Your Ultimate Guide to Character Creation & Management with Vampire: The Masquerade NEXUS

This brings you to the Character Builder. It guides you through the entire vampire character creation process in three main sections: Getting Started, Creation, and Concept & Lore. A fourth area, Progression, helps you track experience points as you complete game sessions in your group’s campaign, or chronicle.

As you select your character options, white numbers in red circles let you know how many choices are awaiting completion.

Your progress in the Character Builder is on the left. You’ll see main options in the middle of your screen, with details, rules information, and supplemental choices (if any) on the right side. This approach allows you to create a Vampire: The Masquerade character quickly if you like, or dive deep into each option’s description, rules, and lore.

Throughout character creation, you can click Save Changes at any time if you need to step away and finish up later. 

You’ll find most of your Vampire: The Masquerade character creation choices in the Creation section. These are presented in bite-sized elements: Clan, Attributes & Skills, Disciplines & Powers, Predator Type, and Advantages & Flaws. You can make your choices in any order, but the sequence presented is usually the easiest and fastest way to approach the different options available to you. 

Other articles and resources will go into the Creation options in more depth. For this overview, here is some key information about each element:

Attributes & Skills: Attributes are the physical, social, and mental traits that define your basic capabilities, such as Strength, Manipulation, and Resolve. Skills represent broad areas of aptitude, usually honed through practice, learning, or natural ability. 

Attributes: Each attribute starts at 2 points (or dots). During character creation, you select one attribute to increase to 4, three attributes to increase to 3, and one weaker attribute to decrease to 1. 

Skills: Unlike attributes, skills start at zero, representing no special training or aptitude. Here, you can select whether your vampire character is a Jack of All Trades with a lots of 1s and 2s in nearly 20 skills, a Specialist with only 10 skills–one of which having a very potent 4 dots–or has a Balanced distribution of skills that provides several 3-dot skills alongside 12 skills at 1 or 2. 

Disciplines & Powers: When you selected your clan, you gained access to several vampiric Disciplines. Think of these as categories of supernatural abilities. As you assign points to Disciplines, you unlock more, and more potent, powers. Once you have assigned points to Disciplines, you will be able to select one or more of each Discipline’s unique Powers. 

Predator Type: All vampires need vitae, blood, to survive. Predator Type is how you hunt your prey and acquire the nourishment that fuels your existence. Each Predator Type usually adds a specialty to one or more skills, grants a dot in a certain Discipline, and adds one or more dots of flaws.

The Concept & Lore section is less rules-driven than Creation, but no less important to creating a fully-realized, fun-to-play Vampire: The Masquerade character. There are three main elements here: Character Details, Beliefs, and Coterie.

Character Details: From your general appearance to who your vampiric sire was, Character Details help you visualize your character and sense their place in Kindred society.

Beliefs: These are the personal motivations that guide your decisions and drive your actions. Beliefs have real in-game mechanical effects and purpose, so choose them thoughtfully. Your Beliefs will include 1-3 Convictions, human values they attempt to uphold; Touchstones, humans important to you, who represent what you used to value in life; Ambition, a specific, major, long-term objective; and Desire, less of a long-term Ambition, but more than a momentary whim.

Coterie: Lone vampires don’t last long in the World of Darkness. Human agents of the Second Inquisition, savage supernatural enemies, and their own vampire Kindred create a constant threat of True Death that makes living and working in small groups, or coteries, essential to survival. Work together with fellow players and your Storyteller to define this critical aspect of your character and your shared game story.

Playing and Managing Your Characters with Vampire: The Masquerade NEXUS

The interactive Character Sheet on Vampire: The Masquerade NEXUS is more than just the record of a vampire's stats. In fact, the Character Sheet is an invaluable tool to help Storytellers prep for game sessions and to help players keep their part of the story running smoothly.

Smooth Game Sessions: The Character Sheet provides a host of features designed to help players focus on the story unfolding in the game session, and minimize things like looking up rules. A few of these features include Click-To-Know details, trackers, and the dice pool.

Click-To-Know: Whether you want to read all about a new Power you just gained, or to remind yourself how a certain skill works, Click-To-Know is a powerful ally. Nearly every trait on your Character Sheet is clickable. Not sure if Sense the Unseen lets you detect a werewolf lurking in the shadows? Click the name of the Power and the Character Sheet instantly shows you the game rules related to it.

This detailed view has other useful features. First, if you have enough experience points to increase the Attribute, Skill, or Discipline you’re viewing, you can spend the appropriate amount of experience points to advance its rating.

Next, what if something special happen in-game and now your Strength is temporarily enhanced? You can add your own notes describing the circumstances. Then click the gear icon and set an Override with your new number of Strength dots. The character sheet updates automatically, with a blue * to remind you of any trait that has been manually changed.

The next feature is one you will use frequently: trackers. The middle of your Character Sheet includes a series of check boxes to keep up with Health, Willpower, Humanity, and Hunger.

For Health and Willpower, clicking an empty box adds one point of superficial damage. Clicking that box again turns it into an aggravated damage “X”, and clicking a third time resets it to undamaged. The Humanity tracker is managed in its Click-To-Know details (just click or tap Humanity to open the details), and the Hunger track is a series of simple on/of checkboxes. 

The final feature we’ll examine is the dice pool. Whether you’re playing online, forgot your clacky math rocks for an in-person game, or simply prefer the speed and ease of an automatic dice roller, the dice pool tool is both simple and powerful.

Clicking any trait’s dot value on your sheet adds that many dice to your dice pool, then highlights the trait. Even though most dice pools are made of two traits, you can add as many as you wish.

If your character has any Hunger, the dice pool tool automatically swaps a regular d10 for a Hunger die. Then you simply click on the d10 icon in the lower left, and hit “ROLL”.

The Character Sheet shows you the total number of successes, as well as how many of each kind of result: normal failures, successes, and criticals as well as Hunger failures, successes, and criticals. Based on the situation, your Storyteller will inform you of the ultimate outcome…!

Stepping into the Darkness

Creating a Vampire: The Masquerade character is faster and easier than ever before with Demiplane’s official Vampire: The Masquerade NEXUS Character Tools. Check out these pregenerated characters for a taste of what to expect:

Nate Dempsey, Brujah Alleycat

Emma Preston, Toreador Scene Queen

To make your own custom Kindred, simply create a free Demiplane account and click the button below!