Your starting Blood Trait total is determined by your generation. When you come into play for an evening’s game, make a test with a Narrator as you pick up your character sheet. If you win, you come into play with all of your Blood Traits, as determined by generation. If you tie, you have half your generational limit of Blood Traits, rounded up. If you lose, you come into play with only four Blood Traits. Certain Merits, Flaws, clan disadvantages or other circumstances may alter your number of Blood Traits at the beginning of play, and possession of the Herd Background allows you to come into play with more Blood Traits, up to your generation limit (see the appropriate Background descriptions for Generation and Herd in our backgrounds sections of this site).

When you have expended a great deal of blood, you become hungry. A hungry vampire is susceptible to the Beast and to frenzy due to the ravenous lust for vitae. You are considered hungry if at five or fewer Blood Traits; you may be susceptible to frenzy at the sight, smell or taste of blood (see Self-Control/Instinct, in our Virtues section). If you have two or fewer Blood Traits, you are ravenous, and your difficulty to resist frenzy due to hunger goes up by one Trait, making it very likely that you enter frenzy at the first opportunity to feed.

Feeding is the only way to replenish blood. You can take Blood Traits from mortals, other vampires or other creatures with blood, such as animals or Lupines. When you bite someone to drain blood, you invoke the Kiss; your bite causes a rapturous helplessness in normal mortals, and it is pleasurable even to other creatures. However, each Blood Trait drained inflicts a level of lethal damage on the victim. Up to three Blood Traits may be drained each turn. You can close the wound by licking it to seal up traces of your feeding. You may only

heal such wounds that were made by your fangs.

 

You can expend Blood Traits for a variety of functions:

• You must spend a Blood Trait each night at sunset, for simple sustenance. 

 

• One Blood Trait can heal one health level of bashing or two levels of lethal damage. You are still limited to your generation limits of blood expenditure (so  most young vampires cannot heal more than one health level of damage in a turn). Healing in this fashion requires your concentration and a full turn.

 

• One Blood Trait can be spent to gain an extra Physical Trait for the duration of a conflict. You can bid this Trait like any other (“by the power of my blood,”), and you can count this Trait in ties and overbids. You can spend blood like this as a reflexive action at any time, not counting as your action, though of course you still obey the limits of blood expenditure according to generation. You can raise your Physical Traits up to the limit of your generation for one conflict; any additional Traits added with blood beyond that remain only for the duration of a single challenge. Example: Romero de la Salle, Lasombra antitribu scourge, wants to augment his already-mighty Potence by increasing his Physical Traits over his usual 14. As he is of the Seventh Generation, he can normally have up to 16 Traits in a category. Shane marks off three Blood Traits; Romero goes up to 17 Traits for the turn, and even after the turn ends, hehas 16 Traits for the rest of the conflict (assuming that he doesn’t lose any challenges). Even if he loses some Physical Traits, he can spend more blood to bring his total back up to 16.

 

• One Blood Trait — generally measured as a full pint— is sufficient to turn a mortal into a ghoul. This state lasts for a month; after that time, the ghoul must be fed more blood, lest he revert back to mortality. 

 

• One Blood Trait enables a vampire to take on a semblance of humanity for a scene. The vampire flushes and becomes capable of mimicking human activity (such blinking, sneezing or having cool skin rather than cold )Doing so is difficult for vampires with low Humanity; a vampire must spend an extra Blood Trait for each Trait that her Humanity is below five — a vampire with four Humanity Traits must spend two Blood Traits to appear mortal, a vampire with three HumanityTraits spends three Blood Traits to masquerade and so on. Vampires following Paths of Enlightenment cannot do this trick at all. You can take on a mortal visage while performing other tasks. If you must spend multiple Traits to perform this feat but your generation prohibits spending enough blood at once, you must spend the Blood Traits over successive turns. That is, a 13th-generation vampire with a Humanity of three Traits would have to spend three turns, spending one Blood Trait per turn, although he would still be able to perform other actions.

 

• Three Blood Traits can be spent to heal one level of aggravated damage. This damage heals over the day, as the vampire sleeps. Blood Traits spent this way can be accumulated; that is, you need not spend the three Traits all at once, or even all in the same day. You should note Traits expended in this fashion with marks next to your level of aggravated damage; once you have spent three Blood Traits on the injury, it heals the next time the sun sets. You can only heal one level of aggravated damage per day in this fashion, though, unless you also spend a Willpower Trait for each extra wound healed in the same rest period.  

 

• Many Disciplines require the expenditure of Blood Traits, as listed in their individual descriptions. If a particular Discipline costs multiple Blood Traits but your generation prohibits you from spending all of the blood at once, you must spend the blood on successive turns. Spending blood in this fashion is usually reflexive, though the Discipline itself may require an action. For instance, activating Celerity is reflexive; you spend a Blood Trait and still get your normal  action, plus extra actions from Celerity. Casting a Thaumaturgy effect, on the other hand, requires your full turn in addition to the blood expenditure.

 

You can acquire blood from any creature that has blood, including other supernatural creatures, but doing so can cause certain side effects.