World of Darkness Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 from Hardsuit Labs

[lightbane]

I think the 5x5/6x4/whatever format works just fine for a game. I haven’t seen anything better anyway.

Fair enough. The issue though is how every splat had their own special words for no other reason than they could. Even the Promethean that are as asocial as you can get. But that comes from oWoD anyway.

EDIT: I’m not from gaming den but I read their After Sundown game and the tone felt insulting to the reader.

Can't remember much of that place. The constant vitriol was funny at first, but in the end it gets boring. That particular game I don't remember much other than being WoD but edgier.

It’s a glorified rehash with different window dressing updated for the then-contemporary 2000s. imo the hate against it is overblown and misplaced. Then again, I may be biased because I was introduced to CoD before I was introduced to WoD.

It had terrible mechanics (you couldn't move and attack in the first edition IIRC) and lots of unexplained things, but it had its charm. I remember reading all of C: The Lost books until I realized the game is nearly impossible to play without lots of houserules and how the whole hidden society aspect didn't really work with Changelings ("we're all escaped abuse victims that locking us down will make us chimp out, but we still have enough numbers and resources to make elaborate societies somehow").

The Khaibit and Cult of Seth in particular are just *chef’s kiss*. (For reference: They’re vampire superheroes/demon-hunters with shadow powers who venerate the Egyptian god Seth in his original incarnation as Ra’s bodyguard against the evil Apophis. Also they like pulling potentially quite destructive “pranks” to stave off the evils of stagnation and entropy.)

The "prestige classes" were something unique indeed. There was that subclan of vamps that listened to special radiowaves containing questions that they had to answer in a limited time or suffer a severe case of "exploding head" syndrome.

 

[Harthwain]

Anyone could do that and it's doesn't scream originality, but what are you gonna do? Ripoff WW while lying that you aren't?

It's quite entertaining read. It also inspired me to think a bit about how I would make things my way:

1) Vampirism - It's essentially a virus. The more blood you drink, the more likely you are to infect that person. Unless you drink too much, then the result is death. Neither case is deal if you want to keep things under the wraps. Additionally, blood is like a drug for vampires. They have to keep themselves in check while drinking it. Which is harder as time goes on, for obvious reasons.

2) Supernatural powers - You get some superhuman qualities (sensitivity to sun, night vision, super strength/speed, hyper regeneration, unaging, etc.) but I would stay away from something like turning into a mist or a bat. The idea of vampires acting like "spies" in human society is more interesting to me than vampires having superhuman battles at night or somesuch.

3) Relationships - Since vampirism is a disease (with no unique characteristics/powers between each vampire), there are no bloodlines or inherent "Clans" or related powers. Instead vampires organize themselves based on their personal realtionships. Power of each individual and group would depend on who knows who. Oh, and since vampirism is easy to spread, everyone is responsible for making sure new vampires (or vampire-related accidents) don't happen. Otherwise the sanctioned cleaners are going to clean up anyone involved.

4) Secrecy - Vampires keep their activities hidden for a bunch of reasons. It is easier to manipulate people that way. It is also safer than waging war on mankind. The all-out war would have the effect of necessitating the existence of substantial standing army. Considering how blood works you don't want the logistic headache involved or risk demand exceeding supply, so keeping numbers low is better strategy.

To make sure the count stays low and humans are kept largely in the dark there is the Inquisiton. Why the name? Because it was the vampires' idea to start an organization centred around hunting down the supernatural back then for the purpose of maintaining control over it and to use it against those who stepped out of the line. The name (and the title of an Inquisitor) is the reminder of that era. They look more like Men in Black than a wannabe Van Helsings, although I suppose they could cosplay as such, if they needed to make it public and pin the blame on some religious freaks.

I could go on, but I think this is enough to show how I would make my own vampire setting and how remote it is from Vampire: The Masquerade, despite taking the general idea of "modern vampires hidden in plain sight".

 

[hello friend]

That sounds incredibly boring tbh. Vampires are supposed to be unsettling demons inspiring helplessness in their victims, hating living, hating life, and hating themselves, but without self pity. Just pure hatred. I imagine vampire society to be one of resentful codependency of people barely being able to stand each other but what else have they got? - and anyway the tyrannical rule of the local patriarch will not be controverted. Like sociopaths on steroids, if they meet one not under their control or not under the begrudged control of their master they go full beast and just try to them apart. Not sure how you'd turn it into a game but I'd like to play it.

 

[NecroLord]

Something, something, vampires suck blood and are inhumane, parasitical creatures of the night.

 

[hello friend]

If it doesn't shun the cross it's not a real vampire

 

[NecroLord]

If it doesn't shun the cross it's not a real vampire

 

[Heroic Liberator]

If it doesn't shun the cross it's not a real vampire

 

[Harthwain]

That sounds incredibly boring tbh. Vampires are supposed to be unsettling demons inspiring helplessness in their victims, hating living, hating life, and hating themselves, but without self pity. Just pure hatred.

There is no need for literal demons when humans can be monsters too. Now imagine someone who is an addict, but with more power than your average human. A trip from here to there can be a shockingly short one.

 

[hello friend]

If your setting is magical crackhead disease, well, that's a lot less compelling.

This is a vampire (timestamp):


Scientific vampires don't cut it. You take the juice out of the apple.

 

[Delterius]

If it doesn't shun the cross it's not a real vampire

second guy was like 'oh shit so it *can* work?' and so it did

 

[Harthwain]

If your setting is magical crackhead disease, well, that's a lot less compelling. [...] Scientific vampires don't cut it. You take the juice out of the apple.

I like to keep it more grounded than "100 buddah saints and several orbital nukes are needed to bring down an ancient vampire". Superpowers weren't the main draw to Vampire: The Masquerade for me anyway. To each their own, I guess.

 

[hello friend]

"100 buddah saints and several orbital nukes are needed to bring down an ancient vampire". Superpowers weren't the main draw to Vampire: The Masquerade for me anyway.

Yeah, no, I agree that shit is gay. My point is that midichlorians is never cool. It's not about the power level. Vampires are at their best as pure predators. Like that serial killer guy who seduced a bunch of women and killed and ate them - any kind of sexuality in a vampire should be pretense. None of this new shit. A hunting strategy. No aesthetic preference beyond that necessary to ensnare the aesthetically minded. They don't listen to music when there's no one around. They don't read books for fun. The ideal vampire is the social equivalent of the xenomorph in human guise. Empty and petty and sick.

I'm talking about EVIL. Superheroes are mythological heroes without the mythology, and vampire bacteria are vampires without the evil. It takes the life out of the concept and renders it dull.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

The issue though is how every splat had their own special words for no other reason than they could. Even the Promethean that are as asocial as you can get. But that comes from oWoD anyway.

Yeah, I think the jargon in all the games is ridiculous for multiple reasons. It doesn't make any sense to be so standardized, especially given the vast gulfs in time and space between these secret societies. A lot of it just feels completely arbitrary and not remotely like what real people in such circumstances would come up with. It sounds like it was invented by mall goths based on cool factor and idiosyncratic esoteric lines of etymology that only make sense to said mall goths. Perhaps the silliest part is that a lot of the flowery gibberish is unnecessary because words for that sort of thing already exist. For example, in other (far less pretentious) vampire fiction the standard terminology for turning someone into a vampire is... turning. Literally just shortening. Even Bloodlines shied away from using the in-game jargon as much as possible (check the script if you don't believe me). Seeing folks in this thread repeat this ridiculous jargon with no self-awareness constantly pings my silly radar.

And don't think I don't criticize D&D for doing similar stuff. When they get their research wrong, I criticize them. Them having to constantly scramble for names when introducing races, classes, monsters, etc gets painful after a while. There's nothing wrong with giving your fantasy stuff self-explanatory names with more than one syllable and in English.

That particular game I don't remember much other than being WoD but edgier.

You can read it here: https://thegamingden.github.io/after-sundown/

It's not a straight up ripoff like Vampire: Undeath, but unlike Everlasting it outright copies names from WoD/CoD even though it has absolutely no reason to. It's honestly not really much like WoD/CoD at all. But God, the tone of the writing is insufferable to me somehow. WoD is ridiculously pretentious, but this feels like its constantly talking down to the reader.

It had terrible mechanics (you couldn't move and attack in the first edition IIRC) and lots of unexplained things, but it had its charm.

Characters could move and attack, but had to sacrifice their attack action to move twice as fast or to do an all-out defense. It's the same as in d20.

Here's a recap of some problems if you're interested.

("we're all escaped abuse victims that locking us down will make us chimp out, but we still have enough numbers and resources to make elaborate societies somehow").

This is a problem with all the splats, honestly. The population dynamics have never made sense in the three decades the IP has existed. Whenever the books do deign to give specific numbers, the calculations result in each faction having less than a dozen members each. That's not a secret society: that's a club house. Not to mention the ongoing issue that all the secret societies are written using high school clique dynamics rather than secret societies or political parties.

There was that subclan of vamps that listened to special radiowaves containing questions that they had to answer in a limited time or suffer a severe case of "exploding head" syndrome.

Like their head literally exploding Scanners-style or just being really distracted? Either way, that sounds hilariously weird.

Anyone could do that and it's doesn't scream originality, but what are you gonna do? Ripoff WW while lying that you aren't?

It's quite entertaining read. It also inspired me to think a bit about how I would make things my way:

1) Vampirism - It's essentially a virus. The more blood you drink, the more likely you are to infect that person. Unless you drink too much, then the result is death. Neither case is deal if you want to keep things under the wraps. Additionally, blood is like a drug for vampires. They have to keep themselves in check while drinking it. Which is harder as time goes on, for obvious reasons.

2) Supernatural powers - You get some superhuman qualities (sensitivity to sun, night vision, super strength/speed, hyper regeneration, unaging, etc.) but I would stay away from something like turning into a mist or a bat. The idea of vampires acting like "spies" in human society is more interesting to me than vampires having superhuman battles at night or somesuch.

3) Relationships - Since vampirism is a disease (with no unique characteristics/powers between each vampire), there are no bloodlines or inherent "Clans" or related powers. Instead vampires organize themselves based on their personal realtionships. Power of each individual and group would depend on who knows who. Oh, and since vampirism is easy to spread, everyone is responsible for making sure new vampires (or vampire-related accidents) don't happen. Otherwise the sanctioned cleaners are going to clean up anyone involved.

4) Secrecy - Vampires keep their activities hidden for a bunch of reasons. It is easier to manipulate people that way. It is also safer than waging war on mankind. The all-out war would have the effect of necessitating the existence of substantial standing army. Considering how blood works you don't want the logistic headache involved or risk demand exceeding supply, so keeping numbers low is better strategy.

To make sure the count stays low and humans are kept largely in the dark there is the Inquisiton. Why the name? Because it was the vampires' idea to start an organization centred around hunting down the supernatural back then for the purpose of maintaining control over it and to use it against those who stepped out of the line. The name (and the title of an Inquisitor) is the reminder of that era. They look more like Men in Black than a wannabe Van Helsings, although I suppose they could cosplay as such, if they needed to make it public and pin the blame on some religious freaks.

I could go on, but I think this is enough to show how I would make my own vampire setting and how remote it is from Vampire: The Masquerade, despite taking the general idea of "modern vampires hidden in plain sight".

Neat. I agree with dropping bloodlines on principle because I feel way too people used it as a crutch to predetermine their character for them rather than express creatively. (Hence all the "you're playing your character wrong!" dogmatism.)

My idea for a vampire setting was to ditch the focus on vampires and have them all rub shoulders with other urban fantasy characters like shapeshifters, magicians, fairies and so on. But even so there'd be multiple different species of each to keep them from becoming homogenous and predictable. Most of the accepted magical beings were those that didn't spread like a plague, but every so often something like that pops up and has to be put down.

Quite frankly I'm annoyed that urban fantasy has been completely subsumed into paranormal romance and want to see more that focuses on non-romance topics.

That sounds incredibly boring tbh. Vampires are supposed to be unsettling demons inspiring helplessness in their victims, hating living, hating life, and hating themselves, but without self pity. Just pure hatred. I imagine vampire society to be one of resentful codependency of people barely being able to stand each other but what else have they got? - and anyway the tyrannical rule of the local patriarch will not be controverted. Like sociopaths on steroids, if they meet one not under their control or not under the begrudged control of their master they go full beast and just try to them apart. Not sure how you'd turn it into a game but I'd like to play it.

I think there are a couple of indie ttrpgs like that. Let me check my notes...

• Blood Dark Thirst https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/223788/Blood-Dark-Thirst
• By Night We Thirst https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/219754/By-Night-We-Thirst
• Feed https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/124387/Feed
• Hungry Desperate and Alone http://lumpley.com/hungry.html
• Liminal https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267203/Liminal
• Night's Black Agents https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/106783/Nights-Black-Agents
• The Blood https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/333015/The-Blood--Quickstart
• The Blood Hack https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/202601/The-Blood-Hack
• The Vampire: Alone in the Darkness https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/329920/Vampire--Alone-in-the-Darkness
• Undying https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/174206/Undying
• Urban Shadows https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/333500/Urban-Shadows-2nd-Ed-Quickstart
• Vampire City https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/99313/Vampire-City-English

All these games generally treat vampires as pitiless monsters or offer that as a core option.

I like to keep it more grounded than "100 buddah saints and several orbital nukes are needed to bring down an ancient vampire". Superpowers weren't the main draw to Vampire: The Masquerade for me anyway. To each their own, I guess.

Superpowers are moderately interesting ways to exploit vampirism, but I definitely agree that WoD went into comic book superheroes territory without ever owning up to it. "Our game is a totally serious exploration of the human condition!" they say and still expect anyone to believe it. I'd have a lot more patience for their bullshit if they were honest with themselves and owned up to it.

 

[Harthwain]

Vampires are at their best as pure predators. Like that serial killer guy who seduced a bunch of women and killed and ate them - any kind of sexuality in a vampire should be pretense. None of this new shit. A hunting strategy. No aesthetic preference beyond that necessary to ensnare the aesthetically minded. They don't listen to music when there's no one around. They don't read books for fun. The ideal vampire is the social equivalent of the xenomorph in human guise. Empty and petty and sick.

I see what you're saying, but this sounds like something that would work solo, not as an RPG with several players/characters involved (as party). A twist on Hitman comes to mind. Lucius (2012) is another game giving me similar vibes to what you're describing.

I'm talking about EVIL. Superheroes are mythological heroes without the mythology, and vampire bacteria are vampires without the evil. It takes the life out of the concept and renders it dull.

Just because the "vampire curse" is caused by bacteria doesn't mean the character can't be evil or become evil after becoming one. I mean, we do have humans who are fully capable of being evil. Vampires are pretty much the same, only amplified because of their newfound condition and powers. Hell, the characters/players/readers don't even need to know what causes the "curse", just as vampires from Masquerade have no real idea (beyond myths). It is possible to leave it up to speculation. I am mostly saying it's a disease, because it reflects strongly on other elements in the setting, compared to a more conventional approach.

Also, not sure about your point on superheroes. Superheroes are popular. Much more popular than mythological heroes, I'd wager.

Quite frankly I'm annoyed that urban fantasy has been completely subsumed into paranormal romance and want to see more that focuses on non-romance topics.

I am not surprised. Vampires have certain connotations assigned to them. The good part is you can easily turn a would-be romance romance into a tragedy really quick.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I am not surprised. Vampires have certain connotations assigned to them. The good part is you can easily turn a would-be romance romance into a tragedy really quick.

You mean how they’ve been co-opted into sex symbols (often abusive boyfriends who treat the heroine like dirt) and all the vampire genre fans I can find are either straight women or “queer folx”?

The rabbit hole goes real deep. I did some research and it turns out most of the authors who wrote the original gothic vampires like Ruthven, Vardalek and Dracula were gay men working through their issues in their writing… which depicted vampires as monsters who killed everyone they came into contact with. And I found two gothic vampire stories that used vampires to handle race relations… by depicting them as bringing ruination and death to everyone they encountered. I don’t think using vampires this way is remotely progressive or even makes logical sense. The unifying thread of all these stories is that vampires by their nature kill everyone around them, whether they want to or not. Gothic vampires are either deliberate villains who kill the heroes (for darker endings) or are slain by the heroes (for more conventional happy endings), or tragic victims of their own curse who kill everyone they love before their own suffering finally ends via their own demise (for really dark endings). Not what you would call uplifting material.

I cannot for the life of me understand why so many people fetishize this stuff. Vampires kill everyone around them. Abusive boyfriends are assholes. None of that is remotely sexy.

 

[Tyranicon]

I cannot for the life of me understand why so many people fetishize this stuff. Vampires kill everyone around them. Abusive boyfriends are assholes. None of that is remotely sexy.

People are a nonsensical soup of genetic abnormalities and psychological damage.

That explains a lot of why we are the way we are.

 

[hello friend]

Vampires are at their best as pure predators. Like that serial killer guy who seduced a bunch of women and killed and ate them - any kind of sexuality in a vampire should be pretense. None of this new shit. A hunting strategy. No aesthetic preference beyond that necessary to ensnare the aesthetically minded. They don't listen to music when there's no one around. They don't read books for fun. The ideal vampire is the social equivalent of the xenomorph in human guise. Empty and petty and sick.

I see what you're saying, but this sounds like something that would work solo, not as an RPG with several players/characters involved (as party). A twist on Hitman comes to mind. Lucius (2012) is another game giving me similar vibes to what you're describing.

It might work in a mafia-type game, where you're working for the organisation and you can't go directly against the local master because of some blood compulsion, but you could try to find a way to engineer a situation in which someone else might be able to kill him while you would be unable to do anything about it, and thus be freed of that influence - at which point it becomes a free-for-all scramble.

I'm talking about EVIL. Superheroes are mythological heroes without the mythology, and vampire bacteria are vampires without the evil. It takes the life out of the concept and renders it dull.

Just because the "vampire curse" is caused by bacteria doesn't mean the character can't be evil or become evil after becoming one. I mean, we do have humans who are fully capable of being evil. Vampires are pretty much the same, only amplified because of their newfound condition and powers. Hell, the characters/players/readers don't even need to know what causes the "curse", just as vampires from Masquerade have no real idea (beyond myths). It is possible to leave it up to speculation. I am mostly saying it's a disease, because it reflects strongly on other elements in the setting, compared to a more conventional approach.

There is a level of wrongness people can achieve that has an almost unearthly feel to it, seriously mentally ill people and sometimes druggies get there, too, depending on what they're taking and the environment they're taking it in, their psychology etc. By explicitly stating that your setting's characters are supernaturally twisted you can capitalise on it and tap into that unearthliness - of course this requires some suspension of disbelief, particularly for people of a certain frame of mind. If you go the other way you instead make said characters more mundane - you lean more into human tragedy. I have a strong bias, I'll admit to that - if I see a horror film and it turns out the mystery is all a big misundestanding or a hoax instead of a ghost or what have you, to me it looks like a lazy cop out and a cheap way to end things.

Also, not sure about your point on superheroes. Superheroes are popular. Much more popular than mythological heroes, I'd wager.

Superheroes are awful on a conceptual level. It's magic for atheists. There's no quest, only mundane people with mundane hopes and dreams who happen to have been bitten by a radioactive mosquito. It isn't scientific, but it adopts a vague shell of anti-fantasy for the terminally unimaginative. They dress up in gay costumes, too. Man I hate it so much, it's like if someone tried to tell me how lovecraft's dagon was actually a crash landed alien from neptune and his undersea temple was actually a cleverly disguised spaceship jury rigged into an underwater base and would affect peoples minds by beaming them with 5g weaponry. It just doesn't belong there.

 

[FritzedProcess]

If it doesn't shun the cross it's not a real vampire

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I cannot for the life of me understand why so many people fetishize this stuff. Vampires kill everyone around them. Abusive boyfriends are assholes. None of that is remotely sexy.

From an earlier discussion,

On a more serious note,I never understood this fixation with vamps and how they fuck.

It's a consequence of the tropes inherent to modern portrayals of vampires that go all the way back to Gothic horror and to novels like Dracula. Even if the vampire main character isn't being overtly sexualized, he's being portrayed as a charmer who seduces his female victims and the act of embracing in itself carries erotic undertones (i.e. the neck biting being visually akin to sexual foreplay, although it precedes the consummation of a different kind of act; not to mention that the vampire's hunger itself parallels sexual urges). Overt sexualization just takes that a step further by adopting the outlook of the charmed victim (which is either played straight just as there are people who fetishize serial killers and the like or subverted by replacing the predator trope for a misunderstood prince charming one in which the vampire doesn't intend to kill the victim, but to turn them as for them to share eternity together).

 

[lightbane]

You can read it here: https://thegamingden.github.io/after-sundow

Can I get a summary of the most offending points? That's a long one.

Characters could move and attack, but had to sacrifice their attack action to move twice as fast or to do an all-out defense. It's the same as in d20.

Here's a recap of some problems if you're interested.

Old one as the Godmachine Chronicle updated this slightly. Still, I swear you couldn't move much in the first edition of NWOD and OWOD.

This is a problem with all the splats, honestly. The population dynamics have never made sense in the three decades the IP has existed. Whenever the books do deign to give specific numbers, the calculations result in each faction having less than a dozen members each. That's not a secret society: that's a club house. Not to mention the ongoing issue that all the secret societies are written using high school clique dynamics rather than secret societies or political parties.

Blame the writers not knowing anything else. Also, at least in OWoD you had global conspiracies. In NWoD, you have local conspiracies, which makes it even more ridiculous as you can have a powerful and rich Ventrue... That "only" owns a vineyard.
I thinkt hat was fixed in 2nd Ed.

Like their head literally exploding Scanners-style or just being really distracted? Either way, that sounds hilariously weird.

It's quite elaborate and it shouldn't be limited to vamps. It became the precedent for the Godmachine non-sense.

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Holy_Engineers

Spoiler

The Holy Engineers or "God-Talkers" are a vampire cult that worships the God-Machine. They aspire to recover Packet Theta and return it to the Moon.

Overview​

The Holy Engineers were founded in 1964, when their first member received a message from the God-Machine. They believe these message are answers to questions they transmit towards the constellation Orion, but with a catch: the answers usually arrive a few days before the question is asked, creating a peculiar time loop.

According to the Holy Engineers, the Angel of Death is the patron of vampires, while a being in the heart of the Sun called The Unvoiced Name is their enemy. In 1972, the Apollo 17 mission breached the temple of Death and stole its corpse, transferring it to Earth as "Packet Theta," but Death's mind remains on the Moon and sends messages to its faithful via the God-Machine. Their stated goal is to recover Packet Theta and return it to the hidden temple on the Moon, where Death will be made whole; as a reward, all vampires will be transformed into living immortals and the sun will hold no more power over them.

Holy Engineers work hard to interpret the messages from the God-Machine, and obey any directions without hesitation. However, the God-Machine being what it is, messages rarely contain clear directions, and there may be conflict within the group over how to interpret the signal. The Holy Engineers are perhaps the most altruistic covenant of vampires, as they believe themselves to be working towards the good of both Kindred and kine and are willing to make substantial sacrifices to achieve their goals.

Radio Sickness​

A broadcast from the God-Machine is accompanied by all manner of electromagnetic interference, from flickering lights to malfunctioning computers. Analog media can record the signal, but not digital. The vampire who receives the broadcast, called the Holy Sufferer, has a window of a few days in which to analyze the message and work out what the question is meant to be. If the correct question is not determined within three days, they begin to suffer from Radio Sickness: it begins with internal hemorrhaging that gradually becomes more severe, along with a resumption of the electrical effects on their surroundings. If the question still is not broadcast, the hemorrhages begin to deal aggravated damage until the victim falls into torpor, and then Final Death.

Members of the Holy Engineers take broadcasts seriously, and are quite willing to help a Holy Sufferer interpret a prophecy up to a point. Ideally, a God Talker who recognizes a broadcast coming on alerts other members of the covenant, and they meet in a secure Elysium to observe the clues together. A member who shares a broadcast this way, and who regularly helps others with their questions, is more likely to receive help in return than a peripheral member with no record or corroborating witnesses to their message.

The rabbit hole goes real deep. I did some research and it turns out most of the authors who wrote the original gothic vampires like Ruthven, Vardalek and Dracula were gay men working through their issues in their writing… which depicted vampires as monsters who killed everyone they came into contact with. And I found two gothic vampire stories that used vampires to handle race relations… by depicting them as bringing ruination and death to everyone they encountered. I don’t think using vampires this way is remotely progressive or even makes logical sense. The unifying thread of all these stories is that vampires by their nature kill everyone around them, whether they want to or not. Gothic vampires are either deliberate villains who kill the heroes (for darker endings) or are slain by the heroes (for more conventional happy endings), or tragic victims of their own curse who kill everyone they love before their own suffering finally ends via their own demise (for really dark endings). Not what you would call uplifting material.

I cannot for the life of me understand why so many people fetishize this stuff. Vampires kill everyone around them. Abusive boyfriends are assholes. None of that is remotely sexy.

Funny that, considering Dracula is one of the few, if not the only one straight vampire ever. As for gloryfing evil... Well, you see what kind of society we have ended up with nowadays, for not to mention there's a reason of why the saying "nice guys finish last" exist (worse, I read discussions that vilifies nice guys by demonizing their actions, so the whole thing is arbitrary).

 

[Demo.Graph]

This is a problem with all the splats, honestly. The population dynamics have never made sense in the three decades the IP has existed. Whenever the books do deign to give specific numbers, the calculations result in each faction having less than a dozen members each. That's not a secret society: that's a club house. Not to mention the ongoing issue that all the secret societies are written using high school clique dynamics rather than secret societies or political parties.

Blame the writers not knowing anything else. Also, at least in OWoD you had global conspiracies. In NWoD, you have local conspiracies, which makes it even more ridiculous as you can have a powerful and rich Ventrue... That "only" owns a vineyard.
I thinkt hat was fixed in 2nd Ed.

There's the same issue with Order of Hermes (OOH) in Ars Magica. IIRC, there're ~1200 mages in rules, spread out through 12 houses ("schools of thought") with one specific house having ~200-300 mages. So with 90 mages on average per house and about 10-12 tribunals (modern country-sized geographic divisions), there're about 6-10 mages per house per tribunal. And OOH is described as being the most populous than ever in its history, so it usually should've had about 3-5 mages per house per tribunal. Mages are sedentary by nature - they tend to sit in their labs for decades researching stuff and don't migrate that much.
Despite it all, the rules overflow with super secret sects and bloodline-like magic styles that "keep existing for generations". And an annual "cool new spells" magazine that can't possibly be maintained by such a small population.

 

[lightbane]

Despite it all, the rules overflow with super secret sects and bloodline-like magic styles that "keep existing for generations". And an annual "cool new spells" magazine that can't possibly be maintained by such a small population.

I know, but NWoD made the situation worse by changing global conspiracies to local ones, so you have immortal all-powerful vampires... That never moved away from their city and has little possessions outside of it.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Can I get a summary of the most offending points? That's a long one.

Here's the first couple paragraphs:

To write a story together, everyone must be on the same page.

One of the primary purposes of a cooperative storytelling game is to provide a foundation upon which stories can be told. The other is to provide a framework by which disagreements about how a story should progress can be worked out in an acceptably impartial fashion.

The setting of After Sundown is a world like our own would be if horror fiction had an element of truth to it. There really are monsters in the night and other worlds full of nightmarish horrors that bleed into the mortal world. But it is also set in a world which is decidedly modern, and that means modern sensibilities. The game's backstory sees history and mythology through a modern interpretation, and adopts horror tropes that resonate with modern audiences. Many horror tropes are timeless - blood speckled claws in the dark is pretty much always going to be scary - but many other horror elements are merely puzzling, and are going to be downplayed. The modern audience is not particularly worried about miscegenation or communist invasion, and those elements of old horror fiction are deliberately excluded from their appropriation into After Sundown.

The tone is talking down to the reader and explaining things that are either obvious, don't need to be explained in so much detail, or redundant and irrelevant. Pretty much 90% of this passage can be cut out without losing anything of value. It gets worse from there. I believe there was a Something Awful thread which did a let's read of this years ago.

I visited Gaming Den years ago to see some of their let's reads. There are moderately decent observations here and there (such as D&D rules and cosmology being an incoherent mess at the best of times), but there's a lot of hate and arrogance getting in the way of impartial judgment.

Old one as the Godmachine Chronicle updated this slightly.

GMC didn't fix anything because, as we've established, these writers don't know how to design shit. The changes were either arbitrary or made an already iffy system worse. They bolted on FATE-style aspects onto a 90s game chassis because it was trendy at the time without realizing all the problems this creates. None of the problems pointed out at the link I shared were ever addressed, and some of the link's suggestion outright involve discarding some of the system's simplifications like reducing the number of difficulty sliders. This is why I got turned off by dice pools as a method of task resolution: they're overly complicated drek when you can just use 2d10, 3d6 or whatever if d20's lack of bell curve really upsets you and True20 provides a combat system where you don't need to roll several different types of dice if you prefer that.

Blame the writers not knowing anything else. Also, at least in OWoD you had global conspiracies. In NWoD, you have local conspiracies, which makes it even more ridiculous as you can have a powerful and rich Ventrue... That "only" owns a vineyard.
I thinkt hat was fixed in 2nd Ed.

I know, but NWoD made the situation worse by changing global conspiracies to local ones, so you have immortal all-powerful vampires... That never moved away from their city and has little possessions outside of it.

I don't have a problem with local conspiracies. I can't buy monolithic global conspiracies because the logistics don't make sense and I don't buy that vamps could put aside their egos long enough to build a global conspiracy, much less maintain it for centuries before the advent of modern telecommunications technology. Maybe it doesn't make sense for vampire lords not to have some assets outside of their immediate territory (Eurovamps do obviously have to move in order to build their populations in the New World), but they still have centuries in which to accumulate wealth.

More importantly, I don't see the need for monolithic global conspiracies from a design perspective. Especially if the campaign is set in one place for its entirety. What do they add to the game? Do they ever come up during play? If Bloodlines is any indication, then you don't actually need any of that stuff to tell engaging stories.

In my world building, I don't have unified monolithic global conspiracies but I do have magical beings moving around from time to time. Anytime that magical beings try to form monolithic global conspiracies, and it's only ever the evil ones who do because the good ones spend all their time fighting evil and don't have time for that petty political bullshit, they don't get very far before their innate evil pettiness causes it to collapse. There's dozens of self-styled "global vampiric council" groups that have absolutely no power and only exist for vanity's sake.

Despite it all, the rules overflow with super secret sects and bloodline-like magic styles that "keep existing for generations". And an annual "cool new spells" magazine that can't possibly be maintained by such a small population.

One way I address this is by giving all magical beings some form of immortality. Reincarnation, eternal youth, body snatching, eating children, etc. The average age is around a millennium or two. Also, they lie about this stuff to give the illusion that they're more impressive than they actually are. Their periodicals are typically vapid and any real knowledge is usually ruthlessly hoarded. Their magical crafts don't actually have continuity across the ages, they're the same crafts from millennia ago practiced by the same immortals. There's also tons and tons of charlatans who publish hoards of paperbacks where they claim to practice "real majiq" (yes, that's how they spell it). A minority do have genuine magical ability, but it's mostly indistinguishable from chance or limited to highly specific effects.

Or whatever. It doesn't matter until I actually write plots and I'll change my mind if it makes for a better story.

 

[Harthwain]

You mean how they’ve been co-opted into sex symbols (often abusive boyfriends who treat the heroine like dirt) and all the vampire genre fans I can find are either straight women or “queer folx”?

Yes, when it comes to writing vampires are either scary or sexy. Women prefer sexy. Men prefer scary/supernatural side of it (with a pinch of sexy, when it comes to female vampires. Because why the hell not). I don't think there is much point considering "queer folx" (I am guessing you mean LGBT by that). Let's face it - gay vampires exist mostly for women when they want something more spicy than a straight couple, just as lesbians exist mostly as male fantasy for exactly the same reason. Why? Because straight men and women are the overwhelming majority. It is that simple.

The reason why you might think that "all the vampire genre fans are either straight women" is because men are less inclined to write such fantasies and more likely to sit at the RPG table or watch a movie instead, where sexy takes backseat in favour of heavy ambience inherent to the setting. On some level playing as a vampire is a bit of a power fantasy, too (considering your character is essentially an apex predator).

Superheroes are awful on a conceptual level. It's magic for atheists. It's magic for atheists. There's no quest, only mundane people with mundane hopes and dreams who happen to have been bitten by a radioactive mosquito. It isn't scientific, but it adopts a vague shell of anti-fantasy for the terminally unimaginative.

I don't agree with "magic for atheists". Sure the Iron Man would suit that description, but then there are characters such as Doctor Strange, who is a literal mage. Superheroes are modern heroes, usually transformed from an average person. That's the main draw. An ancient hero wouldn't suit the modern times as much (even Captain America has issues, and he is not that old). Since we're on this topic, what's your opinion on Watchmen?

 

[lightbane]

he tone is talking down to the reader and explaining things that are either obvious, don't need to be explained in so much detail, or redundant and irrelevant. Pretty much 90% of this passage can be cut out without losing anything of value. It gets worse from there. I believe there was a Something Awful thread which did a let's read of this years ago.

Uh, okay. I don't notice much other than being overtly verbose and that strange bit about "miscenegation not being modern enough" (what about Lovecraftian's inbred mutants? They're always relevant if you write them right), but I'm no English native.

I visited Gaming Den years ago to see some of their let's reads. There are moderately decent observations here and there (such as D&D rules and cosmology being an incoherent mess at the best of times), but there's a lot of hate and arrogance getting in the way of impartial judgment.

I think the vitriol is exaggerated and they waste time putting too many images and such.

They bolted on FATE-style aspects onto a 90s game chassis because it was trendy at the time without realizing all the problems this creates.

You mean the Conditions that are pretty much everywhere and make combat too elaborate?
At least they "fixed" Dramatic Failures by making them optional in the sense players can take them for some exp, but it results in smart players avoiding them most of the them anyway.
In Bloodlines 2, if a sequel is ever made, I wonder if they would include something about these as a joke.

I don't have a problem with local conspiracies. I can't buy monolithic global conspiracies because the logistics don't make sense and I don't buy that vamps could put aside their egos long enough to build a global conspiracy, much less maintain it for centuries before the advent of modern telecommunications technology. Maybe it doesn't make sense for vampire lords not to have some assets outside of their immediate territory (Eurovamps do obviously have to move in order to build their populations in the New World), but they still have centuries in which to accumulate wealth.

I like global conspiracies because it makes the world feel bigger. See Deus Ex's ones.

One way I address this is by giving all magical beings some form of immortality.

They do have that in most cases in WoD already. The issue is that in the case of vamps for example, newcomers such as the players have little room for growth as everyone is stronger than them and will not hesitate to crush them to avoid competition. That's why Bloodlines 1 took some liberties so that you're allowed to do stuff.