Vampire: the Various

TORPOR: ENDED

2022-07-28T06:23:29Z

Posted by: propergoffick

Good evening, my fellow Kindred.

I apologise for the unacceptable collapse of operations here. This is due to How I Am As A Person, and also because the last few years have been A Time, for all of us. A Time that is of course still ongoing, but I am feeling more equipped to make the best of it now, and want to breathe some life back into my anaemic Dreamwidth activities - including, of course, this community.

Ironically, I spent the time away actually playing Vampire! V5 to be precise; an eighteen month stint as Storyteller for a game set in Glasgow, a showcase for the adventures of the Wild Roses (three Toreador art students investigating why their college burned down, and two Hecata who - as close family of the rival investigator - ended up along for the ride). Then a brief run as a player, very exciting, nice to have someone else take up the designated driver role so I could get drunk off my own nonsense for a while. The chronicle was Tucson By Night (no relation to popular video games - it's just where our Storyteller lives), the character was Penelope, a very English and utterly insane Lasombra who'd been sired antitribu and defected back to the Sabbat because her sire was an arsehole. Somehow, she survived the experience, and now I have to figure out what on Earth to do with a character I built and played to die at the end of the first story.

I'm currently running Vampire: the Requiem second edition for the first time, very excited about it, finding it something of a struggle here and there. It's a beautifully written game, but it's often quite unhelpful for the time-poor Storyteller on the go. I miss Revised Masquerade, which understood that it was a game, played in the real world with other people, before it was a vector for gorgeous prose or excitingly modern layout choices. Requiem has a very open default setting and some interesting mechanics that I'm enjoying the chance to play around with, I just wish it was a bit better about things like "here's a statblock for a dog if you need one" and "here's a folio of vampires who could exist in your world" - to be fair, Requiem first edition was a little better about that sort of thing, although it liked to bury five statblocks in an eighty page theory chapter.

Nevertheless, I persevere, because having my awful little tyrants inflict their Beasts and problems on each other and early-Nineties St. Petersburg isn't a dreadful way to spend a Sunday night, and it's at least reminding me that making it up as I go along is a perfectly valid way to be a Storyteller.

What are you lovely people up to?

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Please delete if not allowed.

2020-08-24T10:28:01Z

Posted by: thatrangerchick

				NEW YORK BY NIGHT
			
A WORLD OF DARKNESS...

What if vampires were real?
What if bloodthirsty predators lived hidden among us, engaged in a never-ending game of desire, conspiracy and betrayal? What if you became one of them? What if you've been one all along and now your very existence is on the line?

Welcome to :
NEW YORK BY NIGHT

nybynight is based on Vampire: The Masquerade and is a Camarilla focused chronicle with Anarch Movement undertones focusing on the uses of power, the dead hand of the past, and the questions of safety and duty versus honor and freedom as the Second Inquisition pushes in upon them.

No previous knowledge is needed to play. We're just looking for a few good writers who want to not only write but develop their characters and the world around them. An overarching metaplot guides the game but we welcome your individual plots and lines as well. 
If you're looking for something different, come check us out. Now accepting not only vampire characters but humans as well. 

Find out more at nybynightOffically been open for three months!
	
TESSISAMESS

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Vampire at the Movies - a good old fashioned rec list

2020-03-08T12:12:09Z

Posted by: propergoffick

A new player on a Discord server I'm on asked for a list of inspirational moving pictures for that there Vampire: the Masquerade, and while I'm not the expert on postmodern vampire films, I at least work with her and it'd be a shame not to take a shot. The following list is by no means exhaustive - it's the movies I think are closest in terms of inspiration or general vibe to some aspect of V:tM.

I thought I'd crosspost it here, partly to see if anyone's still around and partly to make some amends for my prolonged absence. I'm happy to discuss/explain that if anyone cares, but I'd rather not drone on about myself if anyone doesn't, if you see what I mean? Anyway. On with the recs!

THE UR–EXAMPLES

The Hunger is about as close to the Platonic ideal of Vampire: the Masquerade as you can get. Nightclubs! Gratuitous Bauhaus! Lesbian kiss! The aesthetic is spot on: it looks and feels like early Vampire art, or rather early Vampire art looks and feels like this film. V:tM may have come out in 1991 but it's rooted firmly in the 1980s and the vampire chic this film defined. The Hunger will dump the vibe of the game right between the eyes and it's as close as I dare come to "must-watch."

V:tM's Gehenna concept is heavily mirrored/inspired by the novel Queen of the Damned, which was filmed around the time Gehenna was actually happening and the line was coming to a close. The Hunger defines where V:tM came from, all Eighties post-punk writhing - this chuggy post-industrial apocalypse-glam perfectly sums up where it's going.

THE META TAKE

Shadow of the Vampire is about a vampire playing a vampire in the first vampire movie ever made. In a weird way I think that's perfect for the sense of the Masquerade, hiding in plain sight, preying on the worst instincts of humanity and encouraging them to let you get away with all the awful things you want to do. In microcosm, it's the perfect analogy for the "vampires secretly run society" vibe.

YOUR FLAVOUR OF BASTARD

Depending on what type of vampire you want to be (and I'm going with V5's categories here), I recommend at least one of the following:

Thinbloods lend themselves well to the What We Do In The Shadows conceit of vampire flatmates (or The Carmilla Movie, I guess, but I haven't seen that one). They're millennial vampires; all the power and resources are concentrated in the hands of previous generations, so they pretty much have to bind together and find something else to enjoy in life, 'cause they're never going to be powerful in the conventional sense. Thinblood games are low power, a bit domestic, and often the closest to "normal life but we happen to be vampires and bigger vampires try to kick our heads in occasionally."

Neonates are your classic Gen X eighties/nineties vampire movie - The Lost Boys. Still weak enough that they're better off standing together, strong enough that they can afford to be a bit cocky around humans. Probably share a sire, mentor, authority figure of some sort and should probably be working on his agenda once they've finished prowling the boardwalks and clubland at night. They're a step further removed from society, but they can pretend to be human for an hour or two if they really try. Also, this is the other one that was in the air and influential when V:tM first came to be - along with The Hunger, I'd recommend it as the closest to a must-watch.

Ancillae (the upper reaches of age and power offered by the V5 corebook) are more your Interview With The Vampire kind of deal. You've lived a long life, your adventuring days are behind you, and now you're something of a mover and a shaker - you're probably permitted or at least not prevented from siring and you're looking to give someone the choice you never had. Modernity gives you a headache but at least you can work a smartphone four times out of five. Ancillae games are a nice balance between "you're powerful" and "you still have to answer to someone".

If you're extending into Inconnu territory, settle down with a small glass of something and enjoy one of my favourite films ever, Only Lovers Left Alive. It's a slow story, and not a lot happens, but that's elders for you. They become introverted. They fall into a groove. They keep to each others' company. It's beautiful and haunting until some clueless childe comes along and screws it all up for them and they have to admit what they really are.

Want to figure out the Sabbat? Watch 30 Days of Night and thank me later. The vampires there are getting away with something horrible because they've fallen through the cracks in the world. They act alpha-predator but they still live on the fringe or civilisation, the little savages.

REFLEXIVE ACTION

It would be deeply remiss of me not to talk about Underworld, the film series transparently inspired by V:tM,.to the point where White Wolf as was took the producers of the original to court over it. Underworld reflects V:tM at its most "gamery" – all custom weapons, trenchcoats and corsets, fighting werewolves in the dark, flashing back to the ~~Middle~~ Dark Ages and preoccupied with impenetrable why-does-this-matter world-building. It sits at the end of that unfortunate tendency toward Desert Eagles, katanas, Dragonsbreath rounds and C4 appearing on every character sheet that found its way into V:tM's DNA from Shadowrun, along with the penchant for double handfuls of d10s and wearing sunglasses indoors. I dislike that sort of game and I'm not mad keen on Underworld either, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that this sort of thing is also peak Vampire.

WAIT, THIS ISN'T VAMPIRES!

V:tM is synonymous with politics and backstabbing, and there isn't in my opinion a vampire movie that really hits that. Thing is, Reiny-H also loves Mafia movies, and the concept of omerta – which is why, to grasp how a Prince or Baron holds court and influences people, you really should just sit down and watch The Godfather. Which is a pretty basic recommendation, granted, but I don't know if anyone else is here for my "Guy Ritchie's V:tM" style of action storytelling...

YOUR OWN PERSONAL ~~JESUS~~ TASTE

What are your top three movies? Why? That'll give you an idea of what you, as Storyteller, are most interested in running. Now grab some friends and ask them the same question. Wherever you find an overlap in your tastes, that's something that's worth focusing on in your actual game. Try to make sure there's a couple of vampire-themed answers in there, but also something else, because "being a vampire" in and of itself doesn't make a story (unless it's a quiet, short one like Only Lovers Left Alive, but that's a one-off, not a chronicle).

People often expect an RPG to come ready-made and ready-to-go ("We're playing the Lost Mines of Phandelver") and Vampire, at its best, is a bit more bespoke. Asking players about their taste in media is one way to start that tailoring process, making your V:tM something a bit different from everyone else's and getting into that transformative stuff that makes RPGs so gosh-darn amazing.

Mine, discounting the one I've already gushed about up the line, are a nebulous "pick one from Guy Ritchie's early career" and Franklyn. My games run on personality clashes and acerbic banter, generally have a couple of seemingly indestructible SPCs nobody likes and a dark secret that can absolutely take them down, someone WILL have an impenetrable regional accent, but there's also a layer of exaggerated Gothickry over everything, neuratypical characters will perceive the world very differently, vengeance and trauma will drive the major players and love may conquer all but you'll have to lose a lot to get there. None of this is essential to V:tM but it's what makes my V:tM different from A. N. Other Storyteller's.

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Playlist post!

2019-02-11T20:38:58Z

Posted by: katarik

I'd love to see other folks' playlist or mood songs, as well! *waves to the other folks who use music to get into character*

D, my primary, is a rather notorious older Lasombra, well-known in the Sabbat both for his loner tendencies and his malice. Or, well, he started that way, and accidentally made a friend out of a temporary alliance with a kine girl he was using as bait for a local Garou pack, who saved his life because it was the right thing to do, even though Christy hated him and hated the deal she was stuck in. "Good or bad, you're still a person. Or whatever you are," was how she put it. So when push came to shove, he decided he valued her more than winning, and took off. Now he mostly sulks about having to a) refocuse his gifts and modes of thinking to be a good person -- relearning Humanity is *really hard*, he whines constantly -- and b) be around the Garou Christy wound up being adopted into. The pack she was bait for in the first place. He facepalms at his life a lot. (The pack knows who he was. Other people the party runs into do *not* and are Rather Curious. This has occasionally been a problem.)

( Songs with Youtube links under the cut, and lyrics sites )

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LARP Review - Nelly's By Night

2019-02-06T02:49:50Z

Posted by: mckelly

In case anyone is interested, I went to a one shot live action game last week. Here are my thoughts on it:

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fic teaser: Phony People, Come To Prey, chapter 6 intro

2019-02-03T13:16:33Z

Posted by: propergoffick

I've started writing for my long-ass VtM: Bloodlines / Life is Strange crossover fic again. I'm also quite proud of the little "gosh it's been a month since the last chapter let's wake up and smell the plot point" intro that I wrote, so here it is to say "hello community, sorry I've been neglecting you, January was hell but I'm off work for two weeks and two of my hobby projects are finally getting some love so maybe there'll be a preview for the other one too.

This is how the word gets out. Call by call, voice by voice, the chattels of the damned spread the word. It makes the TV and the radio and the blogs, of course; unidentified man, unregistered vehicle, both found burnt out in the Hollywood Hills this morning. The facts - such as they are - trickle through narrower channels. Isaac Abrams is dead.

Sonja in Hollywood leans over the motel desk to borrow their phone, and calls Rico downtown. Rico leaves a note at the mission, ‘cause this sounds like the kind of thing Sanchez wants to know, and texts Carson: you hear anything about this big guy in Hollywood just got whacked? Carson hasn’t, so he emails Bertram, and then he waits.

Vandal hovers and hesitates as the day unfolds. This is too big. Out of his league. Goddess has to know, and she won’t be too pleased, and finally he gives in and makes the call. But come what may, the bank’s got to open up tomorrow night… so he waits.

Nadia swallows her fear, and two Ativan, and by degrees she falls asleep, and yes - for the other shoe, for the discovery she knows is coming, for the tears that will choke out of her if her resolve breaks, if Mira straight out orders it so - she waits.

And a bright spark in a dark panelled room in an old tall house on Fifth Street puts two and two together, watching and reading and listening. He makes a note for his employer, who’s not a morning person, on the official Regency paper with the official Regency pen, and he tosses it into the top tray. This is priority. And he makes a few calls, to a few tired men and women who’ve been by their phones all night, and suggests this one’s worth a look, and could they see their way clear to a BCC to this address, usual process? And because Regency has placed some key people by some key phones in some key offices all over LA in the last few years, and because they keep in touch and everyone knows it’s not what you know but who you owe, a file starts to build as the day goes by and the story doesn’t break, not quite. Nobody on TV says "believed to be retired movie producer and investor Isaac Abrams." They will, sooner or later. But the bright sparks are good at what they do. They’ll buy a night or two for the real investigation, and then - maybe - if the truth is more distracting than the lie - the world will be deemed ready to know. Of course, it all needs signing off, but that too can wait.

Until nightfall.

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Resources

2019-01-22T06:19:15Z

Posted by: eternal_life_sentence

It's not just a couple of dots on your character sheet- Resources, if played right, can open doors for your character and solve a lot of problems before they come up.

But money just doesn't appear. Unless you're playing someone lucky enough to inherit a lot of money from their sire or mortal family, they probably did something to get ahold of it. And it's a lot harder to have a normal office job when you can't go outside during the day...

So how do your PCs make their money?

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vampirethevarious @ 2019-01-17T22:28:00

2019-01-17T22:29:40Z

Posted by: midnightmusing

So, I have finally made my way here after creating my profile a while back and even though I've been subscribed :D. But, Tumblr seems quiet now and not too conducive to interaction when I feel like posting something VTMB related, so here I am.

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vampirethevarious @ 2019-01-13T17:30:00

2019-01-13T23:35:21Z

Posted by: harpers_child

Anyone else ever do moodboards for characters? The traditional character portrait never worked for me. I've found that a collection of images does the job better.

Relatedly, would anyone be interested in seeing moodboard or outfit of the day pictures people have done for characters?

(Icon related because fashion Tories are like that, okay?)

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vampirethevarious @ 2019-01-13T13:45:00

2019-01-13T18:49:20Z

Posted by: mckelly

Here's the first session of my V5 game! There were some issues with audio recording, so the first 15 minutes of the players talking didn't make it in, but nothing really exciting happened until then so not that much was missed.

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Tag structure

2019-01-13T18:17:37Z

Posted by: propergoffick

Throwing this one open for suggestions, since I have only the sketchiest of ideas myself.

I'd like to differentiate by post type (meta, humour, advice, insight, fic, news, actual play, and something for "taking the community's pulse" posts like this one). I can see the merit in tagging LARP and tabletop separately, same for Masquerade and Requiem. How far do we want to go beyond that? Do we need separate tags for each edition? How about clan tags?

Help me out here. Left to my own devices I'll either do nothing or make it heinously overcomplicated.

ETA: Right, I've started introducing some nice alphabetically sorted tags. Two things.

1: let me know if any of them are not clear - I don't always use words in a way that makes sense to other people.
2: I could do with a LARP expert to talk me through the edition history and tell me what tags would make sense there.

To be honest I wouldn't mind a LARPing co-mod as that's the bit of the game and fandom with which I'm least familiar.

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Things you should never do in Elders games

2019-01-13T15:16:43Z

Posted by: havocthecat

Anyone else ever played an Elder, either in an Elder game, or just get enough points accumulated into your character that, no matter young your character was chronologically, you were an Elder?

Theoretically, they are of greater maturity than their Ancilla or Neonate counterparts, but let's face it. We're playing for fun, not to be boring and mature.

Anyone want to share a story of things you should never do in Elders games? I mean, I've got a whole boatload of them, and I'll kick it off with some terrible decisions I have made IC for my favorite character.

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vampirethevarious @ 2019-01-12T23:38:00

2019-01-13T07:41:46Z

Posted by: arcanetrivia

Just had this conversation with my husband:

"We arm-wrestled with Potence once. It was... problematic."
"For the table?"
"It was a concrete fountain we were on, but yes."
*knowingly* "Did you break it?"
"It was an Elders game."
"...I withdraw the question."

(not sure what other tags I might add, if the community is set to allow other than admins to create new tags. have you thought about what sort of tag structure you want to create? like, would "humor" or something be appropriate here?)

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Merry Christmas to Me!

2019-01-08T07:16:08Z

Posted by: eternal_life_sentence

Courtesy of ebay and the Friendly Local Gaming Store

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New V5 Project!

2019-01-02T02:47:18Z

Posted by: mckelly

I posted about this in my personal journal, but I should probably share it here, too! I'm going to be doing a livestreamed game, beginning next week and every other Wednesday thereafter. It's going to be an Anarch-themed political thriller set in Atlanta, Georgia. We've got a fantastic group of characters lined up, and I'm really looking forward to showing them off once the game gets started.

Hope to see you there!

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A Sire's Motivations

2018-12-27T03:02:22Z

Posted by: mckelly

You all seemed to react positively to Isaac when I introduced him to you, so I decided to share an introspective scene I wrote from his point of view. It's set the night after he embraced his childe. Be prepared for massive amounts of sap.

( Fiction under the cut! )

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New Year, New Blood

2018-12-23T13:48:47Z

Posted by: propergoffick

So! As we wind our merry way toward 2019, what's everyone bringing to their table or their tablet or their tireless writing engine next year?

What do you want to see from the newly announced developers and distributors of V5? What's the content you'd pay good money to see on the Storytellers' Vault?

For that matter, what do you lovely people want this community to do? I haven't run anything like this for years, and I have only a few ideas and poor tag discipline on my side. Monthly "Tell Us About Your..." discussion posts, maybe a play by post game, fic recs, but what else?

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Clan Theme Songs

2018-12-18T06:56:12Z

Posted by: eternal_life_sentence

Please forgive me if I'm not supposed to be posting here :)

A while back, I thought it would be fun to create a playlist of "theme songs" for each of the clans. I thought I'd share mine and ask: Do any of you have something similar? What song or songs do you think go with various clans?

My list (obviously heavily biased towards my musical taste and not as complete as I'd like it to be):

Brujah: Hammerfall- Templars of Steel (not a 100% match, but bonus points for absolutely being the song they would pick for themselves)

Followers of Set: The Struts- Roll Up

Gangrel: Breaking Benjamin- Feed the Wolf

Giovanni: Lacuna Coil- Angel's Punishment

Lasombra: Digital Daggers- Where the Lonely Ones Roam

Malkavians: Thousand Foot Krutch- Fly on the Wall (so, so perfect)

Ravnos: Valerie Broussard- Trouble

Toreador: Blackbriar- Preserved Roses (if you told me this song was actually written about the clan, I would not be surprised)

Tremere: New Years Day- Kill or Be Killed

Ventrue: Panic! At the Disco- Emperor's New Clothes (one of the ones I'm not as happy with...)

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Vampire: the Who What Now? (an orientation post)

2018-12-11T10:16:00Z

Posted by: propergoffick

Vampire is a table top role playing game, a live action role playing game, and at least three video games about pretending to be a vampire. And some card games and a board game which involve a bit less pretending.

It exists as two settings/product lines - Vampire: the Masquerade and Vampire: the Requiem - which use a lot of the same words and were worked on by a lot of the same people and essentially do the same thing in similar-but-different ways.

It was definitely created in 1991. By the turn of the millennium, things got a bit complicated, intellectual properties changed hands, licencing was involved, at least one attempt at an MMO was made, and most of the actual people involved had moved on in some way or another. The current shape of things is a bit like this:

Vampire: the Masquerade

TTRPG

First, second, third (Revised) and fourth (V20) editions are all licensed by Onyx Path Publishing. Books for second, Revised and V20 are all available via DriveThruRPG (where, just to confuse everyone, they're still under White Wolf's publisher imprint). If the cover has green marble, it's one of these.

Second, Revised and V20 also have a historical setting - Vampire: the Dark Ages, or occasionally Dark Ages Vampire (because Revised just had to be different). Both of these are, again, licensed by Onyx Path Publishing and available via DriveThruRPG (links are attached to the names 'cause it's a tiny bit clearer that way). If the cover has black marble, it's one of these.

Revised edition has another historical setting - Victorian Age Vampire. Yellowing covers with wrought iron bits on them.

There are also two localised settings. Kindred of the East is a compatible sister game for second and Revised edition which details the very different kinds of vampire found across China, Japan and associated territories. Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom is a localisation of Revised edition, which reskins and reinterprets the core clans, storyline and themes of Vampire for games set in sub-Saharan Africa.

Fifth edition (V5) is overseen by White Wolf Entertainment, a division of Paradox Interactive, who currently own the Vampire IP (and the greater World of Darkness IP of which it's part). Digital products are available from the World of Darkness webstore, physical books/dice/screens etcetera are available from Your Friendly Local Gaming Store or direct from distributor Modiphius. Onyx Path Publishing also releases supplementary material for V5, via Kickstarter. If the cover has white marble, it's one of these.

Hopelessly confused? No worries.

For V20 (omnibus edition, plot-driven gameplay where your characters happen to be vampires), start here.
For V5 (newest edition, character-driven gameplay that's very much about the experience of Being A Vampire), start here.

LARP

Live action rules are the purview of By Night Studios and again, books are available via DriveThruRPG.

Video games

2000's Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption (available via Steam and GOG) and 2004's Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines (again, via Steam and GOG). Both are published by Activision.

Note: Redemption has the capacity to create and run multiplayer environments. How well this works eighteen years after release and several compatibility redesigns later I've no idea.
Note: Bloodlines is barely playable without the Unofficial Patch mod by Wesp5. The GOG version comes with the latest Basic version of this mod by default. There's also a Plus option which makes changes to the game, adding subsystems and restoring cut content~~, some of which was better left cut if you ask me but never mind~~.

There's also Vampire: the Masquerade: We Eat Blood And All Our Friends Are Dead, one of two storylines included in World of Darkness Preludes. This mobile game with a PC port was intended to set the scene for V5 and establish the game's aesthetic. It's available on ~~Steam~~.
2020 update: after the baggage surrounding Preludes writer, known asshole and accused rapist Zak Smith became too significant to ignore, Preludes was pulled from sale.

While it's not an official and licensed Vampire product, Dontnod's Vampyr (for PC, XONE and PS4) is a transparently obvious spiritual successor to the Vampire: the Masquerade titles. I'm not saying they went through Activision's bins and nicked off with everything that wouldn't get them sued, but everything from "aggravated damage" to "the Embrace" says this game's wearing its influences on its sleeve.

There's also the Princes of Darkness mod for Crusader Kings II, which is an unlicensed but popular simulator for the continent-spanning War of Princes that defines Vampire's Dark Ages setting. Personally, I can't stand it, but if you're into super-granular grand strategy games it's apparently brilliant.

Other stuff

Onyx Path also has an official Redbubble store, and has produced a card game about Vampire politics called Prince's Gambit.

A legacy board game, Vampire: the Masquerade - Heritage by Nice Game Publishing, was released in 2020.

A narrative board game, Vampire: the Masquerade – Chapters by Flyos Games, funded on Kickstarter in early 2020. Your moderator will be leaping on the late backer train as soon as it reaches the station...

There was a Living Card Game, Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, which Black Chantry Productions are bringing back into print... soon.

And, Caine preserve us, there was Kindred: the Embraced, a short-lived telly series which did the best it could under difficult circumstances.

Vampire: the Requiem

TTRPG

Vampire: the Requiem has had a relatively modest two editions. Both are produced by Onyx Path Publishing, under license, and both are available through DriveThruRPG. Red cover? It's Requiem.

First edition Requiem was based on the "New World of Darkness" core game. It's a toolbox for playing archetypal vampires - the least developer-driven of the Vampire games, and the most open to individual interpretation and creativity. You'll need the New World of Darkness rulebook and the Vampire: the Requiem rulebook to play.

Second edition Requiem introduces more complexity to the mechanics and adds backstory and metaplot, making it more of a traditional "we give you canon" RPG. It's compatible with the Chronicles of Darkness material (the new name for the New World of Darkness) but doesn't need it. Start with the core rulebook here.

LARP

Rules for live-action Requiem are published under the Mind's Eye Theatre imprint. Start here.

The Storytellers' Vault

The Storytellers' Vault is a DriveThruRPG spinoff site, curated by White Wolf Entertainment, for fans to create and sell content. Mostly game supplements, but there's demand for art packs, novels and resources. Sky's the limit, really. Guidelines and resources for Storyteller's Vault creators are here. The house particularly recommends the Style Guides for each of the product lines as well as Bite Me by Rose Bailey, the Vampire line's longest-serving developer.

I bet that's cleared up precisely nothing.

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BITE ME: How to Write Vampire (Rose Bailey) (Storyteller's Vault)

2018-12-10T22:31:53Z

Posted by: propergoffick

www.storytellersvault.com/product/261142/BITE-ME-How-to-Write-Vampire

Rose Bailey managed and oversaw Vampire: the Requiem's second edition, Vampire: the Masquerade's twentieth anniversary edition, and God, tons of other stuff. She's the longest serving Vampire developer by a good year or so, the one I always forget about because I wasn't paying attention to the development circumstances at the time, and - now that I've read her developer guidelines and the notes she's added five years down the line - she might actually be one of my favourites.

Basically: read this book. Read this book if you have the slightest insecurity about how you run your Vampire game, the slightest inclination toward writing something for the Storyteller's Vault. It is very much a Requiem product, but a lot of the style guidance and the specific cautions against key acts of shittiness can and should apply to Masquerade as well.

Rose's point of view isn't definitive. But it is good to know. After all, if you know exactly what the line was trying to do, you know what it is you're trying to change, and that's always useful. And for me, as a scholar of the line, it's borderline essential.

Vampire is a game of personal horror. Personal means grounded stories we can identify with, as I’ve been saying a lot. But horror? Horror is that, when put in those situations that we understand, our characters do very bad things. A lot of the time, this means violence. Vampires rip out people’s throats or beat them ‘til they cry. But it also means manipulation. It means convincing your old best friend to hide that gun for you, even though you know he’s going to get caught.

Vampires exploit people. Viewing the world from their perspective means facing the consequences of that exploitation.

But you know what, maybe they don’t. That gun? Why are you planting it? The cops can’t hurt you, why not keep it in your own backpack? Just because you’re a vampire doesn’t mean you’re a relentless asshole. Plenty of Darkness to go ‘round this parts. Won’t be easy, but you can choose to be the light. And if you don’t have that chance, if players aren’t offered it, then the game is saying absolutely nothing meaningful or fun. Might as well play Galaga and pretend the enemy ships have crews or something.

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Tell Me About Your Characters

2018-12-07T18:55:47Z

Posted by: propergoffick

Forget about the pages of rules and the handfuls of dice. Close the book, turn out the lights, and tell me a story about dark desires and relentless hunger. Tell me about a vampire: about her talents and her weaknesses, and you tell me what kind of challenges she faces, what rewards or perils come her way.
-- Vampire: the Masquerade (Revised)

Since we're all new here: let's do what used to be not the done thing at all, when I was a lad. Tell me about your characters! Open your hatch and disgorge that nourishing vampire tea.

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