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https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/08/09/bloodlines-2-vampire-masquerade-tabletop-rules
Bloodlines 2's Tabletop Origins Reveals What Makes the Vampire RPG Unique
Getting ready for undeath by rolling dice.
Even though Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2 is still several months off, it's one of the many upcoming RPGs that’s had its claws in me since it was announced during GDC 2019. To get a better sense of the world and mechanics we’ll be dealing with when Bloodlines 2 releases early next year, we invited Rachel Leiker, the Lead UI/UX Designer from VtMB2 developer Hardsuit Labs and Jason Carl, host of the Vampire streaming series L.A. By Night and Brand Manager for White Wolf’s World of Darkness, to run a session of the Vampire tabletop RPG for us so we could get a sense of what it’s like to spend some time in Vampire’s World of Darkness.
There’s a bunch that you can learn about Bloodlines 2 from the Vampire tabletop RPG if you’ve never played it before. Rachel and Jason even devised specific rules to make the game more like Bloodlines, which you can find to use yourself down below. Check out the video above for a quick overview of what happened during our play session, or watch the whole thing right here:
Feeding the Beast
Hunger & Humanity
A massive part of the Vampire experience is how you reconcile the idea that killing people and/or drinking their blood is wrong with the fact that you are a vampire and must do so to survive. While wrestling with the morality of this may be easier for some than others, all vampires need to sate their thirst, or else their hunger can cause them to become feral, bestial creatures with little of their former humanity remaining. It’s a concept that was present in the original Bloodlines from 2004, but that has been refined both digitally and in the tabletop for the latest versions.
“The original Bloodlines tried really hard to be a 1:1 port of Vampire: The Masquerade and its tabletop format into the digital gaming format,” Jason explains. “Some things worked great. The clans, the lore, the idea that you are part of the hidden world... Feeding and the masquerade work pretty well, but some things didn't work so well. I think that it's fair to say that the blood meter didn't really make you feel so much like a vampire as it did a creature of the night with a gas tank filled with blood strapped to your back…. So in the tabletop V5, we took out the blood pool. Instead, we measure hunger.”
Even though Bloodlines 2 won’t directly replicate the way that the Vampire tabletop game opts to abstract this concept - with dice that can be added to a players rolls to represent how hungry they are - it's still something that will play a large roll in your characters struggle.
“We don't have dice in our game, obviously, because it's an electronic thing,” explains Rachel Leiker. “But the hunger system that we have in Bloodlines 2 is something that you constantly have to be aware of. Any time you feed, any time you take damage, anytime you use an ability, your hunger meter will oscillate up and down. It's something that you just have to constantly be aware of and that is something that we took direct inspiration from the tabletop version because it is something that you are doing in pretty much all of your dice rolls. It's something that you have to maintain. It's something that you have to be constantly aware of, lest you fall to the beast.”
Resonance
When you do manage to drink your fill, you may end up experiencing some unique side effects based on the person who “donated” their blood. What’s known as Resonance is a big part of both the tabletop game as well as Bloodlines 2, and has been a part of both throughout the development of each.
“We actually kind of co-developed this system in conjunction with White Wolf and the World of Darkness team,” Leiker says, “To make it something that we could bring it across.”
“I don't know that it would be possible to pinpoint the exact moment where it came into existence,” says Jason Carl. “But as soon as it did, it was obvious that it would work really well for both expressions of this world.”
Resonances in the tabletop version of Vampire: The Masquerade manifest in multiple ways and offer a plethora of occasional buffs and effects. In Bloodlines, the Resonance system is slightly simplified but will appear more consistently throughout the game.
“In the video game, Resonance is a cornerstone of play,” Carl explains. “It is always with the vampire. It's necessary to account for Resonance whenever the vampire feeds, and it's a little bit easier to discover what the particular Resonances are and where to find them. In the tabletop version, there's a little bit more legwork and investigation that goes into finding the Resonances of mortals and figuring out how they fit into the play.”
The story of our play session centered largely around the concept of certain humans having a unique, special resonance to their blood - it will be interesting to see if this is a narrative aspect that makes an appearance in Bloodlines 2.
The World Around You
While you may have a hard enough time simply surviving life under the Masquerade, you’ll also find it hard to stay out of whatever political infighting happens to be going on between your local vampire factions.
Political (Un)Death
Much of our play session revolved not only around hunting for survival, but figuring out how we fit into the world of San Francisco By Night. Similar to Bloodlines 2, our characters were “fledgling” vampires, who had only recently been turned. Almost immediately, we were set upon by older, more experienced and powerful members of the undead community who were all too ready to embroil us in the political conflicts between the vampiric factions. This echoed what we saw in Bloodlines 2 when we saw the first half-hour of the game and again at E3 2019.
Navigating this balance of power, whether it was hitching our wagon to someone with more experience, or offering our services to the highest bidder, is a core tenant of the World of Darkness — not only who owes you, but also who you owe and who they owe is of the utmost importance.
“I think the most important thing to remember about the World of Darkness,” Carl says, “Is that everybody in it is an unreliable narrator. Just because a vampire tells you this is how it is in the world of darkness, doesn't make it true.”
In our latest Bloodlines 2 gameplay demo, we were asked to track someone down and recover some information we had. Throughout the mission, we were approached and offered aid, power, influence by no less than three different parties to backstab or betray the others. It’s easy to see why there’s such a sense of paranoia among the vampire community, and how that paranoia will come into play as you attempt to navigate the clans and factions of Bloodlines 2. In short: trust no one.
Clan Warfare
Players of Vampire - be it the tabletop game or a video game like Bloodlines - don’t choose a “class” as you might expect in a traditional RPG. Rather, you select a “Clan” to belong to and establish your place in it in your backstory. Our characters belonged to three of these clans - the anarchic Brujah, the artistic Toreador, and the occult Tremere - but in Bloodlines, you’ll begin life as what’s known as a Thinblood, a weaker vampire who has no clan to call family.
You’ll eventually choose one of five clans to join in Bloodlines 2 - there are the three we mentioned earlier, as well as the politically-motivated Ventrue and the prescient (and possibly mad) Malkavians. But there are plenty more clans we might be able to play as, too.
We know that Bloodlines 2 will be offering new clans as free DLC. Pulling data from the tabletop rulebook, we can assume that there will be at least three additional clans to replay the game as:
Bloodlines 2: Tabletop Edition
- Gangrel: Warriors more in tune with their inner Beast than any other clan. Gangrel clan members are not only able to interact with animals, even summoning them to aid, but also gain bestial traits during combat like claws or improved strength.
- Nosferatu: Cursed to bear hideous visage, similar to their cinematic namesake, the Nosferatu clan dwells primarily in urban sewer systems or homeless camps.
- The Caitiff: A clan of vampires without a clan, the Caitiff is a collective of "pure" vampires who have been exiled or disavowed from the other clans.
To make our session even more relevant to Bloodlines than the default rules, Rachel and Jason went above and beyond and home-brewed up some rules for us to integrate mechanics from Bloodlines 2 into our tabletop game.
If you’re thinking of running a Bloodlines-inspired tabletop game, you can find those rules in our Bloodlines 2 wiki, along with a full guide to Bloodlines 2 when it releases next year.
What else do you want to see from the Vampire tabletop RPG in Bloodlines 2, or vice versa? Let us know in the comments!
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