We’re going back to the early nights of good ol’ Vampire: the Masquerade, having previously read the first edition core and a pair of quickstart adventures. Now, we’re heading into the meat of it, with Ashes to Ashes, the first serious adventure installment. This is the one that really set the tone for the entire World of Darkness behemoth, folks. Let’s dig in.
Ashes to Ashes follow directly on the sample scenario in the core, where the characters were residents of the dreary seen-better-days vampire community of the dreary seen-better-days city of Gary, Indiana. After attending a party at Prince Modius’ mansion full of sinister undercurrents, they were ordered to get their undead asses to Chicago and meet with Prince Lodin. They weren’t told where to find him, only that Chicago vampires hang out at a place called The Succubus Club, so off they went into the night with insufficient direction and flimsy guarantees of support.
The players go to The Succubus Club and run into one hellraising Anarch and one snooty Elder loyalist, both of whom can offer suggestions for where to go next, so we have a bit of a branching path here. If they take the Anarch’s advice, they stumble right into the play example from the core book, meet Sheriff (who still isn’t the sheriff because that’s not a thing yet, just a guy whose nickname is “Sheriff”) and almost get burned alive alongside a bunch of Anarchs. If they go the Elder route, they get directed to another club where they have a run-in with vampire Harry Houdini (yes, really) and get directed to someone who says he’s the Prince but isn’t actually.
I can’t help it notice that clubs and night hang-outs play a considerable role in all these modules. They’re always lovingly described, too, with a lot of detail about what sort of music they play, what the ambience is like, and what sort of people come here. You feel like the writers were warm to the subject. In fact, you get the distinct impression that the writers thought that the main appeal of being a vampire was that you got to sleep all day and go clubbing all night, forever…
Anyway, the players eventually get sent to a sports arena just before dawn, where they get kidnapped by a bunch of armed guys who arrive in a chopper, and they wake up at a restaurant being interrogated by a Fat Bastard (TM) named Ballard, who scarfs down copious amounts of food while accusing them of having kidnapped the Prince. I love it, it’s so Gothic-surreal. Anyway, Ballard isn’t convinced by the players insisting they’ve never even met Prince Lodin, but says that they’d better find him or he’ll call a Blood Hunt on their asses, so they get sent off with Sheriff to investigate the disappearance.
The players get to examine Lodin’s haven, but before they can get very far an Anarch shows up to rescue them from Sheriff. They can either go along with it (in which case the Elders will hate them) or defend Sheriff (in which case the Anarchs will hate them). It’s kind of not-so-subtly implied that siding with the counterculture against The Man is what any cool person would do, though.
If they do side with the Anarch and let themselves get rescued, they get sent to a supposed safe haven for the day, but find out that it’s an active crime scene – someone found an ancient corpse there. They can also find some very old and potent vampire blood on the premises that can give them temporary Disciplines if they drink it, because this was the early days and White Wolf wasn’t as psychotically determined to gate the players off from anything deemed overpowered yet.
They can decide that it must be Lodin and try to get hold of the corpse, which the police has handed over to a “specialist” who’s actually a vampire hunter and who has his house trapped from top to bottom with anti-vampire traps. If they do take possession of the corpse, though, they end up mind-whammied and black out, coming to after they’ve apparently hidden the corpse somewhere but can’t remember where. Mysteeeeeerious.
With the help of a quirky tabloid journalist, the players eventually find out that Lodin was kidnapped by a rogue ghoul who’s leading a pagan cult out in the sticks and needed a new source of vampire blood after the police nabbed his last one (that’d be the corpse from the last paragraph, natch). They head over, fight a ghouled goat along the way, and finally confront the ghoul (who’s got a ton of Disciplines, because again, these were early days and White Wolf was more generous with letting characters get superpowers) and hopefully save Prince Lodin before he gets eaten by a swarm of ghouled rats. Good times all around!
There’s also a sort of sub-adventure for True Roleplayers, where everyone plays ghouls of Lodin back in the 60s where they have to bust their butts and risk their lives getting Lodin to London so that he can… play a game of chess with a friend of his. It’s meant to further bring home just what massive jerks vampires are and how shamelessly they use them for their own convenience, and that’s meant to hint at how everything in the main adventure has been informed by people’s hidden agendas and opportunistic exploitations.
All in all, this is pretty damn awesome. The story is colourful, there are a ton of fascinating setpieces, most of the NPCs are well-realised, and the plot is meant to get the players feel jerked around and unfairly treated at every step while still giving them plenty of agency and opportunities to be cool.
One thing that really stands out for me is how down to earth it all feels – all the overblown Gothic imagery is rooted in prosaic realities, and everything has an explanation no matter how bizarre it looks. And that also helps with doing something that I’m afraid the World of Darkness entirely lost its knack for later on, which is making the mortals interesting. It’s a story about vampires, sure, but the mortals they run into, all the cops and journalists and hunters and clubbers, are interesting characters in their own right, with their own foibles and goals and capabilities. The simple stuff matters, here, and the complicated stuff is ultimately built on a foundation of it.
I’m actually tempted to run this, if I could find some players who haven’t been exposed to any thirty-year-old spoilers…
Mister Monster's Workshop 
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