Rumble Street

Merits and Flaws

Airhead (1 pt. Flaw)
Your personal concerns are so important that you tend to be clueless about the real world or what is going on around you. This may be your means of avoiding problems or retreating from your fears; nevertheless, you don’t often use your brain to its best advantage — or any advantage, it seems. Those who know you describe you as “spacey,” and their patience often wears thin around you. You fade in and out of conversations, insert non sequiturs, or just plain fail to get it. The Garou and even your own Kin make fun of you behind your back.

Flashbacks (1- 3 pt. Flaw)
You may have left the battlefield, but it never left you. Alternately, you survived a traumatic catastrophe in your childhood or some other time in your past. Whatever the source of your “episodes,” you re-live the horror of those hideous moments as if they were happening all around you. As a one-point Flaw, you have momentary flashes of the event, enough to rattle you for a single action or a few minutes. As a two-point Flaw, the flashback can last as long as an entire scene and requires action on the part of someone you trust to bring you back to the present. No roll is required. As a three-point Flaw, you feel the terror anew and you struggle to get away from it as you did way back when. Everyone around you becomes part of your horror scenario. A family member or close friend may try up to three times to bring you back using a contested Willpower roll. After that, you need professional help. Medications may reduce the difficulty of bringing you back to speed by lowering your Willpower, but only for purposes of calming you down.

Supernatural Kinfolk (4-5 pt. Merit)
This Merit is not intended for mortal Kinfolk. If, however, you intend to play a vampire, mage, wraith, or changeling character who is also Kinfolk, you must purchase this Merit. Despite your supernatural status, your Garou tribe (or other Changing Breed) accepts you as Kin. They may not rejoice in it, but they don’t automatically deny or reject you. Individuals outside your family, including other Garou, may not like you. Other tribes may not acknowledge you as Kin. Most Garou view mages as Gnosis-raiders. They see vampires as Wyrm-spawn, wraiths as un-natural, and changelings as untrustworthy. In fact, you may experience a conflict of interest in walking a fine line between your two supernatural worlds. You find, nevertheless, that there is merit in knowing about both your supernatural and your Kinfolk backgrounds.Supernatural Kinfolk costs four points for mages, changelings, and wraiths. Vampire Kinfolk costs 5 points due to the inherent hostility between Garou and Kindred. Sometimes even family ties are hard-pressed to bridge the gap between the two gestalts. Kinfolk characters created with the standard rule (i.e., those who are not either dead, Awakened, Embraced, or Kithain), may not have this Merit. It is reserved exclusively for characters constructed as wraiths, vampires, mages or changelings based upon the rules for those games.

Wyrm-Tainted (4 pt. Flaw)
Whether through your own twisted actions in the Wyrm’s service, an unfortunate hereditary blemish, or through sheer bad supernatural luck, you reek of Wyrm-taint. Because certain Gifts enable a Garou to identify you as marked by the Wyrm, most werewolves may try to kill you outright! This Flaw is not to be taken lightly. You should work with your Storyteller to determine how you acquired this taint, unless you want it to be a mystery to your character.

Unscented (1 pt. Flaw)
For some reason, you have no noticeable body odor. Your scent is so faint as to be practically undetectable by animals and Garou. This may work to your advantage while hiding from scent-driven predators (and many humans may prefer a neutral-smelling person), this fact is a decided disadvantage among Garou. They are likely to instinctually distrust anyone without a scent, suspecting that he or she is using supernatural means to hide Wyrm taint. No Gifts, such as Scent of the True Form, can reveal you as Kinfolk. Among a group of people who rely heavily on their sense of smell, you have a distinct disability.