world of darkness – Mister Monster's Workshop

Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough: The Succubus Club

Previously in our Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough:

Previously throughout this readthrough I have wittily jested that the true protagonists of Vampire: the Masquerade aren’t the actual vampires, but the various clubs, restaurants, bars, and sundry night-time hangouts they spend their unlives slouching coolly in. And now… we’re going to go over an entire supplement devoted to a single night club. At this point I’m no longer sure if I’m joking or if I’ve genuinely hit on a significant insight…

Yes, it’s the famous Succubus Club, Chicago’s hottest fictional establishment! If you play a Chicago campaign, chances are you’re going to be assumed to be heading here every night by default. The corners are dark, the bands are hardcore, and every single one of the patrons think they’re cooler than you. Never mind all the lore about clans and Blood Bonds and Anarchs – what the game is really about, the actual unbeating heart of it, is hanging out at a happening joint and reveling in how incredibly dark, deep, punk, and supremely not-like-your-parents you are. Everything else exists only to support that experience, I’m telling ya!

We start out with a description of the club itself. It’s owned by Brennan Thornhill, one of Prince Lodin’s many childer and exotic foreigner supreme (precisely where he comes from varies by his mood at the moment, but it’s always somewhere sexy). Lodin embraced him on his request, in return for him using the club to gather information on the Kindred who invariably congregate there. However, since everything always has a deeper level in Chicago, the club actually exists in the first place because the Methuselah Helena slept beneath it for centuries and she still has her haven there.

The establishment consists of a number of different areas. First is the regular dance floor, also known as “Reality.” Above Reality is a series of balconies where the very coolest people can stand and gaze down disdainfully on the unwashed crowd below, nicknamed “Elysium” as a Kindred in-joke. Above even that is the VIP lounge where private parties are held. And down in the cellar is “the Labyrinth,” a set of dark, winding corridors where people go to carry out sordid trysts and illicit affairs. There’s an actual list of random encounters for the Labyrinth, which is a nice touch, but I’m not sure why there isn’t one for Reality and Elysium too?

Helena’s haven is described, with a ton of fake-outs, traps, and general paranoid security measures, including a giant ghoul scorpion. She sleeps in dried-up well ringed with flame thrower traps that she has to very carefully climb in and out of each time. I kind of love how this sounds a) completely impossible for any would-be assassin to penetrate, and b) absolutely wretched. That’s vampirism for you, I guess; living forever, at the cost of giving up most of the things that make life worth the effort.

The club draws a diverse crowd. Blood Dolls (vampire wannabees, basically) are obviously common, but you also get a lot of artsy types who enjoy hanging out in Elysium and doing really great drugs. Punks and gangstas also show up, a lot of them doing business down in the Labyrinth. Among vampires, Toreadors and Ventrue are the most common guests, with Annabelle, the Toreador Primogen, being the greatest patron. It attracts more Anarchs than Elders, though; Elders and their followers tend to frequent competing hangout The Blue Velvet instead.

We get a cast of characters, some with stats, both individual ones like Brennan and general ones like Blood Dolls. Perhaps notably, we get stats for the ghoul bouncers, in case the players start something.

The rest of the book is made up by adventures that take place in, or at least heavily feature, The Succubus Club.

In Annabelle’s Party, the players are invited to a high-class get-together in the penthouse arranged by Toreador Primogen Annabelle. Every single thing about it goes wrong, though; a divorced couple who hate each other both got invited and end up causing a scene, an “art piece” gets unveiled to great fanfare but turns out to just be part of a steam locomotive, and Annabelle’s childe Sophia (remember her?) tries to adopt strip tease to Kindred sensibilities by including blood play in an amazingly tacky display that almost makes everyone involved frenzy.

Then, as the pièce de résistance, Annabelle starts playing a “newly composed piece inspired by her” on the piano, which goes fine until an attending Tremere snidely turns the notes upside down and starts playing them that way – and it’s a super-famous piece of classical music. At that point, Annabelle promptly frenzies from sheer humiliation and tries to rip the offending Tremere’s throat out with her teeth. I got to admit, that had me laughing.

Anyway, the reason for all the disasters (except for Sophia’s; she caused hers all on her own) is that Ballard (a very clever Ventrue) wants to take Annabelle down a peg, so he previously encouraged Drummond (a very dumb Ventrue) in an ill-advised attempt to make his beloved trains a cultural focus, knowing that Annabelle would publically scoff at his efforts, leaving him humiliated. Ballard then consoled Drummond and hinted ever so subtly that it would serve Annabelle right if she got humiliated in turn, leading Drummond to go around mind-whammying a variety of people to cause the flustercluck just described. Meanwhile, Ballard can just sit back and watch as two of his rivals trash each other, leaving him better off regardless of the outcome.

I love this, because it actually provides an example of just how Elders might subtly scheme against each other. In a lot of books, we just get told that vampires “manipulate” each other, but not what it actually looks like. Well, here it is. This is a subtle scheme of multiple layers, with explanations for what actual, practical actions everyone took to make it come about.

Anyway, the players can involve themselves, and maybe go to the train station where Drummond has his haven to give him a talking to before Annabelle tracks him down and does something hasty to him. Getting in involves riding a giant train set, because Drummond is a ridiculous man-child. I love that too.

In Player of Pawns, the players become unknowingly conscripted by Critias, one of the two Brujah Primogen, in his game against visiting Elder Dimitri (which he has in turn been compelled to play by the influence of the Methuselah Menele, who is trying to turn him into a stronger pawn – yeah, wheels within wheels). The players first encounter the two at the Elysium level of the Succubus Club, where they are playing an oddly ominous game of chess. Later, one of them gets kidnapped by Dimitri and thrown into a cell, where they’ll spend much of the adventure while the others are out looking for them. That sounds a bit tricky to pull off efficiently at the table, but okay.

The first night they’re captive, Dimitri will throw in a mortal with them. The cell is air tight, so the mortal will die; the question is whether the player comforts him in his dying moments, kills him themselves so he’ll have a quick death, feeds on him (hey, waste not, want not) or breaks Tradition by embracing him so he can survive (after a fashion) without oxygen. The next night, Dimitri throws in another mortal, along with an oxygen mask this time. Thus, this time the player has the choice of keeping her alive… but of course, if they turned the first mortal, now he’s a vampire too, and he’s desperate for some blood. Oooooh, that’s some quality angst, that is!

Meanwhile, one of Dimitri’s minions – a weird Finnish shaman with a brand new thaumaturgical path called Spirit Thaumaturgy – will try and fail to abduct another player, getting captured instead. The players can get the location of the captive player out of him, free their companion (who’ll be guarded by a “Hag,” which seems to be some sort of weird evil spirit thing that I don’t think is ever mentioned before or after this), and take the fight to Dimitri. If they beat him, then Critias wins the game and diablerises him. Either way, the players have been thoroughly used and will get nothing for it – such is the lot of powerless Neonates caught in the games of Elders!

In Fundamental Differences, the Succubus Club is subjected to an angry crowd of Christian protestors, secretly whipped up by Modius as proof that he is too still a relevant and powerful adversary for Lodin. What Modius hasn’t counted on is that one of the protestors is a pious guy named Terrence Coleman, who has True Faith – one of the World of Darkness’ most constantly retconned subjects, but here shown as a supernatural force that sends Brennan flying through the air when he goes out to give the protestors a stern talking to.

Brennan freaks the hell out and demands that the players help him killinate Terrence. The problem is, this is a really bad idea, because not only is Terrence protected by his mystical possibly-holy force field, but he stays close to the crowd all the time and fortuitously dodges any clandestine attempts at his life without knowing about them (e.g., if the players poison his drink, someone bumps into him and he spills it). If some injury is somehow done to him, it causes a big outcry in the days to come and gets a lot of eyes turned towards the Succubus Club to the point where it won’t make for a particularly good vampire hangout anymore. But of course, if the players don’t go along with what Brennan says, they’ll have ticked off an Elder. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

In Death’s Sweet Sting, an especially savage vampire-on-human murder happens at the Succubus Club, and the players are approached by a vampire hunter named Saul who claims to have been on the guilty party’s trail for a while and to need their help in bringing him down. Since he’s clearly out of all control and the police are starting to breathe down the neck of every vampire at the club (the lead detective is recurring vampire hunter NPC Gregory Stephens, so he knows damn well that this was a vampire killing, even if he can’t tell his colleagues as much), the players have every reason to help out in ending this threat to the Masquerade.

It’s actually a little more complicated; Saul is a biochemist, and he’s created a blood-born virus that drives vampires crazy and ultimately kills them. The vampire was his first test subject. The virus was meant to kill quickly, though, not make them psychotically dangerous for long periods of time while it slowly wore them down. Now he’s desperate to put the genie back in the bottle before he’s the cause of a plague of deranged super-human killers roaming the land and creating a massive human body count.

The players ultimately manage to set a trap for the killer and corner him after a wild chase scene where they get to jump between roof tops and other fun stuff. They take him down, but shortly thereafter they discover that they’ve been infected with the virus. Oooops.

So the players start developing symptoms, including frenzy checks getting harder, and so do a lot of other Kindred in Chicago. Saul comes clean, and the players find themselves having to seek out a scientist at Chicago University and convincing him to create a cure.

I like how this adventure highlights something that keeps coming up in these early books, which is how the vampire condition isn’t stable and understood. It’s a black box; vampires know roughly and from observation how their supernatural biologies normally work, but they don’t have any actual insight into why they work or how they’re even possible. When they start going haywire, they don’t know how to fix them. That’s a pretty effective device for introducing that “personal horror” that the game is supposed to be all about, and I think it kind of got crushed under the sheer weight of material later in the game’s history; when you have a gazillion different writers working on a gazillion different books, you need the rules to be ironclad or you’ll end up with a big mess. Still, a shame.

The last two adventures are connected, forming a short campaign called Child’s Play. In the first, Paper Chase, the players get handed a message by a mind-whammied courier. It’s from a guy named Herdon who’s a fence in illicitly acquired antique manuscripts, and he is inviting them to bid on a previously unknown fragment of The Book of Nod (which is basically the vampire Bible; it doesn’t necessarily contain the truth about early Kindred history, but enough traditional-minded Kindred believe that it does that a previously-unknown fragment would make a tremendous bargaining chip) who he’s got a seller for.

The message seems to imply knowledge of the fact that they’re vampires but actually, Herdon has no idea; Nicolai, the Tremere Primogen, told him that he could get in touch with some collectors of this kind of rare texts, had Herdon write the invitation, and then mind-whammied the courier into handing it to the players. The fragment is also a fake, and the sellers are a pair of vampire hunters trying to draw vampires in to killinate them. Nicolai knows that, and just wants to see how the players will react under pressure.

Got all that? Whew.

Anyway, once the players meet with Herdon, the vampire hunters – who are keeping him under surveillance – will know who they are, and will launch an attack. The players will also have to fight rival vampires who also want the supposed Book of Nod fragment. Meanwhile, Nicolai is watching and taking notes.

The second part of Child’s Play is called Grand Elusion. Nicolai, impressed with the players’ performance in the last adventure, gets in touch with them and asks them to kill Vampire Harry Houdini for him.

Yes, really. Remember how I mentioned back in Ashes to Ashes that Vampire Harry Houdini was a thing? He’s still a thing. Here we further learn that he’s a Tremere, but that he broke free of the Blood Bond to the Tremere Elders that all Tremere are required to have. How in tarnation did he do that? Ah-ah-ah, a magician never reveals his tricks! (he probably learned how from the Sabbat, though) Anyway, he goes by Ehrich Weiss these days, and the Tremere are not at all happy with him going around all sorts of un-enslaved and all, so Nicolai figures he can score brownie points with the Tremere Council of Seven by bumping him off.

So the players head off to The Cave, which is the blue-collar bar where Ehrich tends to hide out, and try to get his whereabouts out of the rough, tough bikers there. One way to do that is to beat the roughest, toughest biker in a game of chess, since he’s partial to it and it’s therefore a very MANLY pastime (and anyone who says otherwise is crusin’ for a bruisin’). I kind of love that.

Anyway, they will find out that Ehrich is supposed to be at Ye Olde Magic Shoppe, an establishment in the part of town the Kindred call “the Hive” (because it’s swarming with inferior beings, i.e., humans). The players go there, talk to the proprietor, dodge an annoying tabloid reporter who’s looking for “supernatural occurrences,” and find out that Ehrich moved on to the Succubus Club. Because of course we were going to end up there eventually, did you not see the title of the book?

Ehrich is hanging out with a magus named Gibson, who is not only drunk but also quite senile. Ehrich will tell the players that they’d be better off siding with him against Nicolai because, well, Nicolai is basically a great big jerk who considers them expendable cannon fodder (which is perfectly accurate: he is and he does). Whether they are convinced or not, Gibson’s treacherous apprentice Orloff will choose that time to send some brainwashed minions at the lot of them, trying to kill Gibson. Ehrich and Gibson flee into the Labyrinth, pursued by some more pawns of Nicolai’s, some additional vampires who have randomly chosen this time to get involved, and possibly the players depending on whether they’ve sided with or against them. Mayhem, basically.

Depending on how the whole thing ends up, the players face various consequences. Going along with Ehrich is actually the right choice here, because he’ll make good on his promises and put them in touch with some of his powerful allies in town, whereas Nicolai won’t punish them for their treachery since the whole debacle has already made him look bad and he wants to distance himself from it. If, on the other hand, they managed to kill Ehrich, Nicolai will see them as powerful tools. And what do we do with powerful tools? We Blood Bond and Dominate them within an inch of their unlives, of course! Can’t risk them turning on us.

I really love all of those scenarios. Some of them seem like they’d be a bit hard to actually run, but there is some real ambition and thought behind all of them – you can tell that the writers were trying to create deep, affecting, angsty experiences for the players, and they beautifully portray the dark whimsy of the setting. Something I especially like is how it’s not afraid to have a sense of humour; vampires can be terrifying, pathetic, or darkly admirable, but they can also be ridiculous. This, as I have touched on before, is important in a game where there is a mechanic for botching rolls.

Next up is The Player’s Guide, where, I am sorry to say, things take a turn for the worse. Stay tuned.

Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough: Chicago by Night (first edition)

Previously in our Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough:

We have reached a historical moment: the very first World of Darkness citybook! Interestingly, the city so honoured isn’t one of the commonly romanticised American cities like New York or Los Angeles, but Chicago, a place that the book’s own introduction admits lacks a distinct character. In many ways, though, I think that’s a strength of the supplement and the early game in general. Anyone can be gothic-punk when living in an ancient, decaying metropolis. The tone of early VtM captured something a lot closer to earth and with more obvious connection to the game’s target audience: “I’m an interestingly dark, soulful creature of the night… so why am I stuck in this lame-ass dump?!” It’s about being an immortal, blood-sucking fiend in Flyover Country, and I feel like the game lost something when it gradually transitioned out towards the coastal enclaves.

Anyway, let’s dig in.

The book starts out with the expected flourishes, including by a Theme (“nothing is what it seems”) and Mood (“chaos”), as well as insincere assurances that of course you can change anything you want. There is also something I think is very interesting, though: an actual explanation for why the World of Darkness is so gothic-punk.

It’s like this. Vampires are old, and they tend to think of themselves as cultured. So they tend to encourage businesses that cater to a more traditional aesthetics and highbrow esoteric interests, artificially propping them up long after they would, in our vampire-free world, have collapsed from changing customs and public tastes. But vampires are also fundamentally parasites, and it is in their nature to always take a little too much. Thus, they gradually bleed their favoured institutions dry even as they’re holding them in place, resulting in a world where everything seems perpetually sickly and decaying while also stubbornly refusing to die. And of course, vampires are also completely heartless about anything that makes them money, resulting in rampant crime and plenty of down-and-outs, drug addicts, bums, untreated mentally ill people, and just general drifting losers… who, probably not coincidentally, no one will care about if they suddenly go missing because a vampire is feeling peckish.

Which makes a morbid sort of sense, and anchors the flavour of the setting firmly in the failings and dysfunctions of the game’s main characters. It’s a world a la vampire. That’s cool in a way that the other game lines never were, because they always placed the blame somewhere else – it was the Wyrm, it was the Technocracy, it was those filthy soulless normies; at the very most you took a little of the blame for not managing to stop them, but if there had been nothing but people like you in the world everything would have been great forever. Here, though? It was you. The world is like this because you’re in it. Deal with it.

We get a word on Prince Lodin and the general power structure of Chicago. In addition to the regular Traditions, Loding enforces some rules of his own: the police and the press are his to mess with and no one else may touch them, visitors to the city may not be permanently harmed, and keep things civil during Elysium (more on that later). He’s not, however, as all-powerful as he seems, because in fact the Primogen are pulling his strings, and a pair of feuding Methuselah who hardly anyone knows about are pulling theirs. Again, nothing is what it seems.

History! Back before Chicago even properly existed, the Methuselah Menele and Helena fought a great battle there and thrashed each other into centuries-spanning torpors. While they napped, Lodin made himself Prince by driving off the previous one during the Great Chicago Fire. He promptly killed all the Ventrue who had helped him, so ever since then all Ventrue in Chicago is Lodin’s progeny. Modius (remember him?) challenged him with the backing of some socialists and unionists, but Lodin ended up first sending him packing to Gary, then having his childe Ballard wreck the American steel industry just to destroy Modius’ power base among the steel workers. Yeah, I’m thinking that ended up retconned to hell and back, but for now? The reason for the Rust Belt is that Lodin was feeling pissy. That’s canon.

After Modius was dealt with, Lodin chilled for a few decades, but then Anarchs started creeping in. He massacred them in the fifties, but they came right in the eighties under the leadership of a charismatic woman named Maldavis who was secretly backed by several of the Primogen. Maldavis managed to oust Lodin’s puppet mayor and get a progressive one elected, and went on chipping away on Lodin’s power base until he went groveling before the Primogen and got them to turn on Maldavis in return for effectively making himself their puppet ruler.

Exceeeeept all of this was actually controlled from behind the scenes by Helena and Menele who was mind-whammying people even from torpor, with Helena usually backing Lodin and Menele running the opposition. They also control about half the Primogen each, though Menele is working on turning as many of Helena’s supporters as possible and then springing a trap on her. Helena has awakened from torpor, though she’s still weak and posing as a neonate; Menele is still napping and is in fact that mysteeeeeerious corpse that the players might have encountered in Ashes to Ashes.

Geography! My least favourite subject in school, except for PE, and time hasn’t improved it! It doesn’t help that the chapter is all jumbled up – roughly speaking, it describes areas and neighbourhood from a mundane, mortal perspective first, then goes back over them to explain how they’re important to vampires, but information is scattered throughout both sections and it all makes it terribly hard to keep track of what part of town I’m even reading about. A few highlights include the fact that Ballard (that obese Tim Burton-ish vampire who the players met in Ashes to Ashes) has nearly run his favourite restaurant out of business by insisting on taking a central table and then eating until everyone around him is sick. He has learned to keep the food down instead of immediately puking it up as vampires usually do when they try to eat regular food, but this apparently only makes the display slightly less sickening. Heh.

Also, there are occult temples in Lincoln Park that can teach you thaumaturgy – not very well, but they can, because thaumaturgy isn’t unique to vampires but is really just “magic.” See, this is one thing that I love about these early books – they weren’t so up their own asses about how vampires/werewolves/mages/whatever were SUPER SPECIAL AND BEYOND YOUR LIMITED COMPREHENSION. Regular people could learn some magic tricks, it was just easier for magical people. And conversely, there were things like Vampire Louis Pasteur inventing a de-vamp-ifying serum, because science and technology could actually interact with supernatural things. None of it was easy, there were practical reasons why it didn’t happen very often, but it wasn’t strictly gated away where the filthy normies couldn’t get to it.

Vampires refer to just about anything outside of Chicago proper but which is still technically part of the city as “the Outlands,” because they’re pretentious bastards. The Outlands include the airports and the Brookfield Zoo (handy for grabbing some low-grade blood when you’re desperate). Whether they include the city of Gary depends on whether you want to terminally piss off Modius by saying they do or you want to terminally piss off Lodin by saying they don’t (pro-tip: it’s safer to piss off Modius).

Elysium! This will later be a universal part of the setting, but here it’s described as a custom specific to Chicago. Basically, the Primogen like to be able to go to the opera or other highbrow places and discreetly scheme with each other there, and they would prefer it if no one interrupted them. So certain hoity-toity establishments are declared “Elysium” and you’d better not make trouble there or so help you. They’re also open to all vampires who want to attend, though if you do everyone will think you’re sucking up to the elders (which you probably are). Also, you can’t talk politics at an Elysium (because this is a place of respite from worldly concerns and and shame on you for trying to ruin the vibe), unless a Primogen brings up the subject first in which case it’s not only fine but mandatory (because of course addressing this incredibly important issue comes before your silly enjoyment). So basically, they’re kind of like the power-tripping admins of any online forum I’ve ever been on.

The Rack is the polar opposite of the Elysium, being the hot clubs where Anarchs hang out. The Succubus Club (which will get its own book, so be patient) is mentioned, and so is The Cave, which is this rugged working-class bar for manly blue-collar men, and The Blue Velvet, which is seemingly mortal-owned but oddly accommodating to vampires. The concept of Blood Dolls is also described, which is nice because it’s the kind of phrase that later books throw around and assume you’re familiar with. Basically, they’re humans trying very hard to act like vampires (without actually knowing that real vampires exist), including by sharing blood – which is very convenient for actual vampires, because it makes them look about 100% less suspicious when they’re in a Blood Doll hangout.

The part of downtown south of the river is called “the Hive” by the Kindred, the implication being that mortals are scurrying insects. Okay, I’m starting to think the Garou have the right idea re: the Kindred needing to have their undead asses kicked. Anyway, it’s described as both crime-ridden and inhabited mostly by poor ethnic minorities and the centre of business and politics in the city, and I’m not sure if that’s just bad writing or if it was a contradiction that really did exist in the real Chicago of 1992.

“The Barrens,” finally, is the vampire all-purpose name for any and every place where they don’t wanna go, apparently usually because it’s full of disagreeable poor people. You’d think they’d be especially interested in going there, then, since poor people can make less of a fuss about people chewing on them than rich people, but okay… Two examples are the Michigan Avenue Underground, where the street runs in two levels and the lower street is perpetually in darkness and vagrants tend to live there to stay out of the rain, and the Cabrini Green Housing Project, which is a ghetto for the poor that’s filled with street crime encouraged by real estate developers who want to drive the poor out so they can put up actual profitable building there. Well, that’s suitably bleak!

The real meat of the book is of course the NPC section, which does not disappoint. Something I really like is how it presents entire lineages of vampires, so you can read about why Vampire A sired Vampire B, how Vampire B inevitably failed to play the practical or emotional role that Vampire A had hoped it would, and how Vampire B then went on to sire Vampire C for its own reasons and to its own eventual disappointment. You really get a sense of dysfunctional family histories, with each generation resenting the one before and expecting too much of the one after it.

Right off the bat we get a deeper description of Menele (he’s the oldest Brujah, so he comes first in the list). Apparently he was once the king of a Greek city-state who got turned by “a Third-Generation Brujah” (not described as an Antediluvian, which might be significant) named Troile after the sacking of Troy (would you believe those bastard Troyans had stolen his wife?!). He then played a part in the founding of Carthage, here described as a Brujah-created utopia where vampires and humans managed to live together for mutual advantage. Sadly, Carthage was betrayed by Helena to its Ventrue and Malkavian enemies and their Roman pawns, leading to a long-running battle across history that included the eruption of Vesuvius and the fall of the Incan Empire (yes, really) before leading to that fateful showdown near what would become Chicago.

We also, sadly, see the beginning of power creep in that Menele has several Disciplines above 5 (yes, he’s a Methuselah, but remember how the core said that that meant he might have as many as fifteen dots of Disciplines combined? Yeah, that didn’t last long). Apparently his super-Auspex means that he can sense what’s going on around him even when in torpor, and his super-Dominate means that he can mind-whammy anyone who touches his inert form. Still not sure how those fairly modest abilities lets him be one of the power players in the city, mind you. Yes, I am simultaneously complaining that this is too much and not enough, whatsittooya?!

We’re also informed that Menele was responsible for most of the events of Ashes to Ashes, having groomed the ghoul who abducted Lodin and also nudged Modius into sending the players to Chicago to take the fall for it. He didn’t count on his body being claimed by a vampire hunter, though, so he might have gotten the players to extract it and then mind-whammied them into hiding it and forgetting where.

Other prominent Brujah include two of the Primogen, Menele’s childe Critias (a smartass Athenian sophist who fancies himself a great political philosopher, and who isn’t aware that Menele is pulling his strings) and Tyler (originally a peasant rebel against the medieval English crown, who went on to play a part in the forming of the Sabbat that she now keeps hidden, and Helena’s secret patsy). There is also as Balthazar / Sheriff, who like most other Brujah started out as a rebel and political thinker, but while most of them were some variety of socialist or civil rights activist, Sheriff was a Southern Confederate. Perhaps predictably, he didn’t get along well with his fellow Brujah and defected to become Lodin’s henchman since that offered him his best opportunity for being a smug, brutal, corrupt-hick stereotype. To thine own self be true, or something.

There are some Caitiffs (which at this point aren’t the result of “weak blood” but are just vampires who haven’t been properly raised as part of a clan), the most notable one of whom is Maldavis, who’s somehow managed to survive Lodin’s wrath. She’s interested in starting a new rebellion, but she’s mostly been replaced by other anarch leaders.

Gangrel! There is a Gangrel Primogen named Inyanga, who was a shaman way back in Africa. She’s somewhat less morally bankrupt than most elder vampires and tries to just feed off people who she thinks deserve it. She’s got some magic power tricks from her mortal days – again something that’s cool and flavourful and that wouldn’t be allowed under the later editions because RESPECT THE IRONCLAD LINES!!!! Ah well. Also somewhat creepy-cool is her childe Doyle, who worked in the butcher yards and found killing cows to be a spiritual experience that made him one with the animal’s soul. Like… ick, but iiiiiinteresting, but ick. He embraced a kind-hearted animal lover named Rose, but she got so horrified by his animal-slaying ways that she wants to kill him… and of course she’d never feed off of a poor, defenseless animal, only from those human jerks! Hee.

The Malkavians have no Primogen, though they do have a leader of sorts named Maureen who has the distinction of being the one who started the Great Chicago Fire. She runs an insane asylum and has a bunch of deranged progeny, including a pair who think they’re a stodgy married couple and their psychotic “son” (actually their sire). I love it, it’s so horrifying.

The Nosferatu Primogen is a guy named Khalid who used to be a Muslim general during the Crusades. He’s pursuing Golconda, but his anger management problem keeps getting in the way. His progeny includes a pair of abused children who killed their parents (he chose them for the embrace because he figured that becoming deformed undead monstrosities would actually be a step up for them) and who are now unwillingly served by the ghosts of said parents. First canonical appearance of wraiths? I’m not entirely sure.

The Toreador! Helena is one. She’s also from ancient Greece, though she’s not actually Helena of Troy even if parts of her backstory do involve running away from her husband to her lover’s family, only to have her husband follow and kill them all. Anyway, we already went through most things about her when talking about Menele. She’s got even more super-duper-Disciplines and can astral-project all over the place when in torpor and Dominate people from afar, which does seem like it would be more helpful in subtly directing things. She was the one who whammied Maureen into starting the Great Chicago Fire as part of her bid to get rid of the Menele-backed Prince and put Lodin in his place, by the way.

The Toreador Primogen is Helena’s grandchilde, Annabelle. She’s a vapid socialite with pretensions of being a great patron of the arts. Helena thinks she controls her, but actually Menele is only letting her believe that. She’s secretly Modius’ sire. She’s got another childe named Sophia who’s an exotic dancer because Annabelle thought that that could become the next daringly transgressive art form, but it turns out that vampires – who have no physical need for sex, though some indulge in it anyway for psychological reasons – don’t have much interest in strippers. Annabelle now treats Sophia as a failed experiment, much to Sophia’s Blood Bound heartbreak. See what I mean about the messed up family dynamics?

The Tremere are pretty few in numbers, but they do have a Primogen, named Nicolai. He’s one of those creepy perpetually-a-child vampires that you need to include in any self-respecting urban fantasy setting, though for him it’s more complicated in that he’s also a wizard of considerable knowledge and power while still being emotionally a child. He sired an old black guy named Abraham to help him deal with that pesky not-of-legal-age issue, and Abraham went on to accidentally sire Maldavis (who’s his mortal granddaughter – yeah, it gets convoluted) when she surprised him and he freaked out. Nicolai also has a number of thaumaturgical rituals that weren’t in the core (which was rather sparse on rituals in general), letting him do things like see into the past and turn into a bat (you can already do that with Protean, but of course no true Tremere would do anything like a Gangrel!).

In contrast, there are a lot of Ventrue, and they’re all Lodin’s descendants because he refuses to let any other Ventrue settle in Chicago. It’s all sort of creepy and narcissistic. Anyway, some of the more interesting ones are Ballard, our resident fat bastard with more money than God. Whose Ventrue flaw is that he must exclusively feed on his prepubescent male family members. I love Ballard, he’s so gross and terrible. Lodin uses him to run finances. There’s also Drummond, who used to be a railroad baron back when railroad barons were relevant, and who’s basically an idiotic man child who doesn’t seem to quite get that he’s a vampire. And finally, there’s Al Capone. Yes… yes, that Al Capone. Who’s a vampire. Because this is a very silly game that thinks it’s a very serious game.

Under “other” there are a couple of skeevy Sabbat vampires who are lurking around waiting for an opening that will let them take over, and an Inconnu who is supposed to just observe but has a soft spot for the Anarchs. There is also a demon in human form, long before those were retconned out and then reintroduced in Demon: the Fallen. She’s a succubus who feeds through sex, and she’s described as behaving kind of like Madonna in a music video. Also, “don’t bother describing her clothes – she doesn’t wear any.” Ooooookay, that’s somer extremely 90s grimdark fan service, I feel…

There is a few pages explaining who is in a coterie with who, which does help keep track of the politics. Notably, coteries are not portrayed as exclusive – you can be in two different coteries at once. The Primogen is considered a single coterie, for instance, but most of them are also the leader of their own mostly-clan-exclusive coteries. In addition, there are also three different anarch coteries with slightly different ideologies, the Sabbat and the Kindred of Gary are considered to be one each, and also there is a Gangrel biker gang and this vampire punk band called Baby Chorus.

The final chapter is a set of random encounters to introduce whenever the characters are wandering around Chicago and you feel like you haven’t screwed with their heads nearly enough lately. They’re divided into a number of categories that are supposed to reflect the themes of Vampire (the Beast, Paranoia, Horror, Nostalgia, etc). Examples include finding a vampire who’s drunk off his ass and ranting to a group of mortals about how horrible it is to be a vampire (breaking the Masquerade in the process); being approached by a pair of teenage girls who want to buy a pint of your blood, but can’t remember why they want that or where they got the money they’re meant to pay you with; running into an old friend from your living days, who remark on how strangely well-preserved you are; and accidentally killing a vessel only to have it immediately rise as a ghost who now exists solely to follow you around and complain at you. There are also some of the first, brief encounters with werewolves, such as one where you meet a werewolf kid who’s gotten lost and need help finding his way home, and a rather less cutesy one where you come across a massacre by rampaging lycanthropes and have to immediately roll to avoid frenzying while the the furries will likely be back any second. Most of them are pretty good, painting a picture of a world that’s at once gritty, whimsical, and a bit messed up.

Well, a few complaints aside, I really loved this book! The NPCs really pop, and the intricate relations between them feel like they’ve got a lot of potential – no one is as all-powerful or as infallible as they’d like to be, which means that anything you want to throw at the players can be some kind of scheme gone wrong. It all has a feel of some kind of dark, twisted wonderland, full of messed-up people acting on motivations that can range from the oddly sweet to the horrifically evil.

Next one up zooms in even more, and focuses on a single location of Chicago and what can happen there. Stay tuned for The Succubus Club.

Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough: Blood at Dawn and Blood Bond

Previously in our Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough:

We continue stalking through the early nights of the World of Darkness. This time, we’re going to cover the adventure that came with the Storyteller’s screen, called Blood at Dawn, and another short one called Blood Bond.

Blood at Dawn takes place in Gary, last seen in the sample adventure for the core rules. The players are offered a chance to gain feeding rights at a strip club that has up to now been the domain of the Prince Modius’ childe Allicia. They have to compete with a snooty elder at the negotiation table, but the whole affair gets interrupted because someone has found a corpse, clearly dead from a vampire attack, in the parking lot. The elder hightails it and Allicia tells the players that they will, basically, get the deal if they can make the corpse disappear.

The players either succeed at this or not (the “correct” answer is apparently to cramp the corpse in a dumpster overflowing with reeking garbage, trusting that the cops that eventually show up won’t care enough to dig through it), but either way the corpse will then mysteriously go missing. It’s gotten up and walked away.

What’s happening is that a none-too-clever “magus” (the first canonical example of what would eventually become the Awakened, for those keeping track!) is out to steal some of Allicia’s blood for his arcane research, so he called up a spirit that would first possess his son and, after it got in a fight with Allicia and drew some of her blood, would jump to her instead. However, our wizard’s kid accidentally triggered a nutty Malkavian, who killed him… and now the possession has kicked in anyway.

The Malkavian eventually shows up, forcing the players to have a very confusing conversation with him (he’s got five different personalities that each kick in whenever someone says something that interests them and who aren’t aware of each other’s existence), before the possessed corpse appears again and attacks them. It’s tough, it’s mean, and it can possess anyone whose blood it sheds – the idea is to freak the players out completely with a messy, confusing fight.

The stated theme for the adventure (yes, the thing whereby every single World of Darkness product had to have its own pretentious Theeeeeeme and Moooood was there from start to finish!) is people doing things for petty reasons, and it shows, in a really nice way. Every NPC is motivated by something terribly prosaic, no one has any higher aspirations, and even the evil deeds (including at least one murder) that are committed are done less from malice and more because someone couldn’t be bothered not to commit them. I like it, it really sells the feeling of a sullen, dreary world run by apathy and petulant self-interest. In other words, a world as seen through the eyes of an angsty, disaffected teenager – which is always what the World of Darkness was best at. It was never that convincing when it tried to invoke grandness and scope, but it was always great when it remembered to keep things personal.

Oh, and the nudie bar is getting an elaborate, loving description, because of course it is. Night-time hangouts really are the main characters in this game, I swear!

Blood Bond features the first canonical look at the Sabbat, who here appears as a sort of mix between a biker gang and a skeevy occultist cult, which I got to admit I kind of love. The players get in a scrap with a Sabbat pack that’s just blown into Chicago, and in the process of it accidentally un-stake an ancient vampire named Jefferson who’s been stuck inside the wall of an opera house for the past several decades. Jefferson immediately embarks on a quest of revenge against Neally, the vampire who staked him in the first place, and things get… kind of twisted.

The backstory for Neally and Jefferson is actually kind of interesting. See, they started out as polar opposites, with Jefferson being practically a saint and Neally being a scoundrel and hedonist. Their feud started when Neally stole Jefferson’s main squeeze, Emily, and ghouled and Blood Bound her. Jefferson searched for a way to break a Blood Bond, but the only people who know how to do that is the Sabbat, so he joined up with them and got driven evil and insane in the process. Meanwhile, Neally started feeling guilty about what he’d done and trying to be a better person – he’s still not that nice a guy, but he’s more of the “can be such a jerk sometimes” sort than the “complete amoral monster” sort. Have I mentioned that I kind of dig that the game, at least in this part of its history, tried for that sort of nuance?

Anyway, Jefferson, once freed, is determined to completely destroy Neally’s attempt at redemption. To this end, he re-seduces Emily, whose relationship with Neally has cooled in the meantime, and starts feeding her his blood. Since Neally regularly feeds from Emily, before long he’s gotten Blood Bound to Jefferson, which thanks to Jefferson’s Sabbat mojo lets him mind-whammy Neally from afar, forcing him to perform acts of utter depravity.

This is all creepy as hell and I love it.

Thus, the players start encounter Neally in the process of doing horrific (and more to the point, Masquerade-violating) things, while insisting that he’s not in control of his actions. They see him walk into a crowded club, use Disciplines to draw everyone’s attention and rip a mortal’s throat out in full public view. They find a child vampire wandering the streets and it turns out that Neally has been turning the kids at an orphanage into vampires. One of the Prince’s favourites seek their protection, because Neally is randomly trying to kill her.

At the same time, one of the players is supposed to have started an affair with Emily, just to make everything even skeevier. Which of course means that this player will also get Blood Bound to Jefferson. Oh yeah, major STD metaphore here! Not sure I’d feel comfortable roleplaying out a messed-up relationship with a thoroughly broken woman with most groups, to be honest – it would have to be one I was really amazingly comfortable with and who I knew would be into that sort of thing. Still, I appreciate what the module is trying to do. It all really brings home the feeling that being a vampire means throwing all the rules out the window, and that that means that you’re at risk for a thousand things that regular squares never have to worry about.

It all culminates in the players being called upon to broker a deal between Neally and the Sabbat (which requires them to spend a night raising hell along with the Sabbat pack, by the way), where they put him through a ritual to break the Blood Bond. It involves burying him alive (beneath a tombstone with his name on it, for added creepiness) and letting him dig his way out, now free of the Blood Bond but also completely insane. Jefferson gloats and takes both Neally and Emily with him as he leaves town at the head of the Sabbat pack.

Yeah, again, not sure this would be fun to play out, and certainly not with a casual group, but… it sure packs a punch, doesn’t it? And just like in the last adventure, I like how all the melodrama is ultimately rooted in the characters. There is history, but it’s the history of three specific people, not some vast world-changing conspiracy.

Next up is another landmark: the very first city book, Chicago by Night. Stay tuned.

Vampire: the Masquerade readthrough: Blood Nativity and Alien Hunger

Today, I thought I’d continue my readthrough of Vampire: the Masquerade with two early adventure supplements that are each meant to work as stand-alone introductions to the game: Blood Nativity and Alien Hunger. Both are also set in locations other than Chicago and neighbouring cities, where the game seems to have otherwise stayed pretty focused in the early days.

Blood Nativity is the shorter and simpler one. The players start out as humans in Cleveland who are blissfully unaware of the existence of vampires, but a bunch of Elders have decided that they’re going to sire a bunch of neonates as part of a power play, so the players get invited to dinner at a fancy Blues club. The idea is that things will get progressively stranger over the course of the evening until the Elders all choose one player to embrace, whether by hypnotism, seduction, or force.

The Elders are a fairly fun bunch. They include such individuals as an opinionated afro-sporting Brujah grrrrrrl, a Gangrel sportsball fanatic, a beer-bellied Nosferatu, and a Malkavian who thinks that the entire world is a dream she’s having. Though there’s a mention that the Tremere of the group won’t embrace anyone he hasn’t apprenticed for years since that’s not how the Tremere do things. Fair enough, but then why is he even in the story given that the premise is that the guys are going to pick some unaware people off the street and embrace them?

Anyway, the players wake up the next evening thirsty for bloooooooood. The Elders have left a few ghouls to give them basic instructions, but it’s now their job to get themselves fed for the first time. So it’s out on the street and start stalking some late-night pedestrians. This is really messed up and I sort of love it.

Okay, so I admit that I’m prudish enough to squirm a little at the description of two high school cheerleaders who the GM is instructed to describe in lavish terms how delicious they look…

Anyway, when stalking around on the street looking for someone to munch on, the players get attacked by a couple of Anarchs and their pet street gang, since the players have unknowingly been poaching on their territory. Once they wrap up that fight, one way or another, the police shows up and arrests anyone who’s still standing.

The players end up in jail, with dawn approaching. How easy it is for them to get out again before it’s too late depends on how much restraint they showed – if they were caught snacking on a gangbanger, it’s not looking good. If they do get out, their behaviour has also been noted by the Elders and the Prince, and will determine their future as vampires in Cleveland.

Honestly, I think if I was a vampire in Cleveland, I’d be inclined to move just from how stupid I’d feel saying “a vampire in Cleveland,” but never mind.

This one is longer and more complicated. It starts with the players being, again, unknowing people, this time in Denver. There are pregenerated characters, or you can make your own if you prefer. Either way, they have all having been kidnapped by Vampire Louis Pasteur…

… no, really, in the World of Darkness Louis Pasteur faked his death and became a vampire and he’s been working on a way to reverse vampirism ever since then, look, I told you that these early books were kind of silly…

… anyway, Vampire Louis Pasteur has kidnapped them and administered an array of serums to turn them into vampires (of different clans, since they got different serums). He plans to later administer another array of serums that are supposed to turn them back to human again, but before that can happen he gets attacked and killed by the Prince of the city and his two cronies, who have been fooled by one of his enemies into thinking that he’s conspiring against them. They set the house on fire and leave. The players wake up in the basement of a burning house, feeling weird and not knowing why, in the company of three oddly tasty-looking people (three other experimental subjects, who experienced Rebirth when Pasteur, as their effective sire, died and became human again – at this point in the game line, that was still a thing that could happen).

The players manage to get out and have to try to figure out what the hell is going on. They get saddled with an annoyingly persistent – and clever – police detective who thinks they had something to do with the murder and the fire. They get contacted by another vampire who explains a few facts of the world to them, but before they can get too chummy he gets nabbed by the Prince as well. They also get a Blood Hunt declared against them and have to duck opportunistic vampires at every turn until and unless they can convince the Prince that they’re not part of some kind of enemy action.

They can also investigate Vampire Louis Pasteur and find out that he was doing some kind of experiments, and that he had a human partner who they can find. They can also discover that a rogue ghoul has stolen the last remaining samples of the turn-back-to-human serums, and if they find him, he might hand them over if they turn him into a vampire first. Finally, if they have put all the clues together right and haven’t lost a ton of Humanity and/or bought a ton of Disciplines, they can administer the serums and regain their humanity… if they still want it.

All said and done, I really like these two adventures. They’re vivid, they’re immediate, and they work by really making you think about what it would be like to become a vampire and suddenly have amazing powers, inhuman urges, and a ton of potential enemies out to get you. The NPCs, likewise, are quirky and fun, and have intricate and slightly unwholesome relationships to each other – it all feels very much like the social circle of a bunch of angsty, maladjusted twenty-somethings, which is where I think the WoD games always really shine.

So far so good. Next up, whenever I get around to it, is Ashes to Ashes, where we go to Chicago and settle in to stay there for a while.

Vampire: the Masquerade first edition – this is where the madness started

Having recently embarked on a quest to read every single book for every single tabletop roleplaying game that has ever interested me even one little bit, it was of course inevitable that Vampire: the Masquerade would be one of the first ones. It’s the first and most defining World of Darkness game, and I’m of course a huge World of Darkness nerd. I mean, not to blow your mind, or anything, but I am.

Thing is, though, that Vampire was always the one WoD game I could never work up any enthusiasm for. I used to hate Werewolf: the Apocalypse with a fiery burning passion, but it at least made me feel something (and I ultimately made my peace with it – look, you can work around the stupid parts and focus on the nice, wholesome ripping-mutants-to-shreds action!). Vampire just felt like a waste of space. I read a few books, if only to mine for antagonist ideas for the other games I ran, but I never took to it.

Now, having read the very first few books of the very first edition, I have to say… okay! I finally see what all the fuss was about!

For those who don’t know (and one of my friends recently told me that her DM was unaware that there were other roleplaying games than D&D until she informed him otherwise, so I guess some people actually don’t know), Vampire: the Masquerade is a game first published in the 90s where you play… well… a vampire. Who has to hide his true vampiric nature from the world. Like in a masquerade. Again, not to blow your mind or anything.

Anyway, it was huge. Like, it was so huge that for a time, it didn’t just compete with D&D, it was bigger than D&D – a feat that no other roleplaying game has even come close to rivalling before or since. It has been mimicked and analysed and argued over with a meticulous zeal that only artsy nerds can equal. There was a well-regarded video game. There was an ill-regarded TV show. Even today, it’s not quite dead, just sort of… in torpor. Much of modern game design can trace a descent to Vampire, if only by being created by people who were so annoyed by Vampire‘s many flaws that they resolved to create something better.

Vampires, in this game, are humans who have had their blood drained by another vampire and fed some of it back, causing them to rise from the grave. The first vampire was supposedly the Biblical Caine, though he’s not around anymore so no one is exactly sure. Each generation of vampires (with Caine being the single member of the first generation, and most vampires created in the modern night being somewhere between the eighth and the thirteenth) are a little weaker than the one before, with the only way to increase your effective generation to kill by feeding another vampire with lower generation than you. They lack most traditional weaknesses, except for sunlight, which does indeed cause them to spontaneously combust.

There are thirteen clans, each with its own set of special vampire powers (called Disciplines), and each being a sort of cross between a type of movie vampire and a type of high school Goth. The Brujah are rebellious bikers with strong political opinions, the Ventrue are snooty aristocrats who aren’t very good at moving with the times, the Toreador (yes, really – did I mention that a lot of things about this game are goofy as hell, despite taking themselves 110% seriously?) are pretentious arteests, the Nosferatu are creepy deformed monsters who lurk in the sewers, the Gangrel are feral shapeshifters who lurk in the woods… Everyone has their own shtick and look down their noses on everyone else.

Drinking a vampire’s blood on three separate nights, even if you’re a vampire yourself, makes you “blood bound” – effectively, you fall head over heels in love and will do anything for them. Humans who drink vampire blood without first being drained of their own become “ghouls,” which means they stop aging and get some minor Disciplines for as long as they still have vampire blood in their system. Needless to say, vampires tend to keep blood bound ghouls as servants and bodyguards.

The vampires of a city are usually ruled over by a vampire called a “Prince,” along with a bunch of elder vampires called “the Primogen.” The Prince and the Primogen enforce, first and foremost, three rules: a vampire may not kill another vampire except by the Prince’s permission, a vampire may not create another vampire except by the Prince’s permission, and a vampire may not reveal the existence of vampires to the humans under any circumstances whatsoever.

That’s about the basics, that have stayed more or less constant throughout all the editions of the game (we are up to the fifth, with the first three being during the WoD’s prime in the 90s and early 00s and the last two being a latter-day nostalgic revival). So what’s different here that made me change my opinion on the whole game?

Well… for a start, it’s pretty.

That’s really a huge thing. What put me off Vampire for the longest time was how drearily, unrelentingly ugly it was. In all the books I read, vampires were portrayed as, effectively, icky walking corpses who went around doing crappy things while serving no purpose. Every line in every book was filled with a sort of snide, smirking disgust. Everything was crap, especially you, and shame on you if you tried to make anything at all enjoyable. My constant reaction was, “… why would I want to play this thing that is intend on making me feel bad?”

First edition, though? First edition is different. Not in any one particular detail, mind. Vampires are still skeevy and self-indulgent. They still leave corpses behind. They still lie and cheat and fight vicious feuds for exceedingly petty reasons. They do all those things.

But damn, they look awesome doing them!

It’s all in the presentation. Third edition and onwards all seemed to hate their subject matter. First edition clearly loves it. The betrayals, the obsessions, the degeneracy, the hatred and the pride, the failures and the humiliations… all are described in glowing, operating terms. This is a game of beautiful damnation, of reveling in your romantic guilt. Blood isn’t just some sordid crack metaphor, it’s every forbidden pleasure, every carnal desire made red and glistening and deliciously lurid. You shouldn’t have it, you’re bad for wanting it… but it would taste sooooo goooooood!

I guess part of the reason why Vampire always rubbed me the wrong way was that it remained the only game about playing amoral characters in a set of games that, as time went on and the gleeful grimdark of the 90s shifted closer and closer to the sanctimonious outrage of the aughts, became more and more about moralising. It’s weird, given that Vampire always remained the flagship game, but it was kind of left behind in terms of tone. Every other game gave you a cause to fight for, bad guys who you should feel great about gunning down because they were bad. Vampire only made sense as part of a setting where no one was innocent and the closest thing to “goodness” was accepting your dark side enough to keep it in check. When the vampires explicitly existed in a world that ran on objective and tangible Good and Evil, they no longer looked like dashing Byronic antiheroes straddling the divide between sublime virtue and sordid vice. They just looked like lackluster posers, too dull and emotionally stunted to bother choosing a side.

I think, on the whole, that the exact incurious self-righteousness that I complained about at length in my Aberrant readthrough (not a World of Darkness product, but made by the same people) was, as it were, the stake through Vampire‘s heart. No one actually wanted to keep making the sort of “I’m a bad, bad man, I hate myself, I should be dead, and ohhhhh! – isn’t that just so romantic?!” game that it was originally (and explicitly; another thing to love about this version is, it actually states what it’s trying to convey instead of having “hidden themes” that you’re supposed to unravel on your own) designed to be, but it was still the most popular one. So they kept shoveling out books for it, and filling them all with finger-wagging about how we should in no way sympathise with the vampires because they were bad, unlike werewolves/mages/hunters/demons (yes, even the freaking demons from hell were holier than thou at that point!) who were good and fighting for a righteous cause just like you should be doing, why are you not out there saving the whales?!

Yeah… let’s just say I liked how they started out a lot better than how they ended up. Not to lie, here: back in the late 90s, I was absolutely one of the people who were sick of grimdark and clamouring for morally uplifting messages. It’s just that having since learned the fruits of self-righteous people running rampant, I have gotten nostalgic for some honest amorality.

But, let’s try to back up a bit and give you something resembling an actual readthrough rather than my fanboy gushing and ranting…

THE ACTUAL READTHROUGH

The book starts out with a letter from a vampire to a human he had previously victimised, in which he claims to try to make up for his actions by revealing the truth about vampires, their nature and their society. Also, the vampire is not-so-subtly implied to be the actual Count Dracula and the human Mina Harker. Which is, er… a choice.

But, aside from the blatant use of public domain characters that don’t really fit very well with the game, I actually love the opening. It sets the tone, presenting the narrator as someone who is monstrous enough to have done terrible things but still human enough to want to somehow make up for them… and it also has a disturbing undertone to it that lends it some extra delicacy. After all, the good count has clearly been watching Mina from afar, brooding on his sins and wallowing in guilt, and having the passionate regard of a self-confessed monster who is prone to unplanned crimes of passion is… perhaps not entirely comfortable.

That’s very much the game, the way it started out – the romance, the tragedy, and the subtle (subtle, please note!) post-modern deconstruction of them both. In contrast, the introduction to the third edition was narrated by what I can only describe as a smirking douchebag actively trying to be a shit to the woman he was talking to. It… made for a less compelling argument for continuing to read.

After that, we get a brief description of vampires (from a more clinical, out-of-character perceptive) and of the fairly straightforward rules. In brief, you roll a pool of between 1 and 10 d10s and each die that equals or exceeds a difficulty between 2 and 10 is a success. Each 1 you roll cancels out a success. If you roll more 1s than successes, you botch and something bad happens. For a simple action, you just roll, and if you get 1 success you muddle through but more successes might give you some kind of perks or bennies. For an extended action, you need a particular number of successes, but you can keep rolling until you’ve acquired them, at the cost of spending more time and risking a botch. For a contested action, you and another character both roll, and whomever gets more successes win. Not an amazing system, some improvements do suggest themselves, but simple and solid enough. Stay tuned to hear how they proceeded to mess it up (yes, sadly that happens already later in this same book!).

We also get the first few of a series of… well, call them old-fashioned cartoons, I guess, that runs through the book, each one consisting of a picture along with a few lines of narration. Put together, they tell the story of a vampire named Shelzza who lived in some ancient (Sumerian?) city and formed a mutual blood bond with the vampire who ruled it, allowing them to be in something resembling “love” to each other. To summarise, he was killed by a peasant uprising, she slept through the ages and woke up in modern times where she got it into her head that a random dude was her king reborn. She stalked him and turned him into a vampire, which he was horrified by, and he eventually killed her and thus became human again.

That’s a thing in this edition, by the way. It’s called Rebirth, and it can be achieved in a couple of different (and all rather unreliable) ways. Killing your sire soon after your own embrace is indeed one of them. Add it to the list of things I’m sorry they dropped in later editions; for one thing, if vampirism was actually theoretically curable (albeit not with any certainty, and never without considerable difficulty), it’d give Hunters of the Redeemer Creed something to actually do. Oh well.

Anyway, I really love that story and how it sets the tone. Shelzza is a monster, and not entirely sane – the story makes both things very clear. But you still get to see it from her perspective, and you feel sorry for her when she dies. Likewise, her relationship to her king is explicitly artificial and a bit disturbing, but that doesn’t make it inherently worthless. Vampires live outside of nature, they get nothing without breaking some kind of rule, without brute-force something that should be organic. But they can still value the things they have and cry out in anguish when they lose them, and that gives them agency and dramatic weight.

The book continues with character creation, which is about what I’m used to – you have nine basic Attributes, a bunch more Abilities, and you assign dots to them so that you have between 0 and 5 in each one. To that, you can add Backgrounds, which are a sort of catch-all for traits that are more conditions you live under than inherent aptitudes – for instance, Resources determine how wealthy you are, and Generation determines, well, what generation you are.

Clans and Disciplines are about what I’ve already briefly covered, except that here, there is some blessed simplicity – only seven clans are detailed, and only ten Disciplines. I love that, most of the extra Disciplines that got added over time were crap anyway. Also, Thaumaturgy (blood magic, basically) looks actually useful instead of being the boring point-sink that it’s been in every later edition I’ve seen.

Also, the clans are more comfortably stereotypical, without the later editions’ frantic insistances that “vampire are all, like, individuals, man!” Case in point, Nosferatu don’t all have unique deformities, they’re all pale and bald with pointy ears and fangs, deal with it. I mean, okay, I get why they drifted away from that over time, it probably would get a bit samey eventually, but… it’s a lot easier to just come up with a character in a hurry when you have solid archetypes to draw on.

Also, with vampires not being inherently worthless and subhuman, some of the clans work a lot better. Like, the Brujah being idealistic crusaders never made any sense in light of later editions’ presentation of vampires as completely and inherently selfish and despicable. Here, because the explicit premise is that everyone is culpable and that that doesn’t completely invalidate their virtues, the Brujah don’t look like hypocrites for claiming to want a better political system. Sure, they’re probably a bit self-serving about it, but everyone is a bit self-serving about everything, and to some extent they really do want justice and equality and all that good stuff, just as long as they get to snack on people a little on the side. Hey, it’s better than someone who doesn’t want justice and equality and still wants to snack on people, you know?

Special vampire rules! Vampires can keep a certain amount of magical mojo in their bodies at the time, called Blood Points, which are replenished by drinking blood, natch. Blood Points can be used to speed-heal injuries, though it’s still a little too slow for you to use it in a fight – it’s more something you use to restore yourself to full health after the fight has ended. Also, you can give yourself bonuses to physical actions for the duration of a scene (about 20 minutes) by spending Blood Points. Notably, it does not seem like you have to stop and concentrate to do that – you can only spend 1 Blood Point per turn, but it seems like you can do it and perform an action too. Which means that if a vampire starts with a full belly, he’ll get progressively more dangerous the longer a fight goes on. That’s kind of cool, and different from how I remember it working in later editions (where you basically had to know a fight was coming so you could hulk out in advance). Also, you have to spend a Blood Point to wake up every night, so the clock is always ticking – faster if you do a lot of crazy action stunts, slower if you restrict yourself to mere human ability, but it never stops, ever.

Vampires are subject to frenzies, where they go nuts in one way or another. When they feed while very hungry (that is, while having very few Blood Points currently in their system), they have to roll to avoid a Madness Frenzy where they basically try to guzzle every last drop of blood they can get to (which is not good news for whomever they were already feeding on). When they’re in some way bullied or humiliated, or a companion is threatened, they have to roll to avoid a Rage Frenzy, where they try to kill everything in sight. When exposed to fire or sunlight, or otherwise in severe danger, they have to roll to avoid a Terror Frenzy, where they can just run and hide until it wears off. Either way, the GM takes control of the character for the duration.

In lieu of rolling to avoid the frenzy, a vampire can decide to “ride the wave.” If she does, then she does go into a frenzy but she retains some control – she can spend Willpower points (which is the other kind of personal currency characters in this game have) to ignore the frenzy for one turn per point. Which isn’t much, but at least you can avoid doing something completely unforgivable. However, you still have to roleplay the frenzy, and if the GM thinks you’re not doing so, he’ll just dock you Willpower points for them. If you run out of Willpower points, he takes over your characters as in a regular frenzy.

If you try to resist a frenzy and botch the roll, you gain a Derangement which is sort of like a mental illness except usually based on a pop-culture-based misapprehension of how that particular illness actually works. That’s a bit of a problem in other games, where the same Derangements are used to reflect actual mental illnesses… but here, I feel like it’s a lot more okay, since hey, they’re not regular mental illnesses, they’re ways that the vampire mind breaks down under stress, and who’s to say how vampire minds work? Anyway, Derangements work under the same principle as riding the wave – you have to roleplay them, and every time the GM thinks you’re failing to do so, you lose a Willpower point, and once you have no more Willpower points the GM takes over your character.

This… is actually pretty good. This looks actually playable, in ways that the version in third or fourth edition never really did (fifth edition has a brand new one that I think is a lot better, but I think I prefer this one even over that one). It really brings forth the themes of the game more elegantly – you need to decide how much compromise to make with your feral impulses, because they are always stronger than you and if you try to complete repress them you’ll lose and they’ll run wild. It all does rely on there being a workable Willpower economy, with well-defined ways of regaining Willpower, which I think is not really the case in this or any other edition, so that’s a shame. Still, it seems like a wonderfully solid system.

Humanity is another special vampire stat, which measures how much morality you’ve managed to hold on to. If you do something like kill or steal, you have to roll to feel bad. No, really, that sounds like the kind of joke you’d make about this game, but it’s literally a thing. If you fail the roll, then you feel great about your hideous crime. And that’s a problem, because it means that another little piece of your conscience has died, and thus your Humanity goes down. Humanity function as a cap for some of your rolls, like empathy-based ones and any that you make during daylight hours, so the lower your Humanity, the more you become a heartless monster who is effectively a lifeless corpse when the sun is in the sky. Avoiding that is effectively the goal of the game.

Golconda is a sort of vampire nirvana that can be reached at the end of a long and complicated road. It isn’t the same as Rebirth (though they may be related, with them being the two alternate outcomes of a similar process), you remain a vampire who need to drink blood to survive, but you start requiring a lot fewer Blood Points to keep yourself going, meaning that you have a lot more ability to hold out for ethical feeding opportunities. You also don’t frenzy, ever. It basically means that you have made peace with your inner darkness, and in doing so, learned to control it. Which is probably why Golconda is rarely mentioned at all in later editions, which as mentioned got a lot more absolutist in their morality. Sigh.

After that, we get more general rules, and this is where the system starts showing signs of becoming the miserable mess that is the Storyteller System as we know it. See, the system as given back in the earlier chapter was fine, more or less what you needed for a game that’s more about ambience and feel than about rigid physics simulations. But the problem is… the White Wolf writers got enthusiastic.

That’s the best way I can put it, honestly. There is a section that gushes about how much fun they think it is to turn every situation into a unique minigame with its own distinct rules. And the thought never seems to have occurred to them that if you do that, then you end up with a gazillion unique minigames that are going to have to be balanced against each other and which, having been used once, are going to have to be memorised so that things work the same way next time. No, they just threw themselves into it with merry abandon, and we have the next several hundred books full of bad mechanics to show for it. At the end of this road, folks, lies Exalted and entire shelf meters of broken Charms, because White Wolf could not and by God would not accept that anything those uncool math geeks could do, they couldn’t do better.

Oh well.

Having all that said, though, I’ll come out and say that I actually think the combat rules are better in this edition than in any that followed, precisely because they were kept relatively simple. If two people fight in melee, that’s a contested roll, and whichever wins deals damage to the other. If someone shoots at something, that’s a simple roll, and one success is enough to hit and deal damage. Cover provides a hefty difficulty bump to shooting, so when bullets start flying you want to throw yourself behind something. And when someone gets hit, that may just be the end of the fight right there, because injury is very punishing in Storyteller. Which works to the game’s advantage here, where it’s pretty clear that combat is supposed to be rare and risky and with stakes, but not so well in… well, any game from Werewolf onward, where Fighting The Bad Guys is expected to be a pretty constant occurrence.

Also, there is no bashing damage here, only aggravating (from fire, sunlight, vampire fangs, and other extra-nasty sources) and normal (from everything else). Vampires can “soak” normal damage, which means that they roll Stamina against a difficulty derived from the damage source and each success cancels out a success on the damage roll. Humans can’t soak at all, and vampires can’t soak aggravating, but damage is rolled against a difficulty derived from the target’s Stamina, so a super-tough character is still going to be able to power through a wound better than a sickly one. That’s a little more complicated than what they replaced it with, but I think I like it better.

There is a helpful example of play where a prose narrative is side by side with a description of the mechanics being used to determine outcomes. That’s kind of cool. The story is about some Anarchs attending a rabble-rousing meeting, but a guy named Sheriff who works for the Prince comes to break it up and everyone ends up fleeing from a building on fire. To clarify, he’s not “the sheriff,” as per later editions – he’s just this one guy who’s called Sheriff, because he struts around talking with a Southern drawl and claiming to be the law. Heh. I guess he got retconned into being an entire institution later…

Next up is the settings chapter, where we get more detail on vampire society… which is rather less cluttered than it will be in later editions. For one thing, there isn’t a gazillion different court positions that will outnumber the total number of vampires in most cities – there’s just the Prince, who rules with the help of whatever cronies he’s got handy. The Primogen are a thing, but they aren’t a fixed council consisting of the top vampire of each clan in the city here, they’re just the most powerful elders, the people the Prince need the support of to rule effectively. It feels a lot more organic and natural.

The main conflict is between the elders on one hand and the Anarchs on the other – the latter being, effectively, young vampires (or neonates) who don’t like the elders. The book is a little vague on whether all neonates are per definition Anarchs – I don’t think they are, I’m pretty sure that there is meant to be such a thing as neonates who are bootlicking sycophants for the elders, but the book doesn’t quite say.

The Camarilla is the overarching vampire organisation that… doesn’t do terribly much except sit there and be stuffy and entrenched. There is a competing organisation called the Sabbat, but it’s this vague thing that’s out there somewhere and most of what you hear about it is probably lies. Still, it’s supposed to be the opposite of the Camarilla, all hellfire and reveling in being monsters. I guess the Anarchs are meant to be the happy medium between the two, which players are meant to sympathise with? Also, there’s the Inconnu, who seek Golconda, but we don’t find out much more about than than that.

Elders are usually a couple of centuries old, and are the movers and shakers in the vampire world. Vampires who are a thousand years or more are called Methuselah and tend to disappear from vampire society, partly out of paranoia and partly because a lot of them can’t digest human blood anymore and need to feed off other vampires. Which is kind of cool. While you’re on the hunt, something else might be hunting you.

The Jyhad is… a little better explained than I’ve seen it elsewhere, but still not great. In some places, it’s said to just be the natural animosity between vampires of different ages – neonates know they can only be as powerful as the elders by killing and eating them, Methusaleh can can only survive by killing and eating other vampires, and the elders are trying to maintain their power and long-term survival in the face of the other two. So basically, everyone is scared of either starving or ending up on the dinner table, and scheming wildly to try to avoid either fate. Other times, there are vague hints that the Jyhad is something deeper that’s really a proxy war between a bunch of of ancient, third-generation uber-vampires (the Antediluvians) who are in hiding somewhere, but precisely how they supposedly control everything without ever being noticed isn’t exactly clear.

Speaking of generations, the first (Caine) through third (Antediluvians) are largely mythical. The fourth and fifth generation are mostly Methuselah and stalking the night for succulent vampire blood. The sixth and seventh tend to be the elders and are the ones whose wrath the players will need to avoid. The eighth through thirteenth are on roughly the level of players and are peers who they might get into scraps with without it being immediately suicidal.

Also, I have to laugh with great sadness at the mention that the ancient, terrifying Methuselah might have as much as… fifteen dots of Disciplines! Ahhhhh, more innocent days, before the power creep set in. I’m sorry to report that it didn’t last long, by the time of Chicago By Night the unbeatable godmode NPCs were already a thing.

Other antagonists include ghosts, lupines and magi, later to be known as wraiths, werewolves and mages. “Lupines,” notably, are just as OP as they will be later, but only at night – in the daytime, they’re effectively human. Not that that’s a tremendous comfort to vampires, admittedly. Among human menaces are the Inquisition, the regular cops, and the Arcanum, which is this nebbish bunch of scholars who research the occult. Yeah, I’ve never quite understood what the Arcanum was meant to be used for, though I guess they are a little more of a problem in a game where you can get killed for letting anyone discover that you’re a vampire…

GM advice! There’s a lot of it, and much of it is… er… kind of pretentious and overblown, to be honest. Look, I think I might once have met a roleplaying group whose campaign had a “theme,” but they were weirdly super-into it even by my standards, and that’s saying some… Still, there are some useful stuff here, like suggestions for how to stage a campaign since it’s hard to make a standard “adventuring party” out of vampires. Having them run a street gang together, be exiles from another city, or be the Prince’s team of troubleshooters are all suggestions offered.

Also, I alluded to this before, but… the book actually tells you what things are meant to represent, which I feel is uncommonly helpful of it. Like, a vampire’s eternal life (which in practice is just life-until-something-kills-you) is meant to represent our instinctive clinging to a survival that is ultimately impossible. The vampire’s need for blood represents the fact that we, as living beings, must consume other life to sustain ourselves – and how, just like how a vampire can live off of rats and freely donated blood, we can theoretically choose to minimise our impact on the environment, but that doing so is so thankless and inconvenient that most of us don’t bother (just to be clear, I am very much one of the people who don’t bother! I’m just saying, the metaphor is sound). And so on.

The book wraps up with a starting setting of sorts, in the form of the city of Gary, Indiana. It’s described as being, essentially, a dismal place of rusting, abandoned factories, crippling poverty and a rapidly fleeing populace, ruled over by a Prince (Modius) whose chance for the big times was lost decades ago and is now just going through the motions. It’s all got a nice Life is Strange vibe to it, of shaking your head at the hopelessness but also secretly relishing the romantic squalor. There are a bunch of other NPCs statted up, including some allies and rivals for Modius, a couple of vampire hunters (regular no-powered ones, since Hunter: the Reckoning is still a decade away!), and some sundry hangers-on. There’s also a short scenario where the players attend a party in Modius’ decaying mansion and get sent as his envoys to the rival Prince of Chicago. To be continued in Ashes to Ashes.

All in all? I kind of love it. Oh, there are some dumb stuff, and some things that could have been better explained, and certainly the book could have been a lot better organised, but the vibe, man. The vibe. This is everything I loved about the WoD, only distilled and without years upon years of the writers getting too big for their britches.

So okay, fine. I’m jumping on the bandwagon, some thirty-five years after it left the station and probably twenty or so since everyone else got off of it. I admit it. Vampires are cool, too.

Grrrrr! Aaaarrggghhh!

I got to break out my Werewolf port for the first time in ages (I have one campaign I run for the whole group and one campaign for each player who might be missing… yes, even I think it’s a little OCD, okay? But anyway, the player who needs to be missing for us to run Werewolf is the second-most reliable player in the group, so the Werewolf campaign doesn’t see much use). It was fun, especially since I think the mechanics really clicked for the first time.

The big thing with Werewolf is supposed to be Rage. You’re a werewolf, you’re going to go berserk, it’s kind of your thing. You’re the Hulk, only furrier. Rage strengthens you but also takes away your control. And a large part of my reason for starting on this port in the first place (which led to my all-around porter madness) was trying to find a way to model that mechanically in a way that wasn’t too fiddly.

I may have actually worked it out now, at least in a rough fashion. The way it works is, each player has a number of Rage boxes that start out unmarked. Every time a player fails a roll, they mark a Rage box. They can then clear a Rage box to heal wounds, pull off different stunts in combat, fight whole groups at once, and badassery of that nature.

However! Whenever a player gets taunted too harshly, or fails in a way that feels too humiliating, or gets injured too badly, they have to roll +Rage (that is, 2d6 plus the number of marked boxes). If they roll 10+, they frenzy. If they fail the roll with 6-, conversely, nothing happens, but they mark Rage as usual when failing a roll. So the more Rage you have stored up, the more of an unstoppable killing machine you are in combat, but the greater the risk is of you completely losing your cool and smashing something you didn’t plan on smashing.

The Rage economy worked out really well in the fight scene we ran tonight – the player used Rage to hit far above his normal weight class, got hurt and had to fight for control, gained Rage from avoiding frenzy, and then used that Rage for more fighting. This player is a relatively feeble little Ragabash (think scout/trickster), and his opponents were two fomori with military-grade rifles and body armour, so it was a tough fight, and I think the Rage mechanic made a lot of difference.

We never did have to play out a frenzy, which is probably good, because those rules still need some work. Mechanics that take control away from the player are always tricky to formulate – you need players to still have choices, or else you’re just sitting there talking to themselves, but the whole point of Rage is supposed to be that you sometimes lose control. I am sort of considering an approach where I view it kind of like driving a speeding car that you can’t break, only steer – instead of asking, “what do you do?”, I might ask, “do you fight or flee? If the former, who do you attack? If the latter, which direction do you blindly charge off in?” With rolls required whenever they try to do anything that requires hesitation or forethought. I don’t know, though, there are a lot of pitfalls here. I’ll need to think on it.

But it was definitely fun to try out this part of the rules!

Grimdark puttering

No major progress on anything important this week – I’ve been two steps away from a nervous breakdown most of the time. Still, puttering around on this and that has, surprisingly, gotten me most of the way through outlining Rank 5 of the Dark Heresy port. And that’s kind of neat, because Rank 5 is honestly where the game actually starts to happen. That’s when you get to play around with power swords and big-boy psychic powers and cybernetic implants that lets you levitate.

The entire first half of the game is you working your way up from “Imperial Guard draftee” or “underhive scum” to actually becoming one of the people the setting tends to really focus on. Which makes senes in theory – zero to hero is a thing for a reason, right? The problem is that it cuts you off from most of the source material – not all of it, by any means, there is the occasional piece of media that follows the people way down on the ground, but still, the pickings there are a bit slim. And I think the game designers did realise that, since they went on to release special rules for playing as an Inquisitor (even if they mostly amounted to, “just start by spending a gazillion points of XP”) and all the other games in the line were about being some kind of badass.

I don’t know. I guess I’m not that much of a fan of zero-to-hero in general. It can be cool if you’re playing a really long campaign, but most campaigns don’t last for years of real life – whatever level you start on, you’re probably not going to be moving that far from it, so I think it makes sense to put at least a decent amount of cool stuff on it.

I’m kind of looking forward to starting to adapt the other games in the series, because there I’ll find out if the system I’ve worked out can be adjusted to higher power levels and plenty of authority. That’s honestly what I enjoy running more – not games where the players are all-powerful or anything, but games where they have juuuuust enough power to get to make demoralising hard decisions. Being powerless means freedom from responsibility, and as my players could tell you (usually with a lot of long-suffering sighs), I do so love to inflict responsibility on them.

In other news, today’s Mummy: the Resurrection session went well. It was the thirtieth one in the campaign, proving that sometimes they really do go on for a long time (so it’s kind of a shame that this is a system where character progression is a lot more plot-dependent and thus the players still aren’t that far from where they started out). It’s odd, it’s a pretty obscure and unloved game running on a glorified set of house rules, but somehow it just clicked. I kind of feel like I should change to a different campaign soon, because Lord knows there are plenty of other games I want to try, but at the same time, it seems a shame to stop when it’s going so well. Oh well, we’ll see.

Houston, we have a resurrection!

Today marks an occasion for my Mummy: the Resurrection campaign. We actually got to the resurrection part. The players finally returned from the Underworld, returning to life in the city morgue. Now let’s see them deal with the various parties who have developed an interest in them. And how long it takes before they stand before the Judges again, of course.

We ended up spending a little more time in the Underworld than I intended. I’m not exactly sure what to blame that on. On the one hand, I grumble a lot about how my players keep hyper-focusing on whatever is right in front of them and ignoring the overarching situation, but in all due honesty… part of it is also that I set them to too ambitious a task while in the Underworld, having them rescue prisoners from a spectre stronghold. Which required them to first get hold of a Hierarchy cache so they wouldn’t have to do it bare-handed. And then they ran into trouble along the way, because the Shadowlands are dangerous.

So yeah… in retrospect, I shouldn’t have gotten quite so ambitious with something I just intended to be filler. I do have this tendency to assume that things can get polished off in a session or two, but of course I also don’t want to rush through it without giving the situation proper gravitas, and then I sit there six months later and wonder why we never got to my super-cool “real” plot.

Part of it is the nature of the World of Darkness, too. It’s supposed to be, if not “realistic,” then at least grounded in some sort of internally consistent setting. Everything is supposed to come from somewhere, everything is supposed to have context. That’s what I love about it. But it does mean that there aren’t much in the way of simple encounters – you can’t just go, “suddenly, you’re attacked by zombies!” because each individual zombie has to have its own angsty backstory or it feels like you’re phoning it in.

Funny thing? Out of the WoD games I’ve tried, the one that runs the most smoothly is Mage: the Ascension, once I figured out how to manage it. There are still no simple encounters, but the game does encourage you to just throw more mismatched intrigues and general weirdness at the players, and then let them figure it out as best they can. Mummies and werewolves are supposed to be fighting a war. Mages are just meant to “reach enlightenment,” and the nice thing about that is that just about anything can be framed as another Very Important Step On Your Personal Journey. And of course, when the players get really interested in something random and start examining it from every angle, they are acting exactly like the sort of erratic geniuses they are meant to be.

But yeah, as far as mission-centric games go, I probably should learn to break the missions down into smaller pieces.

Magey moves

This week, I managed to move on with my Mage: the Ascension port and write up a list of GM moves. This is something like my fourth or fifth version of this list – as usual, Mage resist easy summary. But I think this set works with my conception of Mage as a game about mystery, conflicting viewpoints, and the contrast between the magical and the mundane.

Introduce a tantalising mystery or an opportunity to learn. Every mage desires, in one form or another, to learn – to better understand a world that is strange, complicated and often contradictory. The fundamental GM move, then, is to offer the players something to learn about. Perhaps they stumble on the outer Ripples of a Mystery (see the section of Mysteries for details), or maybe they catch wind of a rare book of lore, a wise spirit, or a master who might share his knowledge with the worthy. It can even be something entirely mundane, such as the location of an elusive enemy. Whatever it is, it should not come cheap; the players will have to do the legwork if they want to unravel the enigma.

Add another ingredient to the witch’s brew. The world is a battlefield between billions of competing wills, and even a straightforward conflict between two parties can grow complicated in a hurry. With this move, introduce another factor to the scene that comes from a different Paradigm or with another agenda than any of the extant ones. The factor can be an NPC or an inanimate force, seemingly mundane or overtly supernatural – what matters is that it’s different, making the scene feel more disjointed and chaotic. For example, the players might spot a Dreamspeaker rival of theirs while infiltrating a Syndicate-owned night club, or have their Verbena grove invaded by a little grey-skinned alien. Less dramatically, if the players are arguing with their chantry leadership about some course of action, an impasse might be taken as an invitation by a previously neutral cabal to suggest their own preferred plan.

Remind them that they walk a world of dust. The world is a harsh place, full of petty injustice and bleak misery. With this move, introduce some purely mundane problem – a mugger, a flat tire, a failing business, a bad cold. The problem can even be the simple fact that things take time, and that the world won’t sit still while the players spend a week digging through the library for information on their enemy. Magic can solve a great many of these issues, but of course that tends to lead to problems of its own; force the players to choose between dealing with things like a Sleeper, reminding them of their fundamental humanity, or invoking greater debt in the form of Paradox or unwanted attention from using their supernatural powers to escape everyday concerns.

Have a carefully laid plan go awry. Mages know better than anyone how easily clever plans can go spectacularly wrong. With this move, what someone tried to do – whether the player, one of their allies, or the enemy they were opposing – has a drastic unintended effect, causing a huge mess that doesn’t do anyone any favours.

Offer their heart’s desire, at a cost. A mage knows that the world is his for the taking, but everything has a price. With this move, present the players with an opportunity, whether to get the upper hand in a fight, to discover a clue to a mystery, to win a convert to their cause, or otherwise get something they want. However, either make the opportunity fleeting and necessary to act on immediately, without any chance for the players to hedge their bets, or hint that there will be considerable downsides to seizing it.

Let them be touched by the flames. Mages try to avoid physical danger, and most of the dangers they face are of a subtler kind. All the same, it’s a dangerous world out there, especially if you take an aggressive approach. With this move, deal Damage to a player, with a level determined by precisely what the source is.

Inflict a slow poison or a lingering curse. Any mage knows that the subtlest cut is the one that will barely be noticed at first. Wounds can fester, poisons can take time to kick in, and curses can ruin your life over a period of days or months. With this move, have a player be poisoned, infected, or otherwise compromised, but only hint at it for now; keep the full effects in store for later.

Punish them for breaking the laws of the world. Mages attract the wrath of the Consensus by their very nature, and especially so when they use magic carelessly. This move either causes a player to mark Paradox, or creates a Paradox Effect with a level proportionate to how much Paradox the player currently has marked, or – as is usually the case when a player fails an Arete roll – both. It is also appropriate when a player draws attention to some ongoing Effect, when interacting with something supernatural and volatile, or when in the presence of a Maurader.

Challenge or threaten their values. Every Tradition value something, if only because it’s something they rely on for power. Hermetics revere the written word, Verbena places of unspoiled nature, Choristers hallowed ground. With this move, place something a player’s Tradition considers special and powerful in the cross hairs, perhaps as part of a plot by a rival Paradigm, perhaps just as a natural consequence of events. This can be a player’s own foci, a location where their Paradigm is strong, or just an abstract value or ideal that’s being contradicted or suppressed. Either way, this gives them a chance to practice what they preach, and stand up for something greater than themselves.

Confront them with folly. The ignorant and deluded can be more dangerous than the outrightly malicious, if only because they are so much more numerous. With this move, have an NPC’s failure to see the world for what it really is either cause trouble for the players or provide them with an opportunity. People who are obviously wrong are people who need tutelage, which can strengthen a player’s Paradigm, but they can also dig in their heels and insist on a disastrous course of action unless the players can stop them.

Let them define their own reality. A mage practices his craft as much in his way of life as in his spells. With this move, simply ask the player to describe something, whether a character, a location, or a piece of history. Then take that description and add something to it, preferably something that makes the players’ lives more difficult.

Teach them that nothing ever truly ends. The consequences of a mage’s actions echo down the ages, and lessons learned frequently have to be rediscovered. With this move, bring an element – a character, an event, a location, an arcane principle – that had seemed over and done with back into play.
Make a Paradigm Move. When the players are dealing with some particular Paradigm, you can make a move unique to it that expresses its flavour and feel. This move can be overtly supernatural or merely philosophical, depending on the situation, but either way it represents a particular idea of how the world is meant to work.

Principles of magehood

This week, I’ve been hacking away at my Mage: the Ascension port. I think, at this point, that I have run enough of the game to actually get a feel for it, so now it’s just a matter of getting it out on paper in a way that’ll make me remember it (and possibly explain my way of doing it to others who want to try, but let’s be honest, it’s mostly for my own benefit).

I’ve written up a new set of Principles that are meant to inform everything the Storyteller does. It was tricky to formulate them in ways that weren’t specific to any particular paradigm, but which still felt flavourful and non-generic. Not sure if I succeeded. Have a look:

Be a fan of the player characters. The characters are the larger-than-life, troubled antiheroes of this story of magic and horror. Give them every chance to make choices, and to suffer for them; to stand tall, or fall short; to find wisdom, or be brought low by hubris. Let them show who they are, not as a favour to them, but because you want to see it too.

Start and end with the fiction. A move is only ever triggered by the fiction, and its outcome must always ripple through the fiction. Never say something happens because the rules say so. Instead, show what event or condition in the world led to it. Likewise, don’t just state mechanical outcomes (e.g., “mark a wound box” or “take +1 forward”)—explain what they mean (e.g., “your arm’s sliced fending off the dagger,” or “a blessing guides your aim”).

Offer no escape from magic. To be Awakened is to live an interesting life, whether you want to or not. Mystery and intrigue will find you. Wherever the players go, let their magical destinies ensnare them ever deeper. Never let them rest for long without introducing a new problem or worsening an old one. The path to Ascension waits for no one — if you don’t seek it out, it will come knocking.

Showcase eccentric oddballs, alternative subcultures, and fringe beliefs. Mages aren’t normal people — and neither are the Sleepers they deal with. Neo-pagans and techbros, political extremists and cultists, fringe scientists and secret societies: every NPC should believe in something, and that something should be out of step with the mainstream. Some chase utopia. Others just want to feel something. But none of them believe in half-measures.

Contrast the sordid with the sublime. Mages deal in higher truths — glorious destinies, lofty ideals, and sacred dreams. But each is also a creature of fragile, hungry flesh. They reach for the stars while standing ankle-deep in mud. A path to godhood may lead through alleys so filthy and grimy that the very idea of magic seems like a cruel joke.

Fill the world with mismatched fragments of possible realities. Behind the curtain, countless paradigms clash — each one shaping reality, each wildly incompatible with the others. Mages make belief into truth, at least part of the time, leaving contradictions and broken stories in their wake. And the world is littered with the detritus of past workings — wonders abandoned, horrors forgotten. Mix mythologies and genres freely: let the world itself seem unsure whether it’s a wuxia epic, a spy thriller, a Norse saga, or a psychedelic fever dream.

Give everything arcane significance. Everything is magic, sooner or later. Every office drone on their 35-minute lunch break is unknowingly enacting a grand occult working of efficiency and monetary worship. Every addict shooting up in a condemned building is fumbling toward ecstatic revelation. No action is without philosophical weight — whether the actors know it or not. When imagining a scene, always ask: what higher vision — successful or failed — shaped this place?

Place a mystery behind every corner but keep it half-hidden. For a mage, the world is one vast riddle. Nothing is ever straightforward — there’s always a hidden force at work, a scheme unfolding, an impossibility pushing against Consensus. But mysteries rarely announce themselves. What players see first is a minor oddity: a strange coincidence, a subtle wrongness. Whether they pursue it is up to them.

Wrap the fantastic in the prosaic. This complements contrast the sordid with the sublime. Every act of magic brings consequences — and depends on logistics. A face-melting curse ends with a trip to the ER and a surgeon muttering “acid attack.” The God of Storms must be summoned with ingredients that arrive in shipping boxes. Spells punch holes in reality — but the rest of the time, mages live in the same world we do, and must navigate its systems.

Portray social and environmental ruin. The World of Darkness is a monument to failed utopias. Cities meant to be marvels now rot with smog, slums, and broken infrastructure. Streets reek of exhaust. Everyone’s at once overmedicated and sicker than ever. The system is crumbling — but for now, it clings to life with a rictus grip, too stubborn or afraid to admit it’s already dying.

Show spots of beauty and meaning, always in danger of being erased. The world isn’t dead — just almost. In the middle of polluted hellscapes, some still fight for dignity. Amid mass-produced junk, real art and brilliance survive. These things are always at risk — of being destroyed by bitterness, or forgotten in apathy — but they are hope. Let them shine.
Make everything someone’s creation, but only sometimes under anyone’s control. Nothing just happens. Every event, horror, or miracle began with someone’s will — or their failure to act. Every demon was summoned. Every curse began as fear. But control is an illusion. Most magical acts spiral far beyond what anyone intended. Chaos is more common than success.