Ninety Percent Mortal
A thin-blood pharmacist is cutting vitae into a street drug — and the coterie's own herd is hooked. A Vampire: The Masquerade one-shot for 3–5 players.
Free — copies it into your campaigns with your session tools.
Premise
A new pill is moving through the city's night economy: 'Ninety,' a red-brown capsule that gives mortals eight hours of fearlessness, fast healing, and a craving that arrives punctually with the next sunset. The coterie notices the way Kindred notice everything eventually — through the blood. Their regular vessels taste wrong: thinner, hotter, faintly of someone else. Ninety is cut with vitae, someone's vitae, and whoever is bleeding into the supply chain is one lab test away from putting the Masquerade in an evidence locker.
Stakes
Every dosed mortal is a half-formed ghoul bonded to a stranger — including, by night two, members of the coterie's own herd, who are developing a loyalty the coterie didn't install. The Prince's response, if it reaches court before it's solved, is fixed and known: burn the supply, the supplier, and every contaminated vessel. The herd dies with the dealer unless the coterie gets there first.
Scenes
- 1
The Taste of Someone Else
The coterie's own feeding grounds — a regular vessel's apartment, a club backroom, wherever each PC feeds
Open on feeding, and play the wrongness before naming it: the blood is hot, thin, and carries a flush of borrowed courage that doesn't belong to the vessel. A Resolve + Awareness places the taste — vitae, diluted to almost nothing, and not any Kindred the character knows. The vessel, pressed, is embarrassed rather than secretive: it's a pill, everyone at their gym/bar/night-shift takes it now, forty dollars, 'it's basically a pre-workout.' They have three left in a pill bottle labeled for a dead woman's blood-pressure medication.
Decision point: The vessel offers, cheerfully, to introduce the coterie to their dealer tomorrow night — helpful, eager, and exactly the kind of eager that means the bond is already growing toward whoever's vitae is in the capsule. Use the vessel as a lead and deepen their exposure, or cut them off cold and lose the warm door in?
If they go sideways: If the players ignore the mystery and just feed elsewhere, escalate through the herd: by the next scene one of their regulars doesn't show, and the one after that shows up asking — politely, wrongly — whether the character has 'ever met the chemist,' on someone else's behalf.
Resolve + Awareness — Difficulty 3 to identify vitae in the blood; a critical also catches the generation — shockingly weak, thirteenth at best - 2
Forty Dollars a Door
The supply chain, worked upward — a gym locker room, a bar's coat check, a rideshare driver who deals from the front seat
The distribution is amateur and brilliant: no corners, no territory, just service workers selling to their own regulars, resupplied weekly by 'the delivery guy' — a bicycle courier named Dez who genuinely believes he's moving gray-market supplements. The pills' foil cards come from a compounding pharmacy's blister machine; a Intelligence + Medicine or Streetwise read off the packaging narrows it to two licensed compounding pharmacies in the city, one of which burned its license two years ago and operates nights only, cash only, out of the back of a 24-hour laundromat in the Fairmont district.
Decision point: Dez the courier is bonded — one dose deep, barely, from sampling the product — and he's due to make tonight's resupply pickup in ninety minutes. Follow him quietly to the source, or take him and his route list now and go in loud but blind?
If they go sideways: If the players hit a dealer hard in public, the network doesn't fight — it evaporates, group-chat warnings cascading in minutes, and the next scene's pickup is cancelled. The chemist goes to ground, and the coterie has to flush her out through the one thread that doesn't spook: demand, posing as buyers scaling up.
Wits + Streetwise — Difficulty 4 to work up the chain without spooking it; Difficulty 2 if a bonded herd member vouches for them — at the cost of binding that vessel one conversation closer to the chemist - 3
The Night Pharmacy
Back of the Suds City laundromat, Fairmont — a compounding lab built into a walk-in supply room
The chemist is Priya Nair, a thin-blood Embraced eleven months ago and abandoned: a real pharmacist, licensed under a name she can't use anymore, who discovered her own vitae was too weak to ghoul anyone properly and reverse-engineered that weakness into a product. She doses each batch from her own arm — measured, gloved, documented in a lab notebook that is horrifying precisely because it's competent. She isn't building an army; she's building a customer base bonded gently to her, because a thin-blood with no clan, no sire, and no rights discovered that ten thousand mortals who love her a little is the only protection the city sells at her price point.
Decision point: Priya, caught, doesn't run — she negotiates, and her opening offer is real: she'll cut the vitae out of the formula and keep the network as an intelligence asset the coterie owns, if they stand between her and the court. The players are holding exactly what the Prince will burn: supplier, supply, and documentation. What they walk out of the laundromat with — and who — is the whole game.
If they go sideways: If the players come in as violence, Priya's failsafe triggers: a scheduled group text to her top forty customers — 'pharmacy closed, ask the people who closed it' — with an address. Not hers. Theirs. Forty mildly superhuman, freshly bereft addicts learn where the coterie sleeps unless someone gets her phone before she thumbs SEND.
Manipulation + Insight — Difficulty 4 to negotiate holding real leverage; Difficulty 6 if they've already destroyed stock she can count from the doorway - 4
What the Herd Heard
Wherever the coterie takes the endgame — the court, the laundromat, or their own haven with the herd assembled
The resolution lands on the mortals. The bonded herd members know something now — not the Masquerade, but its silhouette: there's a chemist, the pills are 'donated,' the donors are 'a community.' Withdrawal, if the supply stops, is eight bad days of fearless people feeling fear again all at once. And whatever deal was or wasn't struck in the laundromat, word of Ninety has reached the Tremere, who arrive — two of them, courteous, with a business card and a cooler — wanting the formula, the notebook, and 'a licensing conversation' with whoever holds Priya's leash.
Decision point: The Tremere offer solves everything: they'll take Priya as a 'research associate' (alive, protected, gone), bury the network humanely, and owe the coterie a major boon. It requires only that the coterie hand a person over to the Pyramid with their eyes open. Priya, standing right there, says nothing — she just watches the players decide what she guessed about them the moment they didn't kill her.
If they go sideways: If the coterie already killed Priya, the Tremere want the notebook and the herd — 'the bonded cohort is the research asset now' — and the same decision arrives wearing worse clothes.
Frenzy check (Resolve + Composure) — Difficulty 3 for any character present when a withdrawing herd member, terrified and bleeding trust, begs them to fix it — hunger and guilt arriving on the same bell
NPCs
Priya Nair
Early thirties forever, lab coat over a laundromat apron, nitrile gloves she snaps like punctuation. Keeps her sleeves rolled down. Speaks in dosages and half-lives even about feelings.
Precise, unhysterical, and done apologizing for existing. Argues supply-chain ethics like a professional because she was one. The only thing that cracks the calm: being called what her sire called her — 'a rounding error.'
Dez Okafor
Twenty-four, calves like bridge cable, insulated delivery bag stickered with a hundred dead restaurants. Talks fast, rides faster, believes with his whole chest that he works for a supplement startup.
Sunny, hustling, allergic to questions about paperwork. His loyalty to 'P' is one part bond, two parts the only employer who ever paid him on time.
Reggie Fontaine
Fifty-five, waistcoat, reading glasses on a chain, works the coat check at the Verdigris Room like a maître d' and deals Ninety out of garment bags. Knows every regular's name, drink, and payday.
Discreet by profession, gossipy by nature — the contradiction resolves as riddles: he'll never tell you a secret, but he'll tell you exactly which question to ask. Charmed by good manners, immovable under threat.
Whitcombe
Gray suit, gray gloves, a leather folio and a medical cooler carried like a briefcase and a lunchbox. Introduces himself with one name, no clan, and lets the silence do the clan's work.
Terminally polite, procedurally patient, negotiates like the outcome is already filed and he's collecting signatures. Compliments the coterie's work in a way that makes clear how long he's been watching it.
Endings
Managed Decline
The coterie takes Priya's deal: the vitae comes out of the formula over three weekly batches — a taper, not a cliff — the herd sweats out eight bad days with the coterie playing nurse, and the network survives as the city's strangest asset: a hundred service workers loyal to a pharmacist who now answers to the players. The Prince never hears the true story. The Tremere leave a business card 'for when the situation matures.' Priya keeps her notebook — and keeps writing in the back section, in the different pen.
The Cooler
Priya leaves in Whitcombe's company, upright, eyes open, having signed whatever the folio held. The network is unwound by Tremere hands so gently that most customers believe the startup folded. The coterie holds a major boon from the Pyramid and the specific quality of silence that follows selling a person. Eight months later, Reggie — still at his coat check — mentions that a gray-suited gentleman has started asking his regulars a new screening question: whether they've ever felt their heartbeat come back.
Scorched Vein
The court finds out — a rival, a canary, or the coterie's own report — and the Prince's remedy runs its full text: the laundromat burns with the stock inside, Priya meets the sun on a rooftop with the Sheriff in attendance, and the bonded herd is 'dispersed,' the word the Camarilla uses so nobody has to count. The coterie keeps their standing and loses their vessels, their courier, and the coat-check man's respect — Reggie's lockbox ledger arrives at their haven by courier, unasked, with a note: 'You'll want to know who's left. Nobody else kept track.'
Sequel hook for Vampire V5 campaigns
The last page of Priya's notebook is a formulation she never synthesized — the reversal candidate, marked 'needs a donor above ninth generation' — and it's written in shorthand only a trained compounding pharmacist could expand, which the city's Kindred will eventually realize means the notebook is worthless without a hostage worth more.
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