Without wishing to post private business, things at my end got very complicated this week. Still processing. This will be a short post.
From the main book:
[Blocks are] something that blocks the passage, attack, or influence of a vampire. It may be an absolute bar, or she may be able to penetrate it with a successful Aberrance test against Difficulty 8. Penetrating a block may still do damage: +1 per incident, or per round spent across the block. Many banes (fire, holy water, iron, sunlight) also act as blocks.
Fright Night (1985)
Two of the most famous Blocks are running water and crossing the threshold. Some might be forgiven for thinking that vampires have peculiar tastes.
Rivers and streams have a long body of folklore, predating written history. We sometimes find old remnants of these practices, sacrifices to the river gods. In Greek lore you might sacrifice to the river spirit to ensure safe crossing for your troops or give up something valuable to you in exchange for magical favors. You could enchant items in rivers for future use; if you knew the right ritual, you could bathe a silver coin in that running water and turn it into a lucky piece.
Thresholds are the boundary between the house, which is protected by house spirits, sometimes called genius loci. The Romans would maintain regular sacrifice to their house spirits to ensure good fortune. You hear echoes of that belief in stories about pixies, imps and similar who will work tirelessly for the family but which can take offence and leave, say, if someone gives them new clothes or new shoes. People would bury black cats in the walls of a new-built house, or put a penny under the hearthstone before it was laid. I know of at least two local examples of someone burying kinfolk under or near the front porch of the house. In one of those examples, the bodies were unearthed by accident when a future owner decided to lay some new plumbing. Now, whether they did that out of some folk memory or just to keep their loved ones close is an open question. But if you assume that entombing a cat in the foundations can give you protection and luck, how much more potent would a person be?
All of which to say. it's not the vampire who has peculiar tastes. The vampire knows what we have forgotten; that there's something in that river, in that building, which prevents them gaining access. To the vampire, that thing, whatever it may be, is probably as visible as a brick wall would be to us. If the Block is being caused by spirits or ghosts, the vampire can see those spirits or ghosts.
Which suggests that the vampire can, if so inclined, bypass those blocks. If they really work at it.
It makes sense that the Block means something more to vampires than a simple wall, some supernatural version of the Go To Jail monopoly card. Or, in NBA terminology, some Mutant or Satanic version.
With all that in mind, and borrowing from the main book:
[Satanic] This is a full-blooded vampire, a descendant of Vlad the Impaler. Blocks: wild roses.
Evocative, but why?
It's said that when the Virgin Mary kissed a white rose it blushed and turned red, creating the first red rose. When the infant Zoroaster was placed on burning logs in an attempt to kill him, they turned into a bed of roses. Bacchus, when chasing a nymph, is supposed to have been blocked by a wall of thorns which he turned into a wall of roses, and then back into a wall of thorns when it suited him.
Given we're talking Satanic, the Virgin Mary connection seems the most suitable. The rose and its thorns are beloved of the Virgin Mary. When the vampire sees this plant it doesn't see a simple rose. It sees the Virgin.
Presumably there's something about the cultivation process which robs the rose of this association. So roses grown for a flower shop wouldn't do. But perhaps a rose bush encouraged to grow along the wall of, say, a convent, would, inasmuch as the roses aren't cultivated or controlled, just allowed to grow in a particular location.
[Alien] Fully awakened, an alien stone is a being of unfathomable power, potentially capable of altering gravity and space-time within tens of miles. Blocks: chaotic streams (running water, random charge fluctuations, anything else that cannot be perceived as a whole.
Again, evocative, but there are plenty of things that cannot be perceived as a whole. Oxygen, for instance. I'm sitting in a ton of it right now. I can't see it, and I can't perceive the full extent of it.
Would a running hose be sufficient to block an alien vampire?
What even is a random charge fluctuation, in-game? Is this like the TV version of an electrical charge, all blue lights and crackly noises? Are we just talking static electricity? Could you Block an alien vampire by wandering around in a lightning storm?
The text suggests that they 'created' humans in their image, a result of early contact between the stones and our distant soon-to-be-intelligent ancestors. The text also suggests that perceiving their own perception sets up a feedback loop, trapping them in their own consciousness. I would be tempted to suggest that something like running water works in the same way; it forces them to perceive their own perception. Water reflects, after all. Running water also reflects, just not in a way easily understood by the onlooker. This would make something like the alien stone, to whom perception is all, frantic, their 'minds' constantly racing in an attempt to understand the thing it is 'seeing.'
Anyway, that's as far as I care to go this week.
Next week, more stuff!
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