How to Run Vampire: The Requiem
By
Matthew McFarland
Vampires. More has been written on the topic of what vampires are, why they are scary, what they do, what they can do, their sex lives (so to speak) and how they while away eternity than I care to contemplate. Gamers with any experience in the hobby over the past 13 years probably don’t react the way I did when hearing about game in which you play vampires, namely, a mixture of intrigue and confusion. After all, aren’t vampires the bad guys?
But the fact is, Vampire: The Masquerade really tore down those walls. Now, it’s not at all uncommon to see games offering the chance to play monsters (Vampire wasn’t the first to do it, but was by far the most popular). Those green marble books became so ubiquitous that the old World of Darkness had to end, and rising from its ashes like a magnificent phoenix comes…the new World of Darkness. The first game for this new line, of course, is Vampire: The Requiem.
Before we start, I humbly request that you forget everything you know about Vampire: The Masquerade. I’m not going to make comparisons between the old game and the new in this essay, because I think this does a disservice to both games. I’m not going to tell you what’s changed and what hasn’t, or speculate on why certain things were kept and others weren’t, both because much of my insight on the matter comes from being a designer for the new World of Darkness and because I think it’s totally irrelevant for enjoying Requiem. Indeed, to have a great game of Vampire: The Requiem you need to do exactly what White Wolf did — go back to basics.
The World of Darkness
Running Vampire: The Requiem requires two books: the actual Vampire book and the World of Darkness Rulebook. The latter contains all of the basic rules for the game and a smidgen of setting (as well as the rules for ghosts, which are just handy all around), while the former contains all of the setting, rules and Storytelling advice for Vampire in particular.
The World of Darkness is much like our world. The difference is that monsters are real, but cunningly hide themselves from our view. Why? It depends on the monster, really. Vampires hide because they feed upon the blood of the living, and mass exposure would be fatal to their kind. Fortunately, they are well-equipped to hide (more on this later).
In a more general sense, the World of Darkness houses mystery. Urban legends are more often true than not, every bit of history contains some truly eldritch secrets, and throwing a pinch of salt over your shoulder might very well save your life. What makes the World of Darkness a horror and mystery setting rather than a modern fantasy setting is that you typically can’t prove any of this. By the time the supernatural becomes obvious, you’ve already become so far immersed that there’s no going back.
From a game system perspective, the World of Darkness uses 10-sided dice. Rolls require a dice pool, by combining one of nine Attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, Presence, Composure, Manipulation, Intelligence, Wits or Resolve) with either another Attribute or a Skill. Every die that comes up 8 or higher is a success, and 10s are rerolled. One success is normally all that’s required, though in combat, multiple successes make a difference.
Characters also receive a number of points in Merits. Merits cover everything from being able to hold one’s breath for long periods of time to being well-read to speaking other languages to having extra money. Some Merits are only applicable to mortal characters, while others are only available to vampires (these latter are listed in the Vampire book, not the World of Darkness Rulebook).
All
characters have a Morality trait. When characters act in an immoral fashion,
they run the risk of losing dots from this trait (it ranges from 1 to 10) and
eventually going insane. Vampires have a specific type of Morality called
Humanity that measures, as you might guess, how far
from being human the vampire has fallen. If a vampire loses all of her
Humanity, she becomes nothing but a beast, and no longer suitable for play.
The rules have further permutations, of course, but that’s the gist of it, at least for mortals. Vampires, of course, add their own wrinkles.
The Undead
Creating a Vampire character consists of using the mortal character creation rules put forth in the World of Darkness Rulebook and adding a vampire “template.” Vampires belong to one of five clans, each one representing a class vampire archetype. These are, in brief:
•
Daeva: Vampires
as seductive predators (Interview with
the Vampire).
•
Gangrel: Vampires
as animalistic wanderers (Near Dark).
•
Mekhet: Vampires
as shadowy, skulking hunters (Bloodsucking
Fiends: A Love Story).
•
Nosferatu: Vampires
as deformed monsters (Nosferatu).
•
Ventrue: Vampires
as deranged overlords (Dracula).
Clan
determines what Disciplines (special powers) a vampire has easy access to and
grants an extra dot in one of two Attributes. It also levies a curse. For instance,
Mekhet are more vulnerable to sunlight than other vampires, while Ventrue have
trouble maintaining their sanity. Clan does not
determine outlook, personality or agenda, though these things might determine
which clan chooses to take a person in. From a player’s perspective, the
difference is minimal, but from a character’s perspective, it’s crucial:
Vampires do not choose their clans. Therefore, when creating a character, the
player should be asking not “why did I choose this clan?” but “why did this clan
choose my character?”
The
other major choice to be made at character creation is covenant. The Vampire book lists five major covenants, but
does not claim that these are the only ones in existence. The five covenants
listed are:
• The
Carthian Movement: Vampires who seek a progressive government for their own kind.
• The
Circle of the Crone: Pagan blood-sorcerers bound in worship of their goddess(es).
•
Invictus: Neo-feudalists
hungry for power and money as well as blood.
•
Lancea Sanctum: Christian
vampires who believe that God put them on Earth to be monsters.
• Ordo
Dracul: A group
of vampires dedicated to transcending their condition and becoming more than
undead.
Players can make characters belonging to any of these groups, or can choose to be unaligned. Each covenant has a benefit. The Carthian Movement and Invictus provide experience costs breaks on different Merits, while the other three provide access to mystical powers not available to non-members. Members of all clans belong to all covenants (though some are better represented than others), meaning that players have a great many options for their characters. It bears noting here that although vampires do not choose their clans, they do choose their covenants, and therefore the covenant should be a much greater factor in role-playing the character than clan.
The vampiric condition is detailed fairly extensively in the book. The Introduction answers many of the obvious questions (mirrors, garlic, etc.), and the book contains rules for feeding, how much blood a vampire requires to survive, what traits are intrinsic to all vampires, and so on. There are also a number of ideas that don’t have easy antecedents in mythology but that make sense for the setting. One of these (and a conceit that many players and Storytellers have trouble understanding at first) is the Predator’s Taint.
All vampires run the risk of flying into frenzy when angered or frightened. When two vampires meet for the first time, their predatory natures flare up and the weaker of the two instinctively flees, while the stronger attacks (two vampires of equal power both have the urge to attack). This contest is resolved by a roll of Resolve + Composure, and it serves a dual purpose. First, it allows vampires to recognize each other without using a Discipline — essential for maintaining any kind of society among the undead. Second, it reinforces the notion that vampires are predators, ultimately all competing for the same food source. The problem that many players have with the mechanic is that it seems to suggest that any gathering of vampires will result in chaos, as many of them attack each other or flee the area.
In fact, the book suggests that the Predator’s Taint be used as the Storyteller requires, rather than always enforced. In running Vampire, I’ve found it to be extremely useful in bringing characters together and occasionally reinforcing that no vampire should ever feel “safe” around others of his kind. I think, though, that it’s a superb example of the principle I put forth in Living with Lady 10-Sider: never ask for a roll if you aren’t prepared for the results.
Vampires feed on blood, and this is measured in game terms by Vitae. Players spend points of Vitae to wake up each evening, heal wounds, amplify physical Attributes and power certain Disciplines.
How much blood a
vampire can hold is determined by a trait called Blood Potency. This trait
ranges from 1 to 10 and measures not only how much Vitae a vampire can hold,
but how high his traits can rise, his mental influence over other vampires with
Disciplines and what kinds of victims the vampire can feed from. After a
certain point, a vampire cannot feed from animals anymore, and then mortals,
too, because unavailable as prey. A truly powerful vampire can only feed on
others of his kind. Blood Potency increases with age (and can be increased by
consuming the blood and souls of other vampires; this is, obviously, a taboo
practice and liable to get a practitioner killed), but if it grows too high,
the vampire can enter a kind of stasis called torpor and let the trait fall again. This mechanic exists not only
as a gauge of how powerful characters become (without introducing a
counter-intuitive and artificial “level” system), but also to prevent
super-powerful characters from running the game, thus allowing the players’
characters to be movers and shakers in vampire society.
Vampire
“society” changes depending on which covenant holds power in a city. The Vampire book contains an appendix
detailing the city of New Orleans, but the book also makes it clear that
covenants don’t always behave the same way in different places (therefore, even
though New Orleans is a Lancea Sanctum stronghold, another city that also
boasts a large presence from this covenant might not be). While this grants the
Storyteller a great deal of freedom when designing a city, it also places upon
her a great deal of responsibility. As Storyteller, you can’t simply tell the
players “OK,
Running Vampire
The Vampire book gives some good advice on running the game, but let’s go into practical concerns for a moment. Vampire is a game full of possibility. The Vampire book presents many different ideas for antagonists and conflict, and you can’t hope to include them all. As is so often the case with While Wolf games, you must decide what kind of story you want to tell, what kind of story your players will most enjoy, and then pick and choose the elements of the game best suited to those choices. Vampire can, for instance, focus on political wars between covenants, the struggle to retain one’s Humanity, conflict with other supernatural beings (at time of this writing, only Vampire is in print, but Werewolf: The Forsaken and Mage: The Awakening are both due for release in 2005) or investigating the deeper mysteries of the World of Darkness. There is no “right” way to run or play Vampire, and no overarching goal or looming enemy to defeat. This can be daunting, but it forces the players and the Storyteller to focus the story on the characters and the conflicts presented to them, rather than a conceit of the game setting.
Although the game is self-contained (that is, you can play it with only the two books I mentioned earlier), other sourcebooks are available and more are, of course, coming. The design philosophy is (or at least, has been thus far) to make each sourcebook viable with only the core books. That is, there is no “metaplot,” no ongoing story that invalidates the contents of one sourcebook by updating it in another. This also means that sourcebooks don’t contain recurring characters — if someone appears in Nomads, he won’t reappear later, which means the characters in your group can safely kill him without making things difficult on the Storyteller later.
The size and scope of Vampire are two of its biggest selling points to me. The sheer number of possibilities means that no two Vampire chronicles are the same, and this setup allows a great deal of customization between gaming groups. The system is simple and fairly intuitive (I don’t like everything about it, but then I never do, and setting is always more important than system anyway). White Wolf seems keenly interested in supporting the line; errata is already available for the game here, and several sourcebooks for the game and novels based upon have been released. Plus, an introductory chronicle for the game is available for free download from White Wolf’s website (it’s meant for people without role-playing experience, which is why it will feel simplistic to veterans, but I humbly submit that there’s potential there for anyone. By way of disclosure, I wrote the introductory chronicle).
What I like most about the game, though, is the overall feel. Vampires are monsters, yes, but they aren’t the only ones in the World of Darkness, or even the worst. The game feels mysterious and intriguing, and much more is at work than immediately apparent. Even becoming a vampire doesn’t answer all the nagging questions, as vampires have to take just as much on faith as mortals do. Different covenants think they have the answers, of course, but they can’t actually prove any of it.
Vampire has its disadvantages, of
course. It quite clearly suffers from White Wolf trying to decide what they
wanted to do with it; there are inconsistent presentations of mechanics, powers
that obviously haven’t been playtested well enough
and the characters listed in the
The best advice I can give for people with these kinds of complaints (and I do not say this dismissively, as I have several of the same complaints myself) is to trust the material. Forget the original game, read Requiem and try to do so with an open mind. Create characters with more focus on their mortal lives than the vampiric experiences, and try to immerse yourself in their fear as you experience the World of Darkness. Storytellers, play imagery and theme for all it’s worth, and never forget that the characters are vampires — predators, criminals and monsters — in addition to whatever else they may be. The differences between Requiem and Masquerade are subtle, but important, and you really have to play the game to fully appreciate them.
Vampire: The Blood Mask
I ran a Vampire: The Requiem game recently, which lasted approximately four sessions. The game was set in Detroit, and included three characters: A Nosferatu of the Circle of the Crone who made masks out of leather, a Mekhet of the Ordo Dracul who worked as a thief and kept ties with his mortal family, and a Daeva nominally of the Carthian Movement, also a thief, for whom stealing was a source of pride and excitement.
The characters were hired to steal a mask on display at a museum. Doing a bit of research, the Nosferatu discovered the mask was over 3000 years old and held some significance for her covenant. She asked that the mask spend some time with her fellow Acolytes (members of the Circle) before the group handed it over to their employer. With that in mind, they went to work.
The mask heist went off just fine. As the characters were heading to the Acolytes’ haven, they were attacked by a group of men who carried a salve that healed their wounds (it didn’t do them much good against the vampires, however). When they arrived at the Acolytes’ haven, the experimented with the mask a bit and discovered that it triggered a sensation similar to the Predator’s Taint.
They stayed at the haven for the day, but were attacked before sunset. The men (apparently from the same group as before) stole the mask, but the vampires captured one of them and coerced the truth. They were members of a cult dedicated to discovering eternal life and believed the mask held the secret.
The vampires tracked the cult back to a wealthy woman and invaded her mansion, to discover that she had donned the mask and it had driven her mad with bloodlust. She had killed most of her staff, and the characters fought her with no real effect until they found that attacks that didn’t break the skin (specifically, boiling water) could damage her. They took the mask, gave it to their employer, and collected their money.
While the story was a fairly typical “hunt the MacGuffin” adventure, the specifics made it a Vampire story. The characters had to choose between personal goals and covenant expectations, between killing humans or allowing enemies to escape and face a woman who was simply trying to prolong her own life and became a monster in the process. Had I run the game as a chronicle rather than a single story, I definitely would have stretched out the timetable and allowed them to play with the mask a bit more, probably enabling them to see its effects on vampires as well as mortals. As it was, the story was meant to show off the merits of Requiem and introduce the players to the World of Darkness, and I think it accomplished that quite well.
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Requiem? Click here!
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