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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
So… what did I randomly end up working on this week? Because the only certain thing is, it wasn’t what I was meant to be working on!
Yeah, it was my Mage: the Ascension port. I wrote up some more definite Paradox Effects to have a grab bag of them ready.
Mage is one of those games that are definitely crying out for different rules. Not necessarily simpler rules, not necessarily more complex rules – just anything other than the mess it’s saddled with, which manages to be at once overly convoluted and vague and directionless. It is, accordingly, one I’ve put a lot of work into, and I’m by no means finished yet.
The heart of the system, though, is the spellcasting rules, which rely on two separate moves, like so:
WORKING MAGICK
When you cast a quick spell, describe the Effect you’re after and how you will use your Spheres and Paradigm to achieve it. Then roll +Arete. 7-9, choose 2 options below. 10+, choose 3.
The Effect lasts until the end of the scene.
The Effect does precisely what you intended, no more and no less.
The Effect affects something other than yourself.
The Effect doesn’t deplete your mystical will (-1 ongoing to all Arete rolls until you get a chance to rest).
You don’t need to mark Quintessence.
When you perform an elaborate ritual, describe the Effect you’re after and how you will use your Spheres and Paradigm to achieve it. Then roll +Arete. 7-9, choose 2 options below. 10+, choose 3.
The Effect lasts for as long as you need it to.
No hard-to-replace resource is lost, destroyed, or used up.
The ritual doesn’t take a long time.
You don’t need to mark Quintessence.
The Effect is especially strong, adding +1 to the mechanical effects (i.e., it does Damage-2 instead of Damage-1, clears 2 wound boxes instead of 1, gives +2 ongoing instead of +1 ongoing, etc).
Take -1 ongoing to rolls to create a magickal Effect for each Effect you currently have active. Note that an Effect only have to be maintained if it either affects a living being (who inherently exert spiritual pressure to return to their natural form) or if its continuation is considered impossible under Consensual Reality. Thus, witch-light hovering in mid-air must be maintained, but if you use a spell to set a piece of wood on fire, the wood will keep burning on its own once ignited.
The main power of magick is to change or explore the fiction. If you use magick to create a hole in the ground, then now there’s a hole in the ground; if you use magick to read someone’s mind, the GM tells you what they’re thinking about. Magick rewards creative thinking and clever approaches, not brute force. However, if it really comes down to the nitty-gritty, a magickal Effect can do the following things if the caster can explain how:
Create a Damage-1 (Damage-2 for Forces) weapon for its duration.
Clear 1 wound box.
Give a weapon Damage+1 (Damage+2 for Forces) for its duration.
Give a weapon the AP tag for its duration.
Grant someone Armour+1 for its duration.
Grant +1 ongoing to specific actions for its duration.
When you work magic carelessly, Paradox can result. Mark Paradox for each condition that is true:
The Arete roll failed.
The Effect was vulgar, i.e. obviously magical; couldn’t have been reasonably mistaken for coincidence, a trick of perception, cutting-edge technology, etc. Effects that could be plausibly explained away are called coincidental. This condition never applies in the Umbra or in a sanctum dedicated to your Paradigm. Note that repeated uses within a short period of time can make a coincidental Effect become vulgar; one strange coincidence might be accepted, whereas several in short order can itself be seen as a sign of supernatural power.
The Effect was vulgar and at least one Sleeper who is not a sincere believer in your Paradigm observed the Effect take place.
A character has 15 Paradox boxes divided into Paradox rows of three Paradox boxes each (or 20 boxes in rows of four if the character has Background: Familiar). When the GM makes a Paradox Move, the severity of the move depends on how many rows are fully filled in.
Paradox is the Consensus punishing you for your temerity in defying it, so to banish it again you must show that you can play by the rules even when it’s inconvenient. Thus, every time you fail an Attribute (not Arete) roll, you clear 1 Paradox box.
Arete, for comparison, starts at +0 and can rise as high as +2 at the end of a long campaign, but you also take +1 to any Arete rolls that fits your Avatar Essence, and another +1 for any attempt to cast a Rote you have previously memorised. Combined with the way you’ll often have to choose to take penalties to Arete, and the way that Paradox builds up over time, it makes magic something that starts out very powerful as a mage steps fresh into the scene, but gets increasingly iffy as a situation drags on – which feels like how it should be.
All in all, this system is working out reasonably well in playtests so far, and gives me plenty of opportunities to both make my players feel powerful and to mess with them – both of which are things that I, needless to say, especially enjoy…
Mister Monster's Workshop 