Vampire: the Various

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?

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?