)
Your domain is a smaller piece of a much larger domain, perhaps controlled by a Sabbat pack ductus, your sire, someone you owe boons to, an enemy, or worse your bloodbond keeper. They can’t control everything about you and your domain, but they enjoy twisting the rules on you or demanding tithes.
Disadvantage: You don’t fully own the property and owe a boon to your kindred landlord.
Strange neighbors (2pt Flaw)
Everyone has a weirdo in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, you are the strange person everyone talks about. The Neighborhood Watch takes great pains to keep an eye on cars that park in your driveway, the number of visitors you entertain, and will call the police if they notice something truly bizarre. Dominating or killing the nosy lady next door will not save you from scrutiny and gossip.
Disadvantage: Constant surveillance on you and your guests, increased threat of breaches.
High crime zone
Regardless of refinement or worth, your domain lies in a high crime zone. You do not have influence or control of this criminal element, suffering incursions, losses, property damage, and problematic police interference.
Disadvantage: While crime seems helpful, this crime is driving down blood herd, causes issues on resources, refuses to buckle down under your rule, or other problems.
Stolen domain (3 to 5pt Flaw)
You claimed this domain from another vampire. This leaves you in a bad situation. They may want it back. Or worse they may sell the blueprints, secrets, and security holes to your enemies. You may have intruders at any time. For 3 points, the territory is in contention and sought after by the previous owner causing a bit of menace seeking to reclaim it once a month. For 5 points, the previous owner may attack, infiltrate, or sabotage your domain on a weekly basis. You can connect the previous owner as a character flaw of Enemy of the same amount.
Disadvantage: Infamy by local kindred that know who owned the domain. Incursions and battles will happen physically, magically, or via influence.