It has been too long since I’ve properly re-introduced werewolves to Khallam.  My original conception of Khallam in the Old World of Darkness was very much in line with its relationship between werewolves and vampires.  With the new World of Darkness I can still go that route or shake it up and for the sake of allowing mixed groups I think I will.  Still, I like the idea of the woods and Ravenscross being so forbidden and dangerous.  So, enter the Pure.  I’ve already hinted at this with the character of Back Again Jim, the ancient Gangrel who has awakened and is key to the future of the long running and brutal conflict between the lycanthropes and hemophages.

I will introduce a newly minted pack of experienced wolves into Khallam who are ambassadors of sorts.  They are here to build relations on the part of a larger California interest in Khallam but find that even vampires who want to build relations are scarred by more than a century of brutal warfare and bigotry runs deep – maybe on both sides.  The pack won’t all be peaceful hippies.  There is still a need to carry a big stick and the larger werewolf tribal leaders who arranged this know that the vampires won’t respect weakness – but at the same time sending in a pack of truly war scarred wolves might be seen as open hostility.

Current Thoughts:

A warrior of a lodge called the Painted Claws who believes that vampires are unwitting servants of a powerful enthalpy spirit called the Devouring Wyrm.  They seek to cut the disease from the world and know a lot about vampires.  He is a moderate and would rather see them turned against themselves.  Most bigoted of group but also knowledgable and looking for angles and factions among vampires.

A Japanese half moon and face man.

An aboriginal american mystic.  She is disturbed by the lack of spirit activity.  Most spirits have been enslaved by the Pure and breaking that hold would be important but there is more.  There is a local spirit who is very powerful but she can never see it and loses sight of it among the stars.  There is also something wrong with the earth, some reason that spirit never lands here, something under neath … and there are a lot of hallows …

An Iron Masters trickster.  Because I like them.

And one or two others me thinks.

Lithium (Institutionalize 2, Dominate 3)

[If you read my last post this one will seem awfully similar – it is basically the resolve equivalent to Sedation’s strength reduction.  Although much of the text and mechanics are the same it is the sensation that is so different and significant.  Many kindred would in fact seek an effect like this if they knew about it which could be a boon, bane or both to a Morotrophian.]

Handling any patient is a challenge but modern pharmacology has coped with the needs of mental wards by creating a variety of drugs that allow a patient’s moods and mania to even out.  Tragically, these same drugs do not work on kindred patients.  Dr. Opal Berke solved this dilemma by finding a way to combine the power of Institutionalize and enforce the potency of a drug on a kindred system as if it were a rule of the institution.

Cost: 1 Vitae
Dice Pool: Manipulation + Empathy + Institutionalize – (Blood Potency + Resolve)
Action: Instant

Activating this power requires injecting a Kindred target with the appropriate drug.  While doing activating this power some of the Morotrophian’s blood joins the drug in invading the target’s system and transmit’s the Morotrophian’s power to overwhelm the target.  The blood is merely a conduit however and loses the properties of the Nosferatu’s blood causing no blood ties or other effects.  The drug must be appropriate for the effect of reducing the target’s resolve (such as lithium) but it is not the drug itself that has any effect.

The effects of this power lasts a minimum of one hour.  Every hour the victim may make a contested willpower roll against the Morotrophian and if they fail it continues another hour.  A tie means that the power will last one more hour and then automatically end.  The power cannot last beyond the next dawn.

When successful the lithium effect reduces the target’s resolve by the same value equal to the number of successes on the activation roll.  The mellowing of the victim’s attitude also makes it hard for them to be motivated to do much of anything.

This power costs 20 experience points to learn.

Sedation (Institutionalize 2, Vigor 3)

Handling any patient is a challenge but modern pharmacology has coped with the needs of hospitals by creating a variety of barbiturates and muscle relaxers that aid in keeping a patient asleep or at least sedated.  Tragically, these same drugs do not work on kindred patients.  Dr. Opal Berke solved this dilemma by finding a way to combine the power of Institutionalize and enforce the potency of a drug on a kindred system as if it were a rule of the institution.

Cost: 1 Vitae
Dice Pool: Stamina + Intimidation + Institutionalize – (Blood Potency + Strength)
Action: Instant

Activating this power requires injecting a Kindred target with the appropriate drug.  While activating this power some of the Morotrophian’s blood joins the drug in invading the target’s system and transmits the Morotrophian’s power to overwhelm the target.  The blood is merely a conduit however and loses the properties of the Nosferatu’s blood causing no blood ties or other effects.  The drug must be appropriate for the effect of reducing the target’s strength but it is not the drug itself that has any effect.

The effects of this power lasts a minimum of one hour.  Every hour the victim may make a contested willpower roll against the Morotrophian and if they fail it continues another hour.  A tie means that the power will last one more hour and then automatically end.  The power cannot last beyond the next dawn.

When successful the sedation reduces the target’s strength by the same value equal to the number of successes on the activation roll.  This power can also be used on oneself, as Dr. Opal sometimes does at a certain risk.

This power costs 20 experience points to learn.

Look at the next 250 rolls.  The values certainly flattened out some though it didn’t invalidate the first set by a long shot.  If anything it underscored how small a sample even 500 really is.  I think we’re looking at doing 1,000 minimum at this point.  The possibility of three values being too low and the three mirrored values coming up too high is still looking very possible though.

Before I publish that though we’ll have an interlude of some of our Khallam goodness again.

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So, here are the first 250 rolls.  I had previously discussed doing a chi-square test for randomness but the more I thought about it I’m not sure it would help.  First of all the typical things you look for in chi-square don’t apply here, there aren’t multiple variables, etc… In other words I think it might be over kill and frankly the sample size isn’t likely to be large enough to really matter.  As much as I want a good answer to this question I’m not sitting here and rolling a die/dice 25,000 times times ten dice.  250,000 times?  Yeah, I’m a geek who is obsessed with dice.  But there’s obsessed and obsessive compulsive.

Besides, I don’t think its necessary.  I’m just looking for frequency.  My methodology was to roll the die/dice down a dice tray of my own making.  The felt isn’t perfect so if the die ever ended up a little off center I didn’t count the roll.  This happened three or four times in 250 rolls.  I recorded the rolls, put them in Excel and did some basic calculations.  You can see a copy and paste of that above.  You can see that there is some very significant statistical variance.  I need to check the dice and see if where the values vary significantly they represent opposing faces where a rounding or weight issue would be significant.

A rounding / cleaning problem seems like a significant risk while weight is unlikely.  I’m told that if I want to test weight, get a bucket of water, drop the die in and over the course of a hundred rolls it will show a clear preference to settle weighted side down, far more than you would rolling it.  I reserve the right to do this.  And, I intend to test other dice from this same bag.  More about the test method in a later post.

The Mean is 5.6 and the theoretical perfect mean would actually be 5.5, the dead center of the two “middle” values of 5 and 6.  So, that looks fine but it’s misleading.  Since a screwed up die/dice won’t be weighted towards low or high values but certain faces or sides (and values do not necessarily correspond to physical location.  In fact the top “half” of the die is even values and bottom “half” odd values with no apparent order to me otherwise though someone may correct me on that.  I haven’t compared it with other d10s in my collection but I’m not sure there is a standard scheme for the ordering of numbers on a die/dice faces.  Anyway this lack of relevancy of things like mean also screw up a number of statistical tests.

However, frequency is definitely important.  Let’s look at the most common scores. We expect each value in a perfect random sample to show up 10% of the time (10 values) or 25 times out of 250 rolls.

If we look at the highest value, 10, it is 6% above it’s expected value or 60% higher.  That is … well, beyond significant.  It’s like saying John Holmes was significantly endowed.  1s are pretty high up there too, 40% up there.  By the time we get at the 4th highest, 6s, they are right on the expected norm.  4s and 8s are the least frequent values and also well below the expected frequency.  So, let’s look at the facing.

The 0 or 10 is on the opposite half and one full face separates it from the 1 so its unlikely the same imbalance or unevenness of the die/dice would cause both of them to be exceptional.   However, the 4 and 8, least common value are on mirrored sides of the 0.  Could something ‘wonky’ with this facing cause most rolls that lean towards these three value to infact come up 10 regularly?  That would be an problem with the 5, 9, 1 part of the die.

Hopefully, more rolls of the White Wolf dice will bear it out.  I’m going to roll this die/dice 250 more times for a total of 500 to get a better sample and we will see where we end up.  Depending upon results I may got for another 250 or even 500.  And then I will compare those results to at least 1 more die from the same batch.