From an obscure, extremely niche game last month in “The Whispering Vault”, today I bring you one of the most enduring and mainstream “horror” games of the last 35 years… “Vampire: The Masquerade”. And when I say we’ll be talking VtM, I mean old-school “Vampire”. I only own and have played 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition, and I outright refused to buy or play any of the “New World of Darkness” (nWoD) games. All I have are original (and the best) WoD games, which of course started with VtM.
Now then, with those biases laid out for all to see (don’t worry, they’ll be coming up a lot in this article), let’s move on.
“Vampire: The Masquerade” is a rather unique tabletop roleplaying game. It is very much a product of its time, released when dystopian cyberpunk was all the rage, and gothic horror was making a comeback. Then along comes Mark Rein-Hagen, with a game that took the style of Cyberpunk, and slammed it into the overwrought drama of gothic horror, creating VtM and the rest of the oWoD.
For the 12 people living under rocks and watching “Bluey” for their whole lives, VtM is a game where you take the role of a Vampire, stalking the dark streets of [Insert City Here], fighting to survive the supernatural politics of the city, while trying to avoid being discovered by your human prey. With fairly simple rules, yet extremely complex gameplay, this helped make “Vampire” an instant classic.
People played this on the tabletop. People played this in Live-Action groups. Conventions sprung up around the whole World of Darkness scene, with VtM leading the charge. Hell, in just a couple of years, a television series was released, based upon “Vampire”, that was rather popular and actually quite good! Alas it only lasted a single season, not due to cancellation, but because the lead actor died, and the staff felt the show could not go on without him.
Anyway, “Vampire” was kind of like a bomb going off in the tabletop roleplaying industry. Where “Dungeons & Dragons” 2nd Edition had been dragging itself along, and other fantasy, horror, and sci-fi games came along with it, “Vampire” stepped out into the open, tore D&D’s throat out, and made the other games all fall in line.
Okay, so it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but I do feel VtM effectively killed off 2nd edition D&D (it wasn’t much of a fight), leading the industry away from classic fantasy, and cementing cyberpunk and gothpunk style games as the leaders through the 90’s and Aughts.
All you need to play “Vampire” (or any ‘World of Darkness’ game) are the books, and up to ten d10 dice to share. My players and I preferred to have our own sets, and Chessex was all-too-happy to create many awesome sets of exactly ten d10 dice. We bought oh-so-many of those sets! But that’s not the point. This gave the game a “Shadowrun”-type feel, although that game used d6, but it still worked for us!
To put it simply, “Vampire” is a sexy game. You can play it as a more combat-driven, manly-man sort of TTRPG, basically supernatural warriors fighting powerful enemies to give Incel wargamers a chubby. But that’s not what VtM was designed to be. This is a game of seduction, be that political, psychological, or physical. All of it could be quite deadly. A game where younger undead seek to survive the privations of their ancient elders, while plotting to one day usurp their reign.
This is not the Vampires you know of from D&D. This is a game heavily influenced by Anne Rice and William Gibson, not some bumbling caricature such as Straud. This is possibly the coolest TTRPG ever designed. With that in mind, I really should see if my wife would like to set up a two-player game of VtM, using “The GameMaster’s Apprentice” Horror deck as a GM-less Oracle…
