Stock Locations
Source: https://vamp.bynightstudios.com/vampire/library/stocklocations
A haven is a vampire's most important location, but sometimes Storytellers and players might want to highlight other places. A LARP might take place aboard the Queen Mary, in a Las Vegas casino, or at a Southern plantation. Alternatively, some chronicles work best with sandbox-style play: where Storytellers define the important locations then step back to adjudicate the characters battling over the domain.
The Stock Location system is designed to challenge players and provide depth to their interactions with their environments, without getting lost in the weeds of detailed maps, descriptive floor plans, and other tabletop-style elements of gameplay. This sort of extensive detail just isn't needed in a LARP, whether visiting an abandoned warehouse, haunted house, or even a towering skyscraper of glass and steel.
System Rules
Stock Location Attributes
Stock Locations each have their own attributes. When creating a Stock Location, record its attributes. Unlike items, the Storyteller retains records of a location, even if the location is controlled by a player-character (though a player should know most of the information about her locations).
Stock Location Rating
Each location has a Stock Location rating ranging from 1 to 5, which is used to determine the number of qualities it possesses. This rating indicates the complexity of the facility, as well as its individual benefits. The rating of a location is no indication of its size; small, perfectly hidden locations can have high ratings, while large, empty warehouses can have low ones.
Location Qualities
Each location quality confers one of a variety of effects. Some qualities may convey certain benefits to its owner, while others make the location resistant to acts of sabotage or more difficult to infiltrate.
Types of Stock Locations
Standard Locations
Standard locations are run-of-the-mill places that serve a purpose, but are otherwise not entirely noteworthy. Warehouses, most office buildings, stores, and workshops are all considered standard locations. These locations are not widely known to the general public and have replaceable characteristics. However, they are the easiest to acquire and maintain. Anyone can control a standard location. Supernatural creatures appropriate and discard these places as they see fit, using them for a variety of purposes. Affecting another's standard location or modifying your own requires succeeding at a Simple Quest with a difficulty equal to the location's rating.
A standard location can be assigned a maximum number of qualities equal to its rating.
Prestige Locations
Prestige locations are places considered noteworthy by the public, and they are often local landmarks. These locations have something interesting or grand to them, such as special architecture, a monument, or particular historical or cultural significance. A town's city hall, a notable skyscraper, or a state park are examples of prestige locations.
Controlling Stock Locations
Controlling a prestige location is demanding. In some cases, the location cannot be owned outright. A player-character can only control prestige locations within her own city. This limitation is due to the complex requirements of ownership, such as manipulating boards of directors, creating shell companies, or securing sole access or control over what is officially a public facility. Should a non-local entity wish to assert control over a prestige location, she first needs to find someone local to maintain it, such as another player-character or a Retainer specifically committed to the task.
Affecting another's prestige location or modifying your own requires succeeding at a Complex Quest with a difficulty equal to the location's rating. A prestige location can be assigned a maximum number of qualities equal to double its rating.
Iconic Locations
A number of truly unique and special places exist in the world, some of which may be supernatural in nature. An iconic location is a place well-recognized outside the local area and is possibly world famous (or infamous) in nature, such as the New York Stock Exchange, the Louvre, or The Hague. The average small or medium city may not have an iconic location, but world-famous cities may have more than one.
Unique supernatural locations fall into this category as well, such as the Black Mausoleum, Ceoris, or one of the remaining Great Caerns.
Whether these locations can be controlled by a player-character is up to the Storyteller. In many cases, they simply cannot be controlled by player-characters; in other cases, they can be brought under some control. Should that happen, this control is always conditional. Any attempt to significantly modify, loot, or demolish the location invariably results in intervention from powerful forces, and thus likely earns its former caretaker a significant degree of unwanted attention from entities both mortal and supernatural. Affecting another's iconic location or modifying your own requires succeeding at a Heroic Quest.
An iconic location can be assigned a maximum number of qualities equal to double its rating. In addition, it has access to iconic location qualities.
Adding or Altering Location Qualities
A Stock Location gains additional qualities when its owner increases its rating. Doing so requires time and investment. To raise a location's rating, the owning character undertakes a quest proportionate to the type of location and its current rating. Alternatively, a character may switch an existing quality for another by undertaking a quest one tier lower (to minimum of a Simple Quest).
A character may freely alter cosmetic elements of her standard locations. In the case of prestige locations, the Storyteller should deny additions or alterations that are inappropriate to the facility's nature. For example, adding a swimming pool to a public art museum would likely not be possible. In the case of iconic locations, this scrutiny should be applied even more rigidly.
Upgrading Location Type
Under most circumstances, a location's type - standard, prestige or iconic - cannot be changed. Characters who wish to have access to Stock Locations will find it much easier to take control of existing facilities rather than create or upgrade new ones. However, a Storyteller may wish to allow a character to dramatically improve her locations. To do so, have the characters succeed at a quest of a difficulty equal to the location's current rating, but one category higher.
Stock Locations and Challenges
During the course of gameplay, characters may take action that pits them against a building's security, structure, or IT systems.
Targeting Locations
It is inevitable that characters will eventually target one another's locations and holdings. Before a character can infiltrate, undermine, or destroy her rival's location, she must know some basic information about the location. For example, she may target another's location if she has personally visited it, been given its address, or if she has uncovered the identity of the true owner of a prestige location. In addition, a character may expend a dot of the Contacts background to determine what locations, if any, another character controls.
Challenging Locations During Live Gameplay
Breaking into locations can be a complex matter, providing worthwhile fodder for story. The Storyteller should feel completely free to handle infiltration as something akin to a dungeon crawl: a live-game event where characters respond to challenges on the fly. In those instances, the Storyteller should rate any challenge against the building or its security systems at a base difficulty equal to 5 times its Stock Location rating, modified by any qualities it may possess or other circumstances the Storyteller deems appropriate. This difficulty rating encompasses everything from picking a lock to hacking into a computer.
Challenging Locations During Downtime
If a character wants to infiltrate a location as a downtime action, the Storyteller can handle this request using the quest system. Assign a the character a quest proportional to the type of building, at a difficulty equal to its rating. The player(s) involved should choose a single, simple victory condition, such as stealing a particular item, planting evidence, or rescuing a prisoner, which they achieve if successful.
For Standard Locations, this quest can be a relatively simple affair, but for prestige and iconic locations, security systems and plans become much more complicated, and defeating them becomes something more like a heist. The Storyteller should modify the difficulty based on the building's qualities and is further free to modify the difficulty as she sees fit based on other circumstances. Note that a location's qualities may raise a quest's difficulty rating to 6 or higher.
This system assumes players operate with some degree of finesse. Should a character decide that she wishes to bash her way into a building, such as by openly displaying vampiric disciplines or assuming Crinos form, she should expect her Storyteller to hand out severe consequences. However, should a character sneak her way into a facility without getting caught and with minimal exposure of her supernatural nature, she is behaving as this system expects.
Source Book: MET - VTM - V2 Issue 1