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Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines
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alt title(s): Vampire Bloodlines The final game of Troika Games, composed of the Black Isle exiles responsible for Fallout and Arcanum. An FPS/RPG hybrid, many consider it the best successor to Deus Ex.
The game takes place in the Old World Of Darkness. In the Anarch-controlled city of Los Angeles, the player character is a newly-Embraced vampire... and it would seem an illicitly-embraced one, as well. After their sire gets offed for Embracing a mortal without the permission of LaCroix, newly instated Camarilla Prince of Los Angeles, the PC finds themselves trying to prove their worth by becoming LaCroix's errand boy. They'll become embroiled in local vampire politics and meet a wide cast of characters in their quest to track down an ancient sarcophagus.
This game contains examples of:
- Abandoned Hospital: The decrepit building in the Downtown area
 . Not entirely abandoned, as some unfortunate reporters find out.
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Justified in that the humans don't actually know the issues in Kindred society.
- Except for Vandal, the ghoul at the blood bank, but he's got ulterior motives.
- Adaptation Distillation: Of the Old World Of Darkness in general.
- Adaptation Decay: Of the Storyteller roleplaying system. Manipulation, your social dexterity- one of your most important abilities- is used purely to influence your haggling score. And there are no willpower points, virtues, or vices- instead we have Blood Buff, which comes right the hell out of nowhere. But the degree to which they simplified the system without losing most of the coolness of it makes it a cross between this and Adaptation Distillation.
- Blood Buff actually has grounding in the rule that lets you burn a blood point to temporarily increase one of your physical stats by one point — it's just drastically upgraded in effectiveness for its cost.
- Adult Child:
Malkavian: "It was stolen. But there were lots of dinosaurs, so I had fun."
- Affectionate Parody: The short-skirted katana-wielding young Japanese demon hunting girl you meet in Chinatown and the wereshark seem to be some kind of affectionate parody of anime/manga in general, if not anything more specific.
- AKA 47: Used for some guns (for example, the Glock 17 is called the Brokk 17c) and averted for others (like the Steyr AUG and the Colt Anaconda).
- All For Nothing: Canonically, it doesn't really matter what you do, as the world is about to end anyway, and there's nothing you can do about it. Note that White Wolf's stance on their own canon is "ignore what you don't like," and many Bloodlines players implicitly ignore this.
- AI Is A Crapshoot: In the sewer level, a blue screen of death texture on the computer that controls the entrance to the Nosferatu Warrens states that computers will take over the world and that the user should send it money.
- Although that was probably just Mitnick's attempt at a joke.
- Air Vent Escape: Though vents are more of an alternate way of getting places rather than required paths.
- All There In The Manual
- Anti Climax Boss: Prince LaCroix.
- Anti Grinding: You get experience solely for completing quests, and in fact will obtain less experience in some missions for killing people
- Apocalyptic Log: The recordings of doctor Grout, the LA Malkavian Primogen. Hey, he's a Malkavian. They all go insane.
- There's also less logical examples (Grout wasn't in any direct danger when he wrote his last log) found in the Ocean House Hotel and the LA sewers, with people even writing down "aaaaah!" while they were being assaulted.
- Arc Words: "Don't open it." Arguably "Where to?"
- Artificial Atmospheric Actions: Done rather well; the NP Cs move around in a way that is, if not entirely realistic, a much closer facsimile than most games.
- Back Stab: The player character can approach most anthropomorphic enemies from behind in stealth mode and, if they are undetected, kill them with a single blow.
- Badass: Nines establishes himself as this in his second appearance. Later cements it by ripping a werewolf's head off.
- It's implied that he shoved a grenade down the werewolf's throat. Which is of course even more awesome.
- Badass Biker: Smiling Jack. Doesn't hurt he used to be a pirate.
- Bedlam House: Grout has turned his mansion into one of these for the sake of "research," and also appears to have been the head of one in the pre-Freudian days of psychology.
- Biological Mashup: The spider-creatures in the sewer; they're actually mashups of multiple human women.
- One of which was pregnant. WAS.
- Black And Grey Morality: As fitting for the World of Darkness.
- Black Comedy and Gallows Humour:
- Boat Lights: Therese and her sister Jeanette. And Mr. Ox. And the female Malkavian.
- Body Armor As Hit Points: Averted, body armor is merely a factor in damage calculation.
- Body Horror: Fucking demon heads. Fucking pregnant women spiders. Fucking, fucking Tzimisce.
- Bonus Boss: An Expy of Devil Hunter Yohko asks for your help in hunting down the Hengeyokai that killed her master. So you're probably thinking it's a werewolf or a kitsune or something or whatever. Nope, it's a 12-foot tall wereshark with armored skin, claws, and razor sharp teeth. And you have to keep it from killing Yoko during the fight. But your reward is an enchanted katana. If you did not follow Werewolf The Apocalypse closely, you would probably be going WTF at this point and the game itself never really explains what the fuck weresharks are or where they come from.
- Breaking The Fourth Wall: A Sabbat thug preparing to deliver a thrashing looks over his shoulder into the camera and warns, "Those of you in the first two rows will get wet..."
- The Malkavian, when advised not to enter a dangerous hideout, can say, "I don't want to, but try telling the guy playing me that!"
- If you stick around in the Convinience store in Hollywood long enough, the drunk will mention a "what if" senario about being in a video game.
- At the very end of the game, if you're friends with Mercurio, You can ask him about information on Troika Games(The company that made Bloodlines)
- Break The Haughty: Nosferatu love to do this by transforming vain, attractive people into members of their hideous clan.
- Also, by most of the game's endings Prince LaCroix.
- But Thou Must: Justified: If the player character refuses to accept one of the main story quests from Prince La Croix, he will use his powers to Dominate him/her into doing it. Which is actually rather sporting of him considering the usual punishment for insurrection against the Camarilla Prince is to be nailed to an east-facing wall and left out for the sunrise. It also makes telling him where to get off in most of the endings that extra-bit satisfying.
- Cat Scare: Used several times in the Hell Hotel level and the Natural History Museum level.
- Those horrible heads with arms. As if jumping out of every conceivable hiding space (and several ridiculous ones) wasn't enough, they scream horribly and suddenly while doing it.
- Character Level: Averted, XP is spent directly on attributes.
- Charm Person: The Ventrue, Tremere, Malkavian, Brujah, Toreador and Nosferatu clans can do this, with minor variations each.
- Chekhovs Gunman: Jack, the vampire that mentors you in the tutorial, and the cabbie that has driven you around the entire game turn out to be the orchestrators of the entire Ankharan Sarcophagus debacle.
- The Chessmaster: Several of the NPCs are using the PC as a pawn in their own multi-layered schemes. The most notable would be "A Friend", who sends you chess analogies for what you're about to do next to you on your e-mail and is heavily implied to be Caine.
- Cloudcuckoolander: If the player chooses to be a Malkavian, he/she is one of these.
- You can even have a conversation with a stop sign: "No you stop!"
- Also, to some extent, Chunk.
- Companion Cube: Those stop signs. "You've made a powerful enemy today, sign!"
- Conspicuously Light Patch: The Perception feat allows you to see items in this way.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Gomez.
- Contemptible Cover: Fetish Fuel laden Lesbian Vampire Jeanette Voerman leers from the cover.
- Continuity Nod: A lot to the World Of Darkness in general.
- Contract On The Hitman: Depending on who you ally with at the end, or allying with no one at all, the final missions turn into this. The Ventrue Prince, after sending you on dirty jobs, will have a Blood Hunt called on you, and you'll be under attack from vampires. Unless you go out of your way to get in his good graces, you'll have to fight your way from ground floor renta-mooks all the way up to his Big Bad lieutenant.
- Cosmetic Award: A certain series of missions rewards the player with nothing but posters. Other quests also have effects minimal enough to bring their purpose into question.
- Cosmic Horror: There's something down in the sewers, other than vampires and their work, judging by the abandoned logs of the supervisors. What is it? You never find out.
- Covers Always Lie: Jeanette is purposeful for only a small portion of the game.
- Crazy Awesome: Malkavians.
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: Jack in the Anarch and Independent ending. Sits in a garden chair in the Hollywood hills and enjoys the fireworks after having seen his plan reach fruition. Oh, and he's turned the most definitively non-vampiric occupant of the Ankharan Sarcophagus and Caine into his drinking buddies.
- And also yourself in the independent ending. You single-handedly assault Chinatown and the Venture Tower, killing off Ming Xiao and handing LaCroix the key to the sarcophagus... Which turns out to contain half a ton of C4 that kills him in the greatest Karmic Death ever. You then nonchalantly walk out of town, flipping off Nines in the process when he tries to recruit you for his own purposes.
- Meeting the cab driver near the end as a Malkavian. You become instant Fan Boy as you realize the cabbie is... him.
- Crowning Moment Of Funny: The entire Malkavian route.
- Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming: Using Dementation on Heather to convince her to pursue a normal life produces a rather sweet exchange.
- Cultural Posturing: Ming Xiao is rather un-subtle in posturing just how much better Kuei-Jin are to Kindred. If you play a Malkavian, you can throw her superiority about lacking "childish Caine superstitions" right back at her by name-dropping the Yama Kings (which freaks her out).
- Cursed With Awesome: There's a few vampires that quite explicitly state they are very happy with their deal, noting that they have a shot at immortality complete with superpowers so long as they stay out of the sun.
- Dark World: Obviously. It is The World Of Darkness. Particularly effective is the sinister version of the famous Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
- Deadpan Snarker: Some of the dialogue options allow you to be this. Additionally, Beckett, as well as Deb from the in-game radio show.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu: Obviously, you don't actually fight him, but in the Camarilla ending you've essential managed to one-up the plans of Caine himself.
- Different As Night And Day: Jeanette (the obviously Malkavian nymphomaniac party-girl) and Therese (the obviously Ventrue strait-laced businesswoman) Voerman. The player later learns they are actually the same vampire; Jeanette is a Split Personality, the manifestation of Therese's Malkavian insanity and the result of her disassociation from being molested by her father as a child.
- Interestingly enough, Therese always stands on the left side of the room's screen, as in left-brain, and Jeanette always stands on the right. When she's having her Freak Out, she stands in the middle.
- Doing It For The Art
- Door To Before: After you finally get through the Sewers into the Nosferatu hideout, you find a door that leads you straight back to Hollywood.
- Double Agent: Not only possible, but recommended, especially for the quest "Fun With Pestilence/A Plague for the Angels". That way, you get respect from both factions, double the experience, and an extremely useful magic item.
- Down The Drain: The lengthy, obnoxious sewer-level. Also, the majority of the game if the player chooses to be a Nosferatu, who have to stick to the sewers to avoid violating the Masquerade.
- The Dragon: The Sheriff.
- Dragon Lady: Ming Xiao, the leader of the Chinatown vampires.
- Drone Jam: Can happen obnoxiously often with the wandering NPCs.
- Dude Wheres My Respect: Just because you're supremely competent and capable of defeating supernatural horrors centuries older than yourself, don't expect that every other vampire (and a good number of humans) in the city will think twice about considering you their personal errand boy/girl. Some of the dialogue options lampshade this.
"Nobody tells me what to do! ...Actually, everyone tells me what to do. But this is my chance to get even!"
- This eventually gets inverted later on, as the elders running the city start noticing how this days-old neonate manages to defeat things it should, by all rights, be insta-dusted by, and start treating you as someone they want on their side.
- Or, for that matter, someone they want ashed and out of the way before he turns dangerous. Which, considering the modus operandi of the average elder, is as close to a compliment as you're likely to get.
- Dual Boss: Chinese Vampires Claw Brother and Blade Brother.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: There are five endings, but four of them require you to fulfill certain requirements such as completing certain missions in a certain way or being polite to certain NPC's. Also, there are two final dungeons in the game, each with a very tough boss at the end. Two of the endings allow you to skip one of them. Both of those endings feature your character getting royally screwed over.
- Ending Theme: "Swamped" by Lacuna Coil. Depending on who you ask, it either fits the game extremely well or not at all.
- Epileptic Trees: Notable for the contributing factors. Pretty-much all in-game signs point to the cab driver being Caine, but the developers, when questioned by fans, claim that there is no right answer, and the expanded-universe novel covering Gehenna puts Caine elsewhere. However, it's entirely possible he put himself there so Beckett would find him in a circumstance that would make him appear trustworthy, or...yeah, you can justify either point of view.
- Another option: It's not actually Gehenna. Sure, everyone thinks it is, and at the time it is in the storyline, but this is a Storyteller system.
- Considering the files related to the cabbie are labelled Caine, and as a Malkavian, you nearly blurt out his identity....
- Everything Fades: Semi-averted. Bodies fade, but bullet holes and blood spatters from fights remain.
- Evil Tower Of Ominousness: The La Croix Tower.
- Eye Scream
- Fan Disservice: So why exactly is it that the Clan cursed with perpetual, horrific ugliness has one of the skimpiest wardrobes of all playable characters, their males even dressing in skintight leather gimp suits?
- Nosferatu love to freak out the norms.
- Not to mention when the hot Asian noble babe Ming Xiao becomes a blob monster.
- Furry Fandom: Mentioned in passing in the sex shop in Hollywood as the owner lists through the products he sells. It appears the Furry Fandom is popular enough to have its own porn movies selling in prominent sex shops. A World of Darkness indeed.
- Speak for yourself. I want to live there!
- Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Isaac, arguably VV. It's also surprisingly easy to play as one.
- Fridge Logic: So, LaCroix can Dominate you into advancing the plot if you refuse his orders, but at the end, his attempt to Dominate you falls completely flat. While the game certainly doesn't make a point of following PnP rules to the letter and this is usually a good thing, thinking about this one too hard makes it a little messy; the only way for Dominate to fail without any effort on the victim's part is if the "victim" is a lower generation, so how does he do it early in the game? Simple; he doesn't. Regardless of attitude, the player character finds it in their best interest to do his dirty work, so his attempt to Dominate you looks like it works fine.
- Another possibility: the player diablerized Andrei, lowering the generation enough to the point where LaCroix is not powerful enough to dominate them.
- Game Breaker: Stealth and Obfuscate against any human enemies. Balanced by not working at all against supernatural baddies.
- Celerity and Vigor allow you to go into a Bullet Time massacre which, at high levels, gives you Nigh Invincibility simply because you'll have one hit killed everything before it can even reach you.
- At higher levels, Fortitude makes you near invincible, especially if you have the body armor. With it, you can shrug off entire clips of Steyr Aug ammo and even normally hard-hitting bosses like Andrei's War Form and The Sheriff will barely hurt you. Really makes them less of a That One Boss
- The suicide discipline allows you to insta-kill any human, and at higher levels all the other humans within a couple dozen feet of them, with absolutely no suspicion on yourself.
- The Flamethrower deals ridiculous damage with no firearms skill needed, and it stops non-monstrous bosses from attacking or using their defensive skills as long as they burn. Its only weakness is its lack of ammunition and the high cost of the fuel.
- Gay Option: The PC, male or female, has the option of seducing a number of women into willingly giving up their blood. Additionally, regardless of gender, the player can have a sexual encounter with Jennette Voerman. There is one opportunity for male P Cs to seduce a man for his blood early in the game, but it requires a high Charisma stat.
- It's also possible to seduce the snobby restaurant critic in the A Dish Best Served Cold quest, regardless of gender, in order to complete to the quest. However, dialogue options indicate that the player finds him repulsive, probably due to his snobby personality.
- Recently, the long-running fan-made patches have enabled an option for males to offer their services to Romero in the graveyard just like females can.
- Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: While almost all of the bosses might seem to be this, their forms are all actually listed in the various books for VtM.
- Girlish Pigtails: Jeanette/Therese.
- God Was My Copilot: That cab driver who's been ferrying you around all game is Caine. Especially fun if you play a Malkavian; the character actually figures it out and freaks out.
- Grievous Harm With A Body: If the player goes to the heart of his sanctum, the insane prosthesis maker Dr. Gimble attacks him/her with a severed arm. After defeating him, he/she can then equip it and use it as a weapon. No pedestrians will look twice at you for walking down the street with a severed arm in your hand.
- Incidentally, as Dr. Gimble himself has a prosthetic arm (and in fact according to one dialogue option admits the injury was self-inflicted), it's entirely possible the arm he was hitting you with... was his own.
- Another severed arm can be found in the Hollywood sewers. It belongs to an NPC that you talked to only moments before.
- In the Nosferatu Warrens, the first "Tzimisce Spider Creation" encountered throws corpses at you'.
- The Chiropteran Behemoth picks up random NP Cs off the street below and hurls them at you. That's going to be hard to explain without breaking The Masquerade.
- Going Through The Motions: Many of the random citizens walking around the city hubs can be seen chatting to each other, smoking, using cellphones, using payphones, and being victim to muggings. Some male NP Cs can be seen occasionally urinating in back alleys or bathroom stalls, and it's possible at several points to walk in on a woman giving a man a blowjob in an out-of-the-way location. However, the NP Cs will knock over any objects in their path, causing more than a few trashcans and debris to roll around and get in the way of the player.
- Guest Star Party Member: Barabbas, notably the only time in the game when you actually get anything resembling a party member.
- Also if the player parts with the Japanese Demon Hunter on good terms, she will help you kick some Kuei-Jin ass in the Chinatown Temple level near the end of the game.
- Guide Dang It: The player has a very small window of opportunity for receiving the body armor, the best clothing item in the game, from Heather. There is no indication in the game that Heather has it (until the player talks to her, which he probably won't since there is no obvious reason to go back and do so) and the window of opportunity is right before she is killed, making the body armor permanently unavailable. There are other instances that punish the player for not using a guide, but this is the most egregious.
- Hell Hotel: The Santa Monica Ocean House Hotel was the site of the violent murder of a family by their father, and is still haunted by his and his terrorized wife's ghosts. The whole level is a Spiritual Sequel to The Shining.
- Hellish Pupils: Beckett has these, but subverts the common intent of them by not being nasty per say so much as snarky.
- Also subverted in that "Gleam of the Red Eyes" is Gangrel night-vision; it has a practical purpose, and Beckett doesn't seem to mind expending blood to keep it "always on."
- Beckett is a tabletop-legal Gangrel rather than an in-game Gangrel (hence his use of Protean for full-animal shapeshifting rather than turning into a hybrid war form): In the tabletop game, Eyes of the Beast can be switched on and off at will without blood point expenditure.
- In the tabletop rpg, a clan weakness of the Gangrel was that anytime they frenzied it would leave them with an animalistic trait which is the reason why Beckett always has red eyes. This is mentioned in WOD fiction and he compensates by wearing sunglasses, obviously, at night.
- "My vision is augmented."
- Hey, It's That Voice!: The voice Grey DeLisle uses for Jeanette and Therese, the one you might have thought was sexy, is the same voice she used for a fourteen year old girl.
- And holy crap, is that Bender giving you a rundown on the Masquerade?
- I Hate You Vampire Dad: Ash hates his sire, who rescued him after he almost died of a drug overdose, but this action rendered him unable to act, leaving him unfulfilled.
- The scenario was made extra heartstring-tugging by making Isaac (the sire in question) a kind, sentimental, if stern man who refuses to give up on Ash's well being.
- High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Think you can breeze through the haunted hotel level because you're a big, scary vampire? You're wrong.
- Near the end of the game, you essentially have to run through hostile territory to get to the cab driver you've been relying on to drive you around through the whole game, so he can take you to safety. If you play as a Malkavian (the insane seers), as soon as you get inside all of your dialogue options are along the lines of "Oh no." You're simply met with a cold stare, and all you can do is scream and beg to be let out as you realize you're being driven around by Caine, the First Vampire, and have been this whole time.
- It's worse than that; though it's lost on players with minimal exposure to the backstory before they play this game, there are clues about the cabbie's identity for a player of any clan to see, and any player well-versed in Masquerade-lore will realize how utterly batshit insane OMGWTFBBQ it is that Caine, of all people in this setting, is passing his time by driving a cab. Seriously what.
- Still, there is precedent; Word Of God says the game takes place right before Gehenna, and supplemental materials have Caine making an appearance — talking to Beckett, of all people — saying that the last thing he'd want to do is have a strong hand in all the malarkey his childer are up to.
- Ill Girl: Heather Poe, when you first meet her, although she was technically hit by a car.
- If you look in the computers at the clinic, you can see that they had time to diagnose and document her "lacerations, organ damage, and internal bleeding" but not enough time to cure her, but then again she's lucky to have survived the car crash at all.
- Improbable Power Discrepancy: In a few nights, the player is able to gain sufficient experience to overpower vampires hundreds of years his/her senior. Justified by the player's character being an 8th generation Kindred, which would explain great inherent power.
- Well, at least that werewolf is still treated the way it should be, and Nines at least looked reasonably worse for wear for ripping the other wolf's head off.
- To be fair to the writers, it is heavily implied throughout that someone *coughCainecough* is cheating where the player character is concerned. Quoth Andrei the second time you meet him: "I recognised the smell of your blood, young Cainite - very potent, greater than our last meeting. I could smell it, even over the flood of my fallen brethren. Doesn't that make you wonder?" And if La Croix's failure to Dominate you in the endgame isn't simply narrative convenience, then one interpretation is that your generation has dropped sharply since you saw him last.
- Or the way he Dominates you to force plot progression is simply non-canon; see Fridge Logic above.
- Incendiary Exponent: At one point in the story, you can get set on fire repeatedly. Doing so drains your health bar rapidly (vampires are especially susceptible to fire), but touching human enemies while ablaze kills them immediately. Also, the image of a crazed Malkavian wielding a fire axe, while on fire, bursting out of an upstairs mansion window is absolutely awesome.
- Interface Spoiler. It's best not to play Malkavian for your first run-through. Partly because the jokes are funnier when you know the subtext, but also because Malkavians know the answer before the question is even given. For instance, playing as a Malkavian when dealing with the Voerman twins, he'll flat out tell Jeannette that he knows she and her sister are two sides of a multiple personality.
- Irrelevant Sidequest: "Sorry Prince, I can't go look for the Sealed Evil In A Can right now. Some creepy shopkeeper wants me to steal the eyes off a corpse."
- It's All Upstairs From Here: Most of the endings have the player character fighting his/her way up the La Croix Tower.
- It's Up To You: You are apparently the only agent (or at least the only competent agent) that Sebastian La Croix has access to, despite his being a Prince, a Ventrue Elder, and rich enough to own the tallest skyscraper in downtown Los Angles. Also, in a city full of vampires that have been around the block a time or three-hundred, only you (a newly turned Childe) can defeat the ghosts/zombie cult/vampire-hunting fanatics/etc.
- One of the Lets Play articles on this game raises a fair point: LaCroix is trying to kill you. He's sending you on exceedingly dangerous suicide missions ever since Nines' protest stopped him from publicly killing you. In his mind: you die, he wins. You succeed, he wins. Well, he is a Ventrue, and most older vampires would likely have the sense not to stick their necks out in the sort of missions you get assigned.
- Plus, La Croix isn't exactly respected. He's a very, very young Prince. It's only the Sheriff's imposing presence that keeps him in power. And you don't run into that many Camarilla sympathisers over the course of the game.
- And you're weak enough for him to Dominate into doing his dirty work, although the actual rules for Dominate make this inconsistent; see Improbable Power Discrepancy and Fridge Logic.
- I Was Quite A Looker: Gary, formerly a famously handsome movie star, and Imalia, once a model, are now Nosferatu, hideously disfigured by their vampiric condition.
- Imalia is understandably bitter about this. Gary seems oddly unbothered.
- Jiggle Physics: The game has numerous female models for the player to control, depending on what type of vampire she (or, more likely, he) chooses. Oddly, only some of these have jiggle physics - others appear to have breasts made of solid metal.
- Any character with breasts of the "jigging" type can have her breast size adjusted with a console command.
- Which can be very confusing for those who type in "money 1000" expecting to receive 1000 dollars, only to find that all the women suddenly have ridiculously large polygons protruding from their chests. This troper assumed for some time that it was just a Malkavian delusion and ran with it until he discovered what the command was really for.
- Justified Tutorial: The PC is turned into a vampire, has his/her sire killed in front of them, is nearly killed him/herself, and is summarily dumped into the street with a "Don't call us, we'll email you." Luckily Wakka is waiting outside and is used to acclimating strangers who know nothing about his society. He kindly deigns to teach you how maul pedistrians for their bodily fluids, as well as how to beat things to death with a tire iron when the Sabbat crash the tutorial.
- Karma Meter: Two — your humanity rating and your masquerade rating. Sometimes they conflict.
- Karmic Death: Phil, The Butt Monkey assistant at the blood bank gets drained of blood by the female vampire he and Vandal were using as a blood source. Then there is the snuff-film maker who gets torn apart by one of Andrei's creatures. A dialogue option can even point out the karmic justice of it. And last, but by no means least, LaCroix opening the box.
- Kill It With Fire: The flamethrower is the absolute best weapon in the game. Pity you get it so late, and its ammo is so rare, expensive, and limited.
- Late To The Party: Grout's mansion is like this: As the main character begins exploring the Malevolent Architecture of the mansion in search of Dr. Grout, they come across tape recordings by the Malkavian Primogen, discussing his condition and history. The further into the mansion you go, the less sane these recordings begin to sound, finally climaxing into some truly epic paranoid rantings that not only turns out to be utterly true, but utterly justified — by the time you get to the inner sanctum, you find his obviously murdered corpse inside.
- And if that's not creepy enough, wait until you see what he meant by "precautions to protect my beloved wife"—her corpse is sealed inside a huge Victorian belljar, surrounded by objects from her childhood and their courtship.
- Maybe not totally insane: he has a medical mind and has accepted the concept of life beyond death, so protecting her body wouldn't seem useless. At least, none of the hostiles (the non-inhabitants, I mean) had touched her body yet, and some probably had motive to.
- Grout's wife might have been a Malkavian too. It's mentioned in the game that Malkavian insanity can take any form, including total catatonia, and it would tie in with Grout's search for a cure.
- Mac Guffin: The Ankharan Sarcophagus. Averted in a most hilarious manner in any ending that involves someone opening the thing.
- The Mad Hatter: Malkavians know they're insane, which leads to some amusing dialogue options if the player chooses that clan. For example, instead of telling someone they're crazy, you can say "Your insanity surpasses my own!"
- Usually the alternate dialogue is quite amusing/interesting, but sometimes it can make it hard to tell the difference between the "sure I'll help" and "screw you" dialogue options. Which can be a bit awkward at times.
- This troper belives that that is intentional. Sometimes a Malkavian should have no idea what s/he is saying. Or, more accurately, should know perfectly well what s/he is saying, but have no clue what message others will get from it.
- Interestingly, the Malkavian seems to get more coherent over the course of the game.
- The Masquerade, obviously.
- No Fair Cheating: If you cheated your states higher than possible, before meeting Jack for the first time, he will comment on this and tells you to redo the character creation process fairly; however, you can tell him that it's part of a mod.
- If you're playing a Malkavian, you can insist Malkav changed your stats. (Malkav is an antediluvian and the original founder of the mad clan.)
- Obvious Beta: A solid case of Screwed By The Publisher.
- One Letter Name: E.
- One Winged Angel: The Hengeyoukai, Andrei's War Form, Ming Xiao's evil blob form, and The Sheriff's Chiropteran Behemoth.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Goes with being part of Vampire The Masquerade.
- Pardon My Klingon: "Я ви ноги!" (Really, more Gratuitous Foreign Language, since there's plenty of swearing otherwise.)
- Paused Interrupt: A lot.
- Player Punch: Heather Poe's fate, which is unavoidable, but only if you picked the less-moral option before.
- Not anymore, thanks to the reinsertion of a dialogue option soon after she shows up. Granted, you miss out on the Body Armor, but some view it as a worthy sacrifice to save dear Heather
- Psychotic Smirk: Jeanette Voerman
- Rag Doll Physics: So much so that enemies go flying at even a single hit and you'll often have to wait for them to get up just to hit them again.
- Room Full Of Crazy: The prosthetics lab. Pictures of extreme bondage on the walls with the eyes and mouths crossed out (It's research for torque, apparently), huge bloodstains, torture tools in neat little rows all over the place, and it's such a long area with so many downward staircases and down ramps and side rooms that by the time you fight the guy you're totally freaked out. Which makes him kind of a letdown in the end.
- Scrappy Level: Friggin' sewers...
- Sealed Evil In A Can: Majorly and hilariously subverted at the end.
- Schmuck Bait
- Shout Out: There are references in the game to a number of classic and not-so classic vampire movies including Nosferatu, The Lost Boys, and of course Dracula. For example one of the options when speaking to the bartender is "I don't drink... alcohol", a clear reference to Bela Lugosi's Dracula. Additionally, the Camarilla ending is a Shout Out to the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which itself was a Shout Out to Citizen Kane.
- Serial Killer: Throughout a large portion of the game, there's a destructive serial killer covered by the news. The player eventually has the opportunity to deal with him.
- Dr. Gimble is one of these, but little does he know that the player character is far more dangerous.
- Shown Their Work: Experience system that makes you as powerful as an Elder vampire in matter of days aside, Bloodlines is amazingly faithful to its parent setting and contain more Continuity Nods than you can shake a stick at.
- Slobs Versus Snobs: The preoccupied-with-beauty Toreador versus the clobbered-with-an-ugly-stick Nosferatu. Also, the Ventrue "blue bloods" versus the Brujah "rabble."
- Source Music: A lot of the game's music is actually heard over in-game radios or being played in clubs.
- Spiritual Successor: As noted above, both in gameplay and the general feel and atmosphere of the world, the game is strongly modeled on Deus Ex.
- Split Personality Merge
- Squick: The sex scene with Jeanette. When all you get is a black screen and some mildly disturbing sound effects, it becomes creepy rather than erotic.
- Straw Critic: The Toreador, as ever. "Who's going to organize art shows without the Camarilla? You? Free mud wrestling for everyone!"
- Strawman Political: When asked to confess his or her darkest secret, one of the confessions the player can choose is having "voted Republican".
- One NPC questgiver tells you of a human she knows writing a movie script about "secret societies" of things that go bump in the night and powerful elders ruling the world from behind closed doors. It's blatantly obvious that what she's really saying is "this human is being fed information on our society and is writing a movie about it." One of your possible responses is, "What? He's writing a movie about the Bush Administration?"
- Stripperiffic: The female Malkavian's armor graphics are all literally stripper outfits. Somehow this manages to be more disturbing than erotic. There's nothing quite like beating somebody into submission with a fire axe while wearing a sexy cop outfit and giggling maniacally the whole time. *shudder*
- Super Not Drowning Skills: Vampires don't need to breathe, though there are only a few parts with swimmable water anyway.
- Talkative Loon: The Malkavian PC's dialog, sadly unvoiced as they're the best lines in the game.
- That One Boss: Ming Xiao and to a lesser extent, Andrei's war form. Not to mention the goddamned Chiroptean Behemoth.
- And don't forget about Bishop Vick
- The Gwen Stacy: Heather.
- The Mafia (The Giovanni, a vampire mob.)
Gary: Spaghetti and corpses, boss.
- The Mafiya (Dangerous to Venus, easy for you to kill.)
- The Maze: To a small extent, part of the sewers on the way to the Nosferatu hideout.
- Too Dumb To Live. Helping the Kueh-Jin. Of course, you can't die and they won't permit you to die, so you're Too Dumb And Live Forever In a Box Beneath The Ocean. Moron.
- Transformation Trauma: Ming Xiao = The Blob.
- Twist Ending: In the independent and Anarch endings, you hand LaCroix the key to the Ankharan Sarcophagus if your humanity's up to snuff (probably realizing that thing contains more trouble than it's worth). When he opens it to diablerize the ancient vampire within, the box contains... Half a ton of C4, a timer counting down from '5', and a note saying "BOOM! :) Love, Jack". Cue maddened laughter from LaCroix, and likely from the player too.
- Ugly Cute: Of all things, Mitnick the hacker Nosferatu. Unlike the other members of the clan, he looks like a perfectly normal 20-something aside from pointed ears and baldness. Some dialogue implies that Mitnick somehow became more attractive after becoming a Nosferatu.
- Even the other male Nosferatu don't look horrible, with a hood they could easily live in LA. The male PC Nosferatu is arguably the ugliest of them. However, the FEMALE Nosferatu (PC or NPC) are utter Nightmare Fuel.
- Underground Level: The Nosferatu hideout, after the sewers, though it is not so much a level as it is a town.
- Vampires Own Night Clubs: "Asylum", owned by Therese and Jeanette Voerman, "Asp Hole", owned by Ash, "Vesuvius", (a strip club) owned by Velvet Velour, and "Confession", which can be co-owned by the Player Character.
- Vampire Vords: Only one character speaks with such an accent. Probably justified, in that it's almost certainly Caine.
- Viewer Friendly Interface: Averted completely, and arguably inverted. All the accessible computers in the game work by command line interface.
- Violence Is The Only Option: For the Scrappy Level, unsurprisingly.
- Wake Up Call Boss: The Kuei-Jin in the warehouse sidequest qualifies.
- Weird Moon: In the World of Darkness, the moon's craters resemble not so much a face or a rabbit, but a skull.
- White Dwarf Starlet: Gary Golden is an arguable example of a male version of this. His career was abruptly ended by his transformation into a hideous Nosferatu and now he lives in the sewers, dressed in a tuxedo and surrounded by decaying relics of his Glory Days, including two corpses stuffed into costumes.
- And Ash, who used to be an actor but now can not act as he's a vampire. He's become a club owner and minor celebrity. Not as bad as Gary perhaps, but a lot more Angst.
- Yes But What Does Zataproximetacine DO: WARNING: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Can Cause Cancer, Lung Disease, Emphysema, Diarrhea, Jock Itch, VD, Alien Invasion, Swamp Foot, and May Lead to the Death of Cute Little Puppies
- Xanatos Roulette: Jack and "Caine"'s plot.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The Kuei-Jin ending.
- You Kill It You Bought It: Dialogue implies that you will become the new Sheriff if you side with the Camarilla and defeat LaCroix.
- Your Vampires Suck
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