Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Logs 316-325: Vampire the Masquerade

Logs 316-325: Vampire the Masquerade
I really enjoyed playing Vampire the Masquerade; as a system, the rules differed from what we were used to playing and thus they provided a breath of fresh air for our RPG tastes. At first, the idea of only using 10-sided dice made me dislike the system, but I adapted and ended up liking that element of the game. My favorite aspect of Vampire involved using XP differently; in Vampire, the players choose how to "spend" their awarded XP to "purchase" their new abilities or stat increases instead of being locked into a set leveling system with guaranteed level bonuses.

I played in at least 3 Vampire campaigns over the years. I don't really remember the first one, but I can tell you about the others...


Vampire Boy Part 1: Dark Ages
I played a little kid who was turned into a vampire around age 8 or 10: Duke Theodore "Theo" Vincent. He was technically Ravnos, but his main goal in life was to convince vampires from different clans to teach him their best abilities so he was often pretending to be a Toreador or some other clan to get people to like him and help him.

Our storyteller ran us through a short campaign of 6 sessions that mostly revolved around a group of people who were trying to raise the ancient god Set. Our characters initially had no idea what we were getting involved in (and, as players, we found trouble adapting to some of the combat rules and how to deal with different powers/abilities interacting with one another).

The first 2 sessions established the premise of the campaign. The player group included: Theo, Akio the "merchant," General Alric, Ramon, and 2 Setite sisters working for Prince Deondra. There was a war with the Ventrue and Brujah against the Assimites. A mysterious woman named Jocelyn was going to lead us to a ruby that was supposed to unite the Camarilla. We battled Gangrel that ambushed us in the forest.

In Session 3 my character burned all the ships at the harbor to create a distraction and the drama focused on deciding what to do with the ruby. We travelled to the Darklands. The gem was actually broken into pieces. Session 4 was about getting another piece of the gem. In Session 5 we dealt with a mage, explored a castle, and the Gangrel arrived to take us to their leader.

In the last session of the mini-campaign we put together all of the ruby pieces, there was a huge battle, we ended up in an Egyptian underground area, and through some weird rituals and conflicts Set was temporarily raised by then vanquished. Our characters then retired to each of our own agendas.

Vampire Boy Part 2: Modern
We later decided to continue in the campaign world, but moving time up to the modern era. Our characters ended up in Chicago, meeting up once again (because my character still had the ruby from the Dark Ages campaign and Akio wanted it). Theo had become a party boy who lived on a cruise ship with a team of - strangely enough - vampire slayers. At this point in his existence, Theo had become obsession with swapping bodies with people.

Our character went from Chicago to Dallas, where we met the local vampire prince(ss). Assassins came after us as we travelled around the world. We dodged killers, partied, and kept the ruby out of the hands of the bad evil people (as opposed to the goodish-evil people).

Aristotle
Some campaigns go unfinished; you know, where you play a session or 2 or 3 and then the game fizzles out because of scheduling issues or whatever. That happened here, even though we had a fun game going. This time I played a philosopher-vampire named after Aristotle. The main conflict came from a fancy ball/gathering where there was a battle going on.


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