Would UV Rounds and Silver Nitrate Rounds be effective on vampires/werewolves?

Question

I'm running a campaign in Vampire: The Masquerade, and I wanted to give the players these two types of ammo (UV Rounds and Silver Nitrate Rounds). Would these two have any effect on the supernatural beings, or are they incompatible with the World of Darkness setting?

Note: These come from the Underworld universe. I don't want to give the player an instant killer, but an affordable way to use guns in the World of Darkness. By affordable I mean that their use become more usual than bladed weapons, as long as guns don't deal lethal damage to vampires.

Answer 1

In the classic WoD, both of these is most certainly a NO:

The quick talk:

Werewolf made clear that only pure, metalic silver does aggravated damage. Silver Alloys? Nope. Silver salts? No. And then there are Corax that laugh at your silver bullets but fear your gold wedding ring. Or Mokolé, who fear BOTH metals. But only the pure metals, not the salts or alloys. Even Elektrum - a 1:1 gold-silver alloy - isn't pure enough (but for Mokolé)!

Vampire cleans up this stuff too: It is not UV light that harms them, it is explicitly sunlight. That is, light from the sun. The Corax have a trinket that can make sunlight¹, Mokolé know Tame Sunbeam², Nagah the lance of the summer sun³ and Simba know a gift to enforce a rising sun^{Bastet Breed Book p116}, even at night. So: No, no UV rounds for Aggravated damage, sunlight

There is one exception to all of this stuff: If a mage goes and uses Magick. Then the bullet - loaded with Quintessence - can do aggravated damage, no matter what it is made of.

The proof:

Werewolf

The W20 core book always speaks of silver or silver bullet. Also p.146 "For every object made of or containing silver" - notice that it says silver not silver alloy. More on p256: "Damage dealt from a silver weapon" - silver again, not salt or silver alloy. And the example: it packs silver shrapnell not silver salt. And p259: "Silver, the lunar metal, is a werewolf’s great weakness." and then comes the real deal:

^{Not everything called “silver” by humans contains enough actual silver to be spiritually pure enough to harm a werewolf. Sterling silver (over 90% silver) is certainly pure enough to be spiritually active. At the Storyteller’s discretion, “Jewelry Silver” (80% pure) may be enough to affect werewolves. Argentite and Horn Silver are compounds of silver and certainly not spiritually pure, nor are compounds with “silver” in the name, including silver nitrate, silver chloride, or silver iodide. Some items can be plated with silver, rather than being made entirely of silver. These items deal damage as though they were silver weapons, but the plating is ruined after a couple of blows.}

Vampire

Again, the book mentions sunlight very often, but not a single mention of UV. And then there is V20 p272:

*Aggravated: Certain types of attacks are deadly even to the undead. Fire, sunlight, and the teeth and claws of vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural beings are considered aggravated damage." ⁴

No mention of UV here. And then we get the real deal what counts for what when it comes to sunlight in a spreadsheet⁵:

Soak Difficulty	Intensity of Light
3	Faint light coming through a closed curtain; heavy cloud cover; twilight
5	Fully protected by heavy clothes, sunglasses, gloves, and a wide-brimmed hat
7	Indirect light coming through a window or light curtains
9	Outside on a cloudy day; hit by one ray of direct light; catching the sun’s reflection in a mirror
10	Direct rays from an unobscured sun

Did you notice something here? No mentioning of UV. Yep, Vampires in Vampire: the Masquerade are vulnerable to the spiritual object sun and its light (which can be called up by Fera, see above), not its UV light. Even reflected by the Moon it doesn't harm them anymore. It is plain, old sunlight only.

Additional note:

The VtM Bloodlines video game has a scene that revolves around a bad guy testing vampire weaknesses and UV is completely inaffective.

VtR (different game line, but they share a lot of common stuff) Mirrors goes so far as to suggest the power of daylight is so wrapped up in the symbolism of it that a vampire in space outside of Earth orbit would not experience even the most direct sunlight as anything bad. – Alex P Jul 11 at 23:58 [in comments]

Mage exception

A Mage doesn't care about what a being is vulnerable to, as long as he can satisfy his own paradigma to channel magick. A Mage simply does do aggravated damage if he channels the powers of Quintessence. It is a supernatural attack. If you are an Euthanatos and you channel your Entropy magic through a .302 FMJ, then it does aggravated damage. Have a look at this quote:

On a metaphysical level, such damage tears apart the Pattern that binds a living thing together… and so, it follows that Life 3 and Entropy 4 Effects inflict aggravated damage by unweaving that Pattern.⁶

And then, they pack the special ammunition types.⁷ Let me pick two of them. Mind, that the first line is a Hypertech ammo, so technically Magick bound into ammo, and the other line is functioning via plain old fire, which always does aggravated damage to most beings^N in the WoD.

Ammo type	Damage	Effect
Ectoplasmic Disruptors	5/A	Blasts spirit entities and vampires with aggravated damage explosion; normal damage to physical beings.
Incendiary Rounds	4/A	Phosphorus – ignites in air when fired; inflict two dice aggravated damage for one turn after they hit; ignite flammable objects.

And then again, this:

Magickal Damage

• Bashing Damage: Mind Sphere Effects.
• Lethal Damage: Most other Sphere Effects.
• Aggravated Damage: Any Sphere when charged with Prime 2 and a point of Quintessence. ⁸

---

1 - W20 Changing Breeds, p.101.
2 - W20 Changing Breeds, p.146.
3 - W20 Changing Breeds, p.163.
4 - V20 Core Rulebook, p.272.
5 - V20 Core Rulebook, p.302.
6 - M20 Core Rulebook, p.407.
7 - M20 Core Rulebook, p.454.
8 - M20 Core Rulebook, p.504.

^{N - Probably the only beings that laugh at fire are ethereal like spirits in non-manifested shape or have a specific defense against it like spirits of fire.}

Answer 2

There actually exists silver nitrate ammunition in one of the Pentex books, and apparently it works (though I think it would poison a werewolf more than inflict aggravated damage, myself).

It also shows up in Mind's Eye Theatre: Book of the Wyrm.

Silver Nitrate Hollow-points - Availability: Pentex 5 (need-to-have only), Hunters 5