ryslig application

[effusing]

OOC INFORMATION
Name: Nix
Contact: salroka
Age: 30+
Other Characters: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Nathaniel Black
Age: 20
World Information:

A brief overview of Vampire: the Masquerade on the White Wolf wiki. Though the article is fairly short, it provides links to the pages for pretty much all of the concepts relevant to this character; I'll also link to the pages of major sects, factions, etc where appropriate.

Nate is a player character from a V5 campaign chronicle set in San Antonio, Texas. The year is 2022. San Antonio came under Anarch control relatively recently, by vampire standards; previously, the territory belonged to the Sabbat. As a result, a number of cultural markers typically associated with the Sabbat are still strongly represented throughout the vampiric population of the city (prominent use of Cainite instead of Kindred, pack instead of coterie, etc). The city's current Baron, a woman named Sophronia, served as a major figure in the turf war that wrested control of the area away from the Sabbat.

With regards to other major cities in Texas, Austin is Anarch territory, Houston is controled by the Sabbat, and Dallas is ruled by the Camarilla.

Character Information:

Like most people within the World of Darkness setting, Nate was born a perfectly normal human with no connection to the supernatural at all. His father, Rob Black, worked in finance law, providing his family with a comfortable cushion of wealth; his mother, Samantha, was able to leave her job in accounting to act as a stay-at-home mother following the birth of her son. Nate spent his earliest years swaddled in parental affection and material abundance, and before long, he grew into an outgoing and active little boy—if one markedly sensitive, and very attached to his mother.

In an attempt to manage Nate's often-excessive levels of physical energy, his parents enrolled him in a number of youth sports programs growing up. However, in the end, only one stuck through his childhood and into his adolescence: football. Always a bit of a big kid, Nate slotted well into a position on defense. More than just having the build for it, though, the demands of the game played well to Nate's strengths—both physical and mental. He had a talent for it. And, like so many other boys with talent, the sport soon became something more than game to him. He developed aspirations of going pro.

Unfortunately, as Nate grew older, he discovered a harsh reality of the world: way too many high school football coaches are fucking insane. The man in charge of Nate's high school team was particularly proud of his intolerance for mistakes, and the typical consequence for misplay was a harsh and loud dressing-down, delivered as a form of public humiliation in front of the entire team. To further aggravate the situation, Nate had retained his sensitive nature from childhood and cried easily—a flaw which could not stand in the eyes of that same coach. He was swiftly, relentlessly bullied out of that and any other tendency that might have been viewed as suspiciously girlish—alongside any inclination he might have had to protest his treatment.

His parents noticed a change in his behavior at this time—but, after a few months of getting blown off whenever they tried to raise the subject with him, they largely wrote the matter off as a normal part of puberty. It's just natural for a 14-year-old boy to start squirming away from his mother's hugs, right? It helped that, to all appearances, Nate was thriving. He was sociable and popular with his peers (because he couldn't stand the thought of people disliking him, and crafted his public face accordingly). He took up all sorts of new interests, even as he dropped most of his childhood ones outside of football (because he wanted to better fit in with his teammates, even when they spent their free time questionably). He performed excellently in the sport itself (because if he was just perfect enough, he could cut off any ridicule before he received it). Even his grades were—well, alright, at the least. Certainly good enough to keep him academically eligible, with enough wiggle room left to bomb a test here and there.

For Nate's part, he would have called himself genuinely happy, anyway. First, he made himself so busy with school and friends and football that he didn't have the time to consider whatever downsides might have come with them; then, after a while, the pressure placed on him started to feel normal. The satisfaction of success and the praise of the people around him fully eclipsed it. He graduated high school without incident. He got into college on a football scholarship, where he would play middle linebacker. He did well enough in the public eye that he was talked about as a professional prospect. All-in-all, his life was progressing in precisely the way he had hoped.

With Nate having grown more independent, Samantha returned to work outside the home around this same time. Not long after, her behavior began to inexplicably change. Many of these changes were fairly mundane: keeping erratic hours, being late or absent to regular appointments, or simply having no answer to where she had been or what she had been doing during this missing time. Others were more bizarre, however—alterations in her demeanor or preferences with seemingly no cause behind them, for instance, or the sudden loss of interest in activities she had previously enjoyed. Of course, Nate's father assumed there was something very wrong—first an affair, then drugs, and then both at once. He attempted to confront her about it, to no avail—and even claimed to Nate at one point that Samantha had turned their altercation over the matter physical.

Nate... did not take Rob's word on the matter. His relationship with his father had always been, while not unloving, distant and awkward; conversely, he never really lost the mama's boy tendencies he'd held in childhood. His mother was perhaps the one thing in his life more important to him than football. Naturally, he took her side in the matter, defending her from every accusation his father through her way; worse, he assumed many of the admissions Rob made to him in private were attempts to smear Samantha and manipulate his loyalties as divorce looked increasingly likely. Even as Nate worked to hide the stress and anger caused by his deteriorating homelife from his teammates, it came nearly to the point that he and his father were no longer on speaking terms.

Personality:

5-10 Key Character Traits:
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? Conflicts
Opt-Outs: Lich, Manticore, Shade, Simulacrum, Slime, Vampire

Roleplay Sample: