A few Dementation tricks which have arisen in the LARP I'm playing:

Dementation 1 to cause or prevent frenzy when someone's irked.  The player
of one Ventrue with only two dots in self-control told me that right now the
character suspects nothing, but may eventually skritch his head and say
"Huh -- I frenzy a lot, but only when that Malk isn't around."  And to
*cause* . . . oh, very easy and very tempting, especially in certain
circumstances.

Dementation 1, again -- this time in a private encounter:

Slice open your wrist and smile.
Unless there's something very wrong with the other lick involved, they'll
immediately feel an instinctual desire for the blood.
You know what to do from here.

(Best used when the other person *isn't* hungry.)

Dementation 3:
Not a specific trick per se, but something I did once.  My character Dria's
logic is thus:  To understand a person's Nature, she usually looks into
their eyes.  The windows of the soul, right?  So if she wants to figure out
their head . . . she stares into their ear.

> Malkavian character creation advice, before you even get to role-
> playing advice.  We might as well get folks off on the right foot.
> How much emphasis should you put on the character's mortal history
> or the embrace?  How much on the character's choice of disciplines
> or how the character managed to survive to the point at which play
> begins?  What's more important, creating a character with a strong
> concept/derangement or moderating this to help the character get
> along with other players' characters?

Really depends on the character and the game.  My current character is
schizoaffective, but very sociable and not obvious most of the time -- most
of it shows up in superstitious attitudes and non sequiturs, the odd
emotional outburst, and creepy art photography.  Of course, occasionally she
has a big breakdown . . . her disorder is not a consistent one.


<snippiness>
> Crossover rules & advice beyond the rules.  Why crossover and how
> to do it for what you want to accomplish?  What themes do Malkav-
> ians embody and how can they be exported into other games, as well
> as how elements of other games can be brought into Vampire?  What
> do Marauders or hallucinating Imbued hunters offer to a Malkavian-
> centric Vampire game?  Is there anything you can recommend from a
> non-White Wolf game, like Little Fears or Delta Green, that you can
> bridge and adapt to deal with Malkavians or other madness?

I'm intending to someday run a game allowing Malkavians, Fae, and some
varieties of Mages (Marauders, Cult of Ecstasy, maybe one or two others) and
nothing else.  It might be a miserable flop, but it could be brilliant, and
one should never have rigid expectations when unleashing chaos.

--Lisa, aka Banananananana the Silent
<delirium@toast.net>