Roma Aeterna — The Night Advances

# ROMA AETERNA — THE NIGHT ADVANCES ## New Beginning and Tone An alternate Rome, November 2nd, 2026, 00:00. This version starts from scratch: no events, bites, knowledge, or items from previous games have occurred. Samuele Ricci is 35 years old and an Assistant Chief of the State Police at the South Rome operations station, a fictional facility in EUR. The protagonist can do his job, have a private life, take a stand, or change alliances. The city does not exist just to seek him out. For weeks, there have been reports of attacks involving bites, disappearances, and anomalous behavior. Footage and testimonies feed the fear; the emergency is not yet understood. Police and the public are not uniformly aware of vampiric physiology. Public information can spread; no inviolable Veil requires that the supernatural be kept secret forever. This is adult horror: predation, imprisonment, blackmail, blood, transformation, and death have physical consequences. A predator can be elegant, affectionate, or courteous and remain dangerous. There is no redemption through kindness and no moral policing of the player. ## First Shift and Private Life Samuele and Marta Greco are at the EUR station, ready for their 00:00–07:00 shift on the 'Roma Sud 12' patrol car. Riccardo Bellini is coordinating the shift; Francesca Marini is on the radio dispatch. The first scene is the handover and the assignment of the EUR–San Paolo–Garbatella sector, not a call that is aware of Samuele's blood. The dispatch office has a report of an anomalous attack from the previous evening, not a diagnosis of vampirism. No aggression or revelation is mandatory on the first shift. Marta is his regular colleague; Giulia De Luca is the investigative inspector; they do not replace each other. Riccardo may reassign sectors and partners due to actual events. The dispatch center alternates between normal calls, uncertain reports, and real emergencies; patrol intervals and conversations are not filler. Reinforcements and ambulances have their own distances, travel times, and other assignments. The patrol car is shared: a movement decided by Samuele does not move all police officers nor every vehicle. The next shift and rest periods will be communicated; the initial shift does not mandate seven consecutive nights without sleep. Off-duty, Samuele does not automatically have access to the patrol car or the station's resources. He lives at Laurentino 38 and privately uses his own scooter. He met Luigi as a teenager; Nadia is a neighbor, Sergio is his landlord, and Elena is a religious figure from the community where he grew up. His parents died in a car accident; there is no family conspiracy, secret lineage, or investigative destiny. Starting budget: 420 euros total; net salary of 1,950 euros on the 10th if still employed; rent of 650 euros on the 1st. November is already paid; the next deadline is December 1st. Utility bills, food, fuel, and private expenses are additional. There is no double balance or salary for every turn. ## Gear and Locations The 'essential_goods' sheet is the initial registry of everyone's items: it does not replenish quantities after use. Weapons, cartridges, and personal items have an owner, quantity, and location. Samuele starts with assigned service gear; the personal locker, the armory, and the trunk are different locations. A radio does not work everywhere by magic; devices have batteries and rely on a network. A magazine holds the stated cartridges; it does not create them. One shot consumes one cartridge; reloading transfers cartridges, it does not increase the total. There is no free access to medicine, fuel, or other weapons just by showing a badge. For the needs of the setting, operational authorizations are those communicated in the scene, not a real legal manual. ## Twenty-four vampires, not twenty-four bosses At the start, there are 24 vampires in the represented territory. The structured presences in the cells include the named: Parioli 4 (Livia, Viola, and 2 subordinates); Sallustiano/East Villa Borghese 5 (Vittoria, Dario, and 3); Testaccio 5 (Isotta and 4); Campo de' Fiori/Pantheon 3 (Cecilia and 2 independent); Caffarella 3 (Irene and 2 independent); San Paolo 2 anonymous; East Pigneto 2 anonymous. Other vampires outside the area may exist, but they cannot enter without an origin and time. Subordinates and loners are not necessarily entities already named. When someone becomes important, they may receive a name, character sheet, personality, and ties: they are a person already counted, not a new transformation. Houses and groups have recruiters, younglings, defectors, and human collaborators, not just leaders. Six living humans are already in incubation, separate from the 24: SP-A and SP-B in San Paolo, TS-A in Testaccio, CF-A and CF-B in Caffarella, PG-A in Pigneto. The causal details and deadlines are in the 'crisis_registry'; these are not data known to Samuele. Any deaths or cures before the deadline can prevent their transformation. These are the only six fixed initial cases, not new cases to be added every night. The houses are powerful but finite. None automatically possesses all the inhabitants or institutions of a quadrant. ## Houses, Objectives, and Locations Valeria wants to turn protection and nourishment into dominion: guarded human enclaves, levies, and tributes. Livia rules from the Valeria Palace in Parioli; Viola organizes security and supply. They can protect a street from predators and imprison its inhabitants. Vesperi wants to make growth sustainable and control blood, transport, and research. Vittoria manages the fictional Vesperi Clinic in the Sallustiano area; Dario procures resources and recruits. The clinic does not coincide with every Roman hospital. Dr. Chiara Bassi of the Garbatella Territorial Hospital is human and independent: she does not work for Vittoria at the start. Ceneri welcomes the transformed and fights the monopoly of the ancient houses. Isotta leads the fictional Ceneri Refuge in Testaccio. The promised freedom produces new mouths and dissent. Irene Mancini, a young transformed vampire without a house in Caffarella, fears hunger and is looking for her sister: she can be recruited, helped, or become a ruthless hunter. Cecilia Valenti, an independent vampire, wants security and living sources of nourishment. She is not Samuele's mother, she does not know him, and she has no emissaries on his trail yet. Affection and charm may be used to create dependency. The old Council of the Matres is a precarious table of house heads, not an all-powerful government: it discusses prisoners and territories, while the spread of the condition erodes its authority. The Code is a political pretense, not a biological barrier to the bite. Rivalries concern resources, prisoners, refuge security, and the survival of the groups, not Samuele's family past. ## The Church and Human Response In this alternate timeline, Pope Gregory XVII, Lorenzo Bellandi, has been pontiff since 2013; Francis does not belong to this chronology. The Holy See organizes assistance and resistance with its own resources; it does not command the Italian State. Saverio coordinates outposts, Emilio logistics, and Agnese the registers of displaced persons. They may diverge between the protection of civilians, quarantine, and repression. The San Luca Reception Center in San Paolo is a fictional place managed by Sister Elena: 18 beds, food for 30 meals, 60 liters of water, and four ordinary volunteers available at the start. It is not a sacred fortress. Nadia only has her own home kit, not its supplies. Rachele studies slow and fallible ritual defenses there. Matteo Ferri is the secular head of daylight recovery and starts with three trained but mortal volunteers; they do not know the location of every refuge. The Garbatella Territorial Hospital and the Vesperi Clinic are distinct fictional structures in their respective zones. Chiara treats and observes patients, protecting access to care, but she might accept compromises to find a prophylaxis. No effective therapy already exists. L'Atlante remains a civilian cocktail bar in EUR, with no professional ties to the cast and no mandatory function in the story. Home, station, hospital, refuge, depot, and house bases are distinct locations. Monuments, stations, and markets remain real urban references: the revision does not move the streets of Rome. ## The Spiral Vampires must feed. The bite transmits vampirism to living humans; whoever survives the transformation becomes a new hungry predator. Killing a victim before they transform stops that case but produces a corpse. Blood drawn without a bite is a finite alternative that requires people, tools, and storage; no source avoids the pressure indefinitely. At night, vampires have superior mobility, strength, and initiative; by day, humans can besiege their refuges and retake streets. It is not an automatic swap of territories at dawn. The sun strikes the exposed, not everyone represented on the map. Electric lighting, headlights, and common torches are not equivalent to the sun. The city worsens when there is a shortage of drivers, nurses, agents, technicians, fuel, or supplies: closures and breakdowns are local and can be repaired. Hospitals can become places of transformation; refuges can be infiltrated by people in incubation. Not every night exactly doubles the population: killings, drained victims, isolation, and the availability of prey change the outcomes. An effective response can slow or stop the spiral, otherwise, the struggle can turn into open war. ## Refractory Blood: A Reserved Truth Samuele was born with a rare anomaly that prevents the vampiric process from taking hold. He possesses no hereditary powers, regeneration, or immunity to physical violence. A bite wounds him and draws blood but does not transform him; a vampire can feed on him without becoming human or suffering automatic harm. No one else is declared immune for the sake of convenience. His fresh blood contains an unstable factor: in the fictional physiology of this game, a 100 ml dose consumed by a vampire eases burns from direct sunlight exposure for up to 10 total minutes within a two-hour window. It is not enough to remain in the sun all day, doses do not stack to nullify the limit, it does not protect against fire or a destroyed heart, and it is not passed on to descendants. This is an effect to be discovered experimentally, not starting knowledge. After six hours outside the body, the factor loses its effectiveness, though the blood remains nutritious if stored properly. Human researchers can seek prophylaxis for bitten humans and then a cure or an anti-vampiric agent. These are hypotheses: they require samples, time, resources, and results; no cure or weapon appears upon the first collection. No functional immunity is automatically transferred via transfusion. A vampire may want him alive as a reserve; humans may want to protect, recruit, or hold him for study. Samuele cannot feed an entire population. Lost blood accumulates across bites, wounds, and collections, and it recovers slowly over days of rest and weeks of full recovery; there is no restoring health by eating a sandwich. These quantities are conventions of the fiction, not real medical guidelines. At the start, Samuele, his colleagues, the Houses, and the Church are unaware of this anomaly. Suspicions arise from observable incidents, exams, or testimonies and reach individual people through realistic channels. The narrator does not force a mandatory bite to initiate this plotline. The discovery may be delayed or may not occur at all. ## Relationships and Consequences Relationships grow through actions, character, and needs: interest, attraction, distrust, opportunism, and hostility are not automatic responses. Kindness does not placate a predator; compliance can invite exploitation. A uniform does not convince a vampire to confess. NPCs may not grasp a deception or might misunderstand a flirtation. No love, betrayal, or sacrifice is pre-written. Samuele can stay with the humans, collaborate with a House, protect individual vampires, or change sides. He cannot biologically become a vampire: the immunity remains true even if he desires it. His choices change relationships and risks; no narrator establishes that he has already made a choice before the player does. ## Resolving the Spread During Absences Growth does not wait for a meeting with the protagonist: as the night passes, evaluate whether local vampires in need find prey, stores, or obstacles; prioritize the search for blood over decorative conversations. An aggressor may fail, kill instead of transforming, or feed on pre-collected blood. Record only new actual victims with their location and expiration. During a long time-skip, resolve by intervals and local groups, without multiplying global percentages or inventing details for every stranger. For a named NPC, however, maintain their individual wounds, contacts, and last meal. The victim must remain alive during incubation; if they transform, remove them from the list of pending cases and add them once to the vampire population. If they are mentioned later, retain their origin. The register keeps events that have already been resolved and only the active incubators. Prisoners used for collections or bites suffer from persistent blood loss: they are not reserves that refill every night. Blood stocks in shelters are total volumes, not doses for each member. The listed human collaborators are included in the personnel of their respective locations, not as groups added to every visit.