Inspiration Strikes

I never thought I'd play "Vampire: the Masquerade" again.

All through high school, there was only one role-playing game (Dungeons & Dragons). And when I went to university, I thought this would remain the case. But when I joined the gaming society I was shunted into the one and only table with a free space (which is a whole other rant...), and at that table they were playing Vampire.

Which turned out to be great fun.

Anyway, over the next several years I played huge amounts of Vampire. I have played much more Vampire than I have any other RPG, with the sole exception of D&D. And, in that time I have run a huge number of campaigns, including one epic that ran for 2,300 years (game time), and 5 years (real time).

I had huge amounts of fun playing that game, and I learned a huge amount about storytelling, characterisation, and writing more generally. But, eventually, I burned out on it all. We reached a point where we were just going through the motions - here's vampire society; the PCs do this, this and this; now they're ruling Vampire society. Rinse and repeat... Plus, Vampires became horribly over-done, and that was even before they went all sparkly!

So, I decided to step away, and indeed took the view that I had told every story I cared to tell with the setting*, and so I wasn't going to run it again. Time to do other things, like lots of Serenity, Star Wars, and even Hunter (which is essentially the flip side of that coin). Plus, lots and lots of D&D of course! It was a shame, somewhat - they'd done a very nice "Victorian Age" version of the game that I kinda wanted to try, but never would.

That was the state of affairs for the past five years or so, and seemed set to stay that way. But then, a couple of months ago, Lady Chocolat loaned me the first season of "True Blood"... On watching the show, it was interesting to see the parallels. Some aspects of the show seemed to be direct lifts from Vampire; other things would be a perfect fit for the game. Suddenly, I got to thinking...

And then, there was an Idea. Hmm, I thought. Hmm...

* Incidentally, this was never quite true. I had had this one great idea for a "reverse trilogy" of stories, in which in the first chapter the PCs would be newly-minted characters in the modern era, then in the second they would be the sires of those same characters back in the Victorian Age, and then in the third they would be the sires of those characters back in the Dark Ages. But, in truth, I suspect that might have sucked anyway...