The New Kid [SAS], Doxy, RPG, WoD, NWoD
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Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selish,
lazy, lighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in
expressing joy and sorrow, especially about triles, they’ll do anything to
avoid pain but they enjoy inlicting it: little men already.
- Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères
An adventure for
using the
Written by P. Alexarnder Scokel Developed by Eddy Webb Special Thand to Matt Mcfarland
Edited by Genevieve Podleski Layout by Jessica Mullins Art: August Hall, Heather Kreiter, Thom
Ang, Phil Hilliker, Justin Norman, James S. Cole, Ken Meyer Jr., James Stowe, Doug Stanbaugh,
Eric Deschamps, Costas Harritas, Jaun Serrano, Cathy Wilkins, Travis Ingram, Avery Butterworth,
Eric Lofgren, Mattias Tapia
stOrytelling adventure systeM
Mental OOOOO
Physical OOOOO
sOcial OOOOO
WHITE WOLF PUBLISHING, INC.
2075 WEST PARK PLACE BLVD
SUITE G
STONE MOUNTAIN, GA 30087
Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selish,
lazy, lighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in
expressing joy and sorrow, especially about triles, they’ll do anything to
avoid pain but they enjoy inlicting it: little men already.
- Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères
An adventure for World of Darkness: Innocents
using the Storytelling Adventure System
Written by Alexander P. Scokel Developed by Eddy Webb Special Thanks to Matt Mcfarland
Edited by Genevieve Podleski Layout by Jessica Mullins Art: August Hall, Heather Kreiter, Thom
Ang, Phil Hilliker, Justin Norman, James S. Cole, Ken Meyer Jr., James Stowe, Doug Stanbaugh, Eric
Deschamps, Costas Harritas, Jaun Serrano, Cathy Wilkins, Travis Ingram, Avery Butterworth, Eric
Lofgren, Mattias Tapia
stOrytelling adventure systeM
scenes
8
Mental OOOOO
Physical OOOOO
sOcial OOOOO
XP level
o-34
WHITE WOLF PUBLISHING, INC.
2075 WEST PARK PLACE BLVD
SUITE G
STONE MOUNTAIN, GA 30087
© 2008 CCP hf. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and one printed copy which may be reproduced for personal use only. White Wolf, Vampire and
World of Darkness are registered trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved. Vampire the Requiem, Werewolf the Forsaken, Mage the Awakening, Promethean the Created, Storytelling System and Parlor Games are trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved.
All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by CCP hf. CCP North America Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of CCP hf. The mention of or reference to any company or product in these pages is not a challenge to the trademark or copyright
concerned. This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters and themes. All mystical and supernatural elements are iction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content. Reader discretion is advised.
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No one has lived in the Mayfair House for as long as you can remember,
maybe even as long as you’ve been alive. Like a big gray toad nestled into the
woods, it gazes down on the corner, eyes empty and soulless.
But that’s all changed. You didn’t see the moving van yourself, but everyone
at school’s talking about it. There’s a new kid in town.
Introduction
What you are reading is
The New Kid
, a self-contained story for
use in your
World of Darkness: Innocents
chronicle.
Innocents
introduces a new kind of character to the
World of Darkness
. While
not suave bloodsuckers, powerful shapeshifters or even humans with
extraordinary powers, the characters in
Innocents
are those with
perhaps the greatest potential of all: children. Though children have
limitless potential (and even a few advantages over the monsters in
the night), they have many more weaknesses.
These weaknesses are precisely what makes playing an
Innocents
character a unique, suspenseful and ultimately fun experience. Chil-
dren do not have the physical strength or stamina of adults. They don’t
possess the same knowledge or experience, and they are not given the
same respect that adults are. If an adult goes to the police with tales of
a bloodsucking monstrosity prowling the streets of his neighborhood,
they might consider him a little off, but they are likely to do at least a
cursory investigation. If a child goes to the police with the same story,
they can be assured a quick drive back to their parents’ house. Children
do, however, have a huge advantage over adults in combating the super-
natural: credulity. Whereas an adult will ignore a threat, rationalizing
it away until it is too late, children
know
that there are things lurking
in their closet, just outside the window and in that abandoned house
on the corner. Adults turn a blind eye until the supernatural comes for
them. Children know, and some are willing to seek it out.
This product is intended for Storytellers, not players. It contains the nuts
and bolts of the story: the scenes, characters and creepy locales. If you plan
to portray a character who will experience this story, reading this means
that you will be robbing yourself of some of the pleasure of uncovering the
surprises, twists and the tension that arises from the unknown.
Think of this story as a box that contains all of the pieces that you need to
craft a strong story for your
Innocents
players. The tools you need to put the
story together can be found in
Innocents
. That book, however, is not strictly
necessary to run this story if you have the
World of Darkness Rulebook
. This
story can be used with those rules and the sample player characters provided
in the back of this story. Similarly, there is nothing stopping you from using
this product to tell a story for
Mage: The Awakening
,
Changeling: The
Lost
or any of the other
World of Darkness
games, though the Storyteller is
encouraged to keep in mind just what kind of questions are likely to be asked
of an adult found lurking around the schoolyard. While use of this product
can help you and your players get a taste for
Innocents
before you purchase
it, this story works best when used with that book. The context, rules and
advice contained in that product is indispensable for any Storyteller hoping
to portray the World of Darkness through the eyes of its smallest denizens.
What’s Inside
This story kit breaks down into four basic parts:
The
Introduction
, which you’re reading now, gives you the gist of the
story, the rundown on Storytelling characters and the history and back-
story necessary to help bring the setting and the characters to life.
The
Scenes
are the heart of the story. They detail the core actions
of the tale and help you improvise in the midst of your story.
The
Player Characters
are a collection of fully detailed characters
with the histories and stats already provided that you can give to your
players to portray so that you can get going straight out of the box.
The
Scene Cards
mark the beginning of in-play resources designed
for easy printing. If you can’t print this whole kit, just print pages
40-41
for the bare-bones outline you need to tell this story.
A
b o u t
t h e
S
t o r y t e l l i n g
A
d v e n t u r e
S
y S t e m
If this is your irst Storytelling Adventure System (SAS)
product, you’ve chosen a ine place to start. To keep this story
kit lean and focused, though, we haven’t included a lot of the
core premises and Storyteller suggestions that are at the heart
of the SAS. Whether you’re a new Storyteller or an old hand, be
sure to read the
free SAS Guide
, found at the SAS website:
Here are some of the features available in
The New Kid
:
•
Interactive links.
Clicking on anything in blue will take
you directly to the section referenced, or to an appropriate
character sheet or prop. It can also take you to an external
website that could be useful.
•
Storyteller characters.
Clicking on a Storyteller character’s
portrait will take you to that character’s sheet. Clicking on
the sheet will take you back to the character’s writeup.
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Treatment
Everyone knows the new kid. Everyone knows he’s a bit... off.
That strange way he talks, clearly from out-of-state. Those sweaters
he wears. How he doesn’t talk to anyone and spends all of recess
counting the bricks on the wall of the school gym. Everyone knows
that the new kid is weird... they just don’t know
how
weird.
The
New Kid
tells the story of a group of children as they uncover the
secrets of the newest student at school and the strange powers he
seems to wield.
The story introduces the player characters to Bradley, a youth
recently arrived at their school. The first act is largely non-linear,
providing a number of scenes in which the characters get to know
Bradley, sometimes helping him out of schoolyard trouble, but each
time discovering some new odd quirk about him or experiencing
some strange occurrence that happens in his presence. By the time
that the first act ends, the players should be invested enough in the
hapless boy and curious enough about his myriad quirks to follow a
clue that suggests that whatever’s up with Bradley stems from his
home life. The second act provides Bradley’s house for exploration:
a dilapidated, creaky, cobwebbed Victorian manse. Some of the
challenges here depend on when and how the characters decide to
enter the home, but there will be mysteries and dangers provided for
the characters to interact with. The second act culminates in the
discovery of Bradley’s father’s dark secret: that he is a scientist trying
to draw energy from another plane of reality who is forcing his son to
help him carry out his dark work. The third act involves confronting
Bradley’s father on his home turf.
characters make to enlist the aid of adults or other students will be
rebuffed; they can only rely on themselves. Dr. Carter is driven by his
own loneliness, throwing himself into his work in the hope that he
will escape the memory of his lost wife. Ultimately,
The New Kid
is
about the isolation suffered by those that delve into the unknown,
including the players’ characters, and the bonds that can form or break
between them.
Storyteller Advice
The most important piece of advice for running
The New Kid
can
be summed up in one sentence: Your players’ characters are children.
Each description should be given with that in mind. Children are small,
so things seem larger to them. Children live with fear constantly, and
they are not apt to question the nature of what they fear. They fear,
and that is enough. Children are more likely to cower than to stand
up to their fear, and more likely to make a break for it than fight a
monster head on. Remind your players when necessary that they are
portraying children, especially when they react to a source of fear or
danger as an adult might.
Children have a shorter range of experiences than adults, and
tend to assign undue importance to smaller, more personal events.
Work with this, blowing up the importance of things like who
Theme: The Unknown
The new kid in school is an outcast because no one knows him,
where he’s from, what his parents do or what music he likes. Bradley
doesn’t know or understand his own powers, or even his family situ-
ation and how it affects him. Dr. Carter is digging at layers of reality
that he doesn’t begin to understand, trying to mine an unknown power
source from an unknown universe.
Mood: Loneliness
Bradley, as a new student at the characters’ school, feels utterly alone.
By becoming involved with him, the player characters risk becoming
outcasts themselves, with only each other for comfort. Attempts the
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is sitting with who in the cafeteria or what brand of backpack
the new kid wears. Allow the characters to focus on the unusual
things that happen around Bradley, but remember that the focus
of the story is on the relationships between Bradley, his father
and the characters.
Finally, unless you’re under a time constraint, take your time with
these scenes. Life often seems to move pretty slowly for children. Give
them all the time they want to play around in any given scene before
moving on. Most of the scenes below are ended by adult-imposed
time limits such as the ringing of a school bell, so when it seems the
characters are almost finished with the scene, interrupt them with
the bell and shuffle them to the next part of your story.
For more excellent advice on playing child characters or running a
story for children, pick up a copy of
World of Darkness: Innocents
.
A Chapter in Your Chronicle
Because the central crux of
The New Kid
is based on the arrival
of a new presence into the characters’ lives, the story can easily be
dropped into an ongoing chronicle. One day the characters are on
their way to school when Bradley gets on their bus, and that’s where
the story begins. Some of the actions the characters might take to-
wards the end of this story can have severe effects on your chronicle,
however. If your players’ characters committing arson would derail
your chronicle, feel free to discourage or disallow that course of ac-
tion. (Of course, if the characters end up with a several-year stint in
juvenile detention, it might serve as a perfect transition to a standard
World of Darkness
game in which the players portray their
Innocents
characters as young adults.)
The major location of the story, the Mayfair House, can be easily
replaced by any other haunted house that you have already used in
your chronicle, and
The New Kid
might even serve as the climactic
story that wraps up the characters’ interactions with the house.
A Story By Itself
The New Kid
is designed to be run as a self-contained story. The Story-
teller can start it quickly by using the pre-generated characters provided,
or the Storyteller can use the character creation rules in
Innocents
.
Background and Set-Up
This product provides a lot of background and other elements
needed to run
The New Kid
. However, certain aspects of the
story such as what the school is like, what kind of neighborhood
the characters live in and even what ethnicity the characters are
is left deliberately vague. Before running this product, take a few
minutes to determine what the socio-economic situation is for the
characters. They might not even be aware of how relatively wealthy
or poor their parents are, but it is important for the Storyteller to
know in order to appropriately detail the environments. Think
about it: an inner-city school that’s all pavement, red brick and
chain link fences will feel very different from a wealthy private
school made up of well-manicured lawns and sandstone walls.
Where the story takes place affects every aspect of the story, from
the kind of principal Mrs. Hoffman is to the tactics and rationale
behind Max’s bullying.
The characters begin the story knowing one another. If this is the
launching point of your chronicle or if you are running it as a stand-
alone story, you should take a few minutes before the game starts to
let them discuss how they know one another and what they think of
each other. Ask each player to tell an in-character humorous anecdote
about each other character. Four of the pre-generated characters are
directly related to one of the other characters, so if you’re using them
or if any of your characters are siblings, make sure that you address
this before play begins.
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