Having altered her victims’ beliefs and stoked their fears, the vampire can now spark disturbing hallucinations of a kind that all vampires suffer in torpor. These awful visions adhere to nightmarish logic, even the most apparently innocent vision turning sinister when the victim has time to focus on it.
Cost: 1 Vitae
Dice Pool: Presence + Empathy + Nightmare vs. highest
Composure + Blood Potency in group Action: Contested; resistance is reflexive Duration: Scene
Roll Results
Dramatic Failure: The vampire starts to hallucinate, perceiving something that only she can see that terrifies her. She must immediately roll to resist frenzy.
Failure: The victims do not hallucinate, or it does not particularly affect them.
Success: The vampire inflicts a single hallucination — a change or addition to what is currently present in the scene — on her victims. The hallucination lasts for a scene.
Exceptional Success: The victims suffer the vampire’s version of reality for a full night.
This terrible hallucination manifests to all senses, though it generally can’t change more than a single person, object, or feature of the location. She could invert the colors in a building, create a shambling monster that stalks her victims, or give herself a nightmarish appearance. The Storyteller should work with the player to determine how big a change the vampire can make. Once created, the Nosferatu can control how the vision reacts while it remains in her presence; once she has separated from her victims, her creation takes on a life of its own. The hallucination takes no effort to maintain, and will run its course even if the vampire meets Final Death.
Unleashing the fears of the Beast gives the hallucination the taint of nightmares, even if the Nosferatu doesn’t intend anything overtly horrifying. A doll’s eyes follow the victims around the room, that nice man has too wide a smile and it doesn’t touch his eyes, the gentle stream reflects the light wrong and something strange is swimming in it. Nightmare cannot create a pleasant image, though no matter how awful the hallucinations can’t cause actual harm or inflict significant pain.
Alone, Waking Nightmare only affects one person. Used with Dread Presence, it can affect any number of people in the vampire’s presence — though they all suffer the same hallucination, and while they are together their perceptions remain roughly consistent.