DT: Travel

Travel will be a necessity for many at the beginning and end of each downtime. Not all sessions will occur in the same location or even the same Domain, and therefore characters may need to make their way regularly between domains to attend. While players do not need to allocate downtime for this travel, we may ask how your character is planning to get to the session.

Within Downtime itself, characters will likely want to travel to attend to various actions both within and outside of their home domain. Naturally the further a character wishes to travel, the longer it will take and the higher the chances of some complication striking are.

Domains and Dangers of Travel

Players should be aware that travel is dangerous, both for vampires or ghouls, and require appropriate levels of planning. The world is far less civilised in these times, not to mention far less known. When cartographers wrote things like ‘here be dragons’ on ancient maps, they weren’t always wrong. Some routes are safer than others, the Danube for instance is a well travelled river route through Bavaria and into Hungary but it is also much more public.

It is important to note that for most characters in the vampiric community, if they wish to travel to a domain other than the one they live in, then they will require permission from the ruler of that domain to do so. This is doubly the case if your character intends to stay in the domain for some purpose. The higher the status and power of a kindred, the more likely they are to be noticed as they move through domains. 

For major events like uptime sessions it is more acceptable for these kindred to travel, but in downtime it is likely that the movements and activities of these kindred will attract attention and may well cause political issues. Therefore many older or more noteworthy kindred may choose to delegate distant tasks to Neonates or Ancillae in their service, or employ their own thralls for such things, to avoid drawing attention. 

It is possible that characters may wish to flaunt domain permissions, or for more notable kindred to travel despite the attention they might attract. In these instances the character can attempt to do so stealthily and try to avoid the attention of those whose domains they are moving through or close to, but of course there is a chance this may not work - in which case the ramifications may be even more significant.