Safehouse
From Edge of Darkness Wiki
 Hunter The Vigil Sourcebook p. 70 | |
| Level(s) |
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| Venue | Hunter |
| Possessed By | |
The hunter has a place of his own where monsters cannot find him. A safehouse might be the headquarters for a cell, or it might be a personal hideaway for an individual. Hunters often rig a safehouse with traps, hidden weapons, security systems and escape routes, because as impregnable as it might be, monsters are persistent and clever. They’ll probably find the way in, and the best a hunter can do is make it hard on them.
A safehouse might be a storage shed that the hunter rents out and uses as a weapons locker, an apartment that is rigged to set the building on fire if he fl icks a switch, or a mansion belonging to his organization that is woefully lacking in security. In game terms, dots spent on the Safehouse Merit need to be distributed among four categories: Size, Cache, Secrecy and Traps. Thus, the storage shed might have no dots of Size or Traps, but several of Secrecy. The apartment doesn’t hold much in the way of Cache (as the owner is afraid to leave anything there), but has a high Traps rating. The mansion has five dots in Size and probably a few in Traps and/or Cache, but none in Secrecy.
Contents |
Size
Safehouse Size is perhaps the simplest defining characteristic, governing the amount of raw space the safehouse encompasses.
x Barely any space; only a pair of characters can fit inside comfortably.
• A studio apartment; one to two rooms.
•• A large apartment or small family home; three to four rooms.
••• A warehouse, church or large home; five to eight rooms, or large enclosure.
•••• A mansion or very large home; equivalent to nine to 15 rooms.
••••• A sprawling estate, interconnected tunnel network; countless rooms or chambers.
Security
Safehouse Cache: A lot of space is good for a very large cell, or for a cell that chooses to live in its safehouse, but it can also make the inhabitants paranoid. After all, if there are 10 rooms in the place, who knows what’s in the other nine at any given time? Hunters find that having some weapons at their fingertips lessens this paranoia somewhat (or it might make it worse, because what if the monsters find the stash?). Each dot allocated to Safehouse Cache translates to one cache. A cache can hold five Size points worth of equipment, so while one might be a weapons locker with two shotguns and a pistol (and a few boxes of ammo for each, which is negligible as far as Size goes), another might hold surveillance equipment (a set of wire taps, binoculars, night-sight goggles and maybe a pistol for good measure). Chapter Six of the World of Darkness Rulebook has some examples of equipment and weapons that might be useful, and players should work with the Storyteller to figure out what might fit in a cache. It is possible, too, to combine two or more dots of Cache into one space, for a total Size of 10 or more. Equipment doesn’t have to be stored in a cache, of course — a large safehouse can have entire rooms devoted to storage. Equipment that is stored in a cache, however, is effectively hidden from anything but a devoted (or supernatural) search. Mundane interlopers receive a -5 modifier to any attempt to find a cache (on a dramatic failure, the searcher finds and triggers a trap, instead, if the safehouse has any). If the players wish, this modifier can instead apply to attempts to access the Cache. The gun safe might be in plain view, but it’s not at all easy to crack open without the proper combination.
Secrecy
Safehouse Secrecy: One of the biggest advantages a hunter can enjoy is, ironically, one that his prey tries to cultivate as well: anonymity. If the monsters don’t know where to find the hunters, they have a harder time killing them. Dots in Safehouse Secrecy indicate how far removed from the hunters the safehouse is, from a legal (and paper trail) standpoint. These dots impose a negative penalty on any attempt to find the hunter through the property, or vice versa. The descriptions of the different dot ratings below are just examples; it’s up to the player to decide what the Secrecy represents.
x The hunter rented or bought the place using his real name, credit card or bank account.
• The hunter went through an intermediary, but cosigned a loan at some point.
•• Some effort toward concealment; an assumed name or paying in cash.
••• Considerable difficulty in tracing the property — the hunter might just be squatting.
•••• The hunter never goes back to the place if he doesn’t have to, never gets there by the same route, and his real name never appears on any of the documentation.
••••• The property has a real owner who lives there full time, is aware of his rights and, if necessary, can show cops around the place while casually denying that he’s ever seen the hunter before.
Traps
Safehouse Traps: Sooner or later, a safehouse is going to be compromised. Hunters know it, even if they don’t want to admit it. That’s why many of them build traps into their safehouses, in hopes they can kill a supernatural intruder — or at least deter him long enough to get away. A trap can take a myriad of forms. Opening a door to a promising-looking room reveals a shotgun aimed at chest level, which promptly fires. Walking up the stairs on the left side is safe, but on the right side, they’re rigged to collapse. Looking behind a painting causes an ax to swing down from the ceiling, just about at head level. A trap can also be designed to destroy part (or all) of the safehouse — at the flick of a switch, the place goes up in flames, collapses or explodes (see sidebar for what this means in terms of the Merit).
A trap can either inflict damage equal to the dots allocated to it to a single target, or can inflict less damage to a large area. Once a trap is tripped (provided it doesn’t destroy the place), any hunter who contributed dots to the safehouse can reset it with minimal work. This is what differentiates traps represented by this Merit from others that the characters might build themselves during the course of the chronicle; no rolls or special effort are required to reset a Safehouse Trap. Again, though, if the trap is designed to destroy large sections of the safehouse, that damage can’t be repaired without significant effort and expense, if at all. Any trap that deals damage to the Safehouse Size can be rigged to go off after a short delay, giving the hunters time to flee.
x The hunters haven’t bothered setting traps. Perhaps they’re afraid of setting them off themselves.
• A trap that infl icts one point of lethal damage to a target (concealed knife, caltrops) or three points of bashing damage to a small area (electrified fl oor, mild poison gas).
•• A trap that infl icts two points of lethal damage to a target (spring-loaded knife, concealed pistol trap) or inflicts six bashing damage to a small area (falling sandbags, fire-hose trap), or a trap that incorporates fire and thus has a chance of igniting targets and the house (see p. 180 of the World of Darkness Rulebook).
••• A trap that infl icts three points of lethal damage to a target (falling ax, poisoned needle on a doorknob) or eight bashing damage to an area (collapsing staircase), or a trap that damages a portion of the safehouse, reducing its Size by one (explosives; anyone caught in the blast takes two lethal damage).
•••• A trap that inflicts four lethal damage to a target (shotgun trap, pit with spikes) or 10 bashing damage/two lethal damage to an area (concussion grenade trap, deadfall trap), or a trap that reduces the Safehouse Size by one to three dots (anyone caught in the area suffers three points of lethal damage).
••••• A trap that inflicts five points of lethal damage to a target (spring-loaded sharpened stake, blowtorch trap) or 12 bashing damage/three lethal damage to an area (bouncing Betty, acid spray), or a trap that completely destroys the safehouse, no matter how large (anyone caught inside suffers four points of lethal damage).
A note on vulnerabilities: some creatures, such as vampires, suffer aggravated damage from fire. Others have more specialized weaknesses, and hunters might well guess at them or learn them over the course of the chronicle. The Safehouse Traps system doesn’t make capitalizing on these weaknesses a special case — working silver bullets into a gun trap doesn’t put the dot rating up. This is because the creatures get a chance to notice the traps anyway (see below), and because a hunter can’t be sure that a) werewolves really are vulnerable to silver, or if that’s just a story and b) werewolves are going to attack the safehouse, rather than, say, vampires, who don’t care a bit about silver.
Each aspect of the Safehouse Merit has a limit of 5. In other words, Safehouse Size, Safehouse Cache, Safehouse Secrecy and Safehouse Traps may not rise above 5 (to a maximum of 20 points spent on this Merit). The combined pool of points is used to determine the cost in experience points for raising the Safehouse Merit during play.
Special
Special: The Safehouse Merit may be shared among characters in a cell. The cell may have built the place from the ground up, or a single hunter might have found or purchased it and improved as he met the other characters.
To share this Merit, two or more characters pool their dots for greater capability. A shared rating in the Safehouse Merit cannot rise higher than five dots in any of the four aspects of the trait. That is, characters cannot pool more than five points to be devoted to, say, Safehouse Size. If they wish to devote extra points to the Merit, they must allocate those dots to a different aspect of the Merit, such as Traps or Secrecy. Shared dots can be lost. If a hunter dies or leaves the cell (perhaps due to a falling-out over methods), the dots that he contributed are subtracted from the safehouse. The Storyteller decides what reduced dots mean in the story when a character leaves a shared safehouse, but the decision should make sense. Dots representing Size, for instance, should probably disappear last, if at all, and if they do, it might mean that a portion of the safehouse has become unusable rather than vanishing outright. A character might take equipment with him when he leaves, thus reducing dots in Safehouse Cache, or a death might draw attention to the place, reducing Safehouse Secrecy.
A character need not devote all of her Safehouse dots to the shared Merit, of course. A hunter might maintain a separate safehouse of her own outside the communal one represented by the shared trait. Any leftover dots that a character has (or is unwilling to share) signify what she has to draw upon as an individual, separate from the cell. For example, three characters share a safehouse and expend a group total of five dots. One character chooses to use two other dots on a private safehouse for herself. Those remaining two dots represent a safehouse entirely separate from what she and her comrades have established together. To record a shared Safehouse Merit on your character sheet, put an asterisk next to the name of the Safehouse Merit and fill in the total dots that your character has access to thanks to his partnership. In order to record his original contribution, write it in parentheses along with the Merit’s name. It is not important to note which aspect of the Safehouse Merit on which those points are spent, as this allows greater flexibility should a character ever decide to withdraw from the community arrangement.
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| Character Type | Hunter + |
| Merit Dots | 1 +, 2 +, 3 +, 4 +, and 5 + |
| Merit Type | Sanctuary + |
| Page has default formThis property is a special property in this wiki. | Merit Editor + |
| Parent | Hunter The Vigil Sourcebook +, and Sanctuaries + |
| Permission | Allowed + |
| Source | Hunter The Vigil Sourcebook + |
