Vampire The Heresy

This is a report of an experience of Vampire The Masquerade played between 2003 and 2006. This was a play by forum game, on a French website (who is now offline), with more or less 30 players and 3 GM. The site functioned as a series of forums, each one used as a โ€œsceneโ€, generally named as a location (even that could move). Those forums were โ€œsecretโ€, non-visible to players except the ones who included in them.

I could talk about that whole way of playing more, especially through the first chronicle that introduced me to that kind of play, with +- 10 GM and more than one hundred players together (at that period, play was mainly happening through Internet Relay Chat, at specific meetings, with the online forums as support). In this kind of game, it was impossible to have a preplanned story, especially some GM roles were especially assigned to โ€œtake NPC and play them through the various forumsโ€ without any considerations for whatever plans any GM would have.

After one year of gming in this style of play, the local IRC server disappeared but the forums were functional. I started my own campaign. Table talk was minimal, but present and done mainly by online messengers โ€“ IRC servers, ICQ, Windows Messengers, maybe skype โ€“ I canโ€™t remember which one. Or directly inside the forum as specific lines tagged in italic, or things like that.

There are a lot of things to talk about. I want to focus for now on my relationship to published official material. And the relationship of the players. The game was โ€œLos Angeles By Nightโ€, or as the official material states โ€œThe Anarch Free Statesโ€. Vampires are organized into three main sects: Camarilla, Sabbat & the Anarch.

I was more interested into the โ€œpunkโ€ aspect of vampires. My main influences were explicit, something between The Lost Boys and Gregg Arakiโ€™s movies โ€œThe Doom Generationโ€ and โ€œNowhereโ€. This may be related to that specific period of my teenage years where I could strongly identify with the fucked drugs-on-the-road and very pessimistic take on a life without perspective (that would change later). This esthetic was presented in a description page for the chronicle, where you can โ€œsubscribeโ€ to play (that would send me a message and let you submit a character).

The community of that website, โ€œLiber-Mundiโ€, was almost exclusively playing Vampire The Masquerade. Interestingly, most people had any respect toward the publishers or the published material. Itโ€™s worth to note that I never owned any book, and we were using a French reference website that would put lore and descriptions of specific rules online (what a power does, what kind of clans exists, etc.). Some books were considered inspiring, some were absolutely considered as horrible mass of bullshit (โ€œDark Secret of the Black Handโ€ was a recurrent theme of silly jokes). The โ€By Nightโ€ sourcebook were especially considered as bad, with LA by Night and Berlin by Night considered to be the worst.

When I decided to start an โ€œAnarch chronicleโ€, I wanted to play my kind of vampire game. I started with three books: The official LA By Night, a real-life guide to LA, and Mike Davisโ€™s famous City of Quartz. I think I didnโ€™t realize at that time but the choice for an โ€œAnarch chronicleโ€ implied specific design choices: players would play neonate (max 3 in a discipline), clan would play no role (you could choose any discipline for your character without clan restriction, and there would be no โ€œclan structureโ€ or hierarchy), there would be no โ€œgroup of charactersโ€ (no โ€œcoteriesโ€ or exclusively โ€œplayer character anarch gangโ€).

The focus was on interaction between a dangerous โ€œmortal sceneโ€, with crazy and dangerous mortals playing their game of powers, and the survival of a vampire in a gang wars. The tone was sometimes satirical and dark comedy (โ€œthereโ€™s a gang of rasta doing a drive by shooting on jet-ski at Malibuโ€, โ€œmy herd is a weight watcher ringโ€), but not a parody of play, with strong feeling of horror (I had watched thousands of horror movies since my childhood).

I think Iโ€™ve used 10% of the official sourcebook. The official sourcebook focuses on โ€œthe Barony of Angelsโ€, which is Downtown/Central LA. I found that 80% of the setting material about the โ€œVampire lifeโ€ was kind of dumb, especially most NPC. Part of the pleasure were to recreate a version of the official material that would both inspire us and express criticism. Typically, the main NPC, Jeremy MacNeil, is a model for the Anarchs, the embodiment of the revolution, โ€œprotectingโ€ the territory from the sects and acting to preserve the โ€œfreedomโ€ of the โ€œAnarch Free statesโ€.

I donโ€™t want to bore you with the details of my prep, so Iโ€™ll just take this as an example. Most of the places we played were not in Downtown LA but in the surrounding neighborhood: Santa Monica, Malibu, Long Beach, Hollywood. This obviously looked like what an European who never went in the US or California imagine of LA through the various Serie Z and B media he would have access to. My main sources were the Araki Movies for the aesthetic of craziness, and Mike Davis for the crazy backstories. Jeremy MacNeil, whoโ€™s the most boring NPC I ever read, was exiled (and out of the game) by a โ€œdemocratic voteโ€ he would have called for. I rewrote most of the NPC backstory, with the key players being dead for years. I would put the own cool things I wanted to see. โ€œWe need Marilyn. I canโ€™t imagine that some stupid Toreador Anarch from the 50s would have sired Marilyn. And let us make her the most intelligent vampire of the game.โ€ (Marilyn became the main antagonist and player of the chronicle. โ€œBut thatโ€™s a masquerade breach!โ€ Oh yeah? Look at how many Marilyn you can see in the street in a week in Hollywood, I figured.). She was, of her secrets was that she ate her sire (โ€œThat fucker broke my careerโ€) and was dependent on depressive herds of medicated/intoxicated mortals.

Each โ€œbaronyโ€ (I think I had 6-7) had a โ€œgangโ€ with a leader NPC, as Marilyn, who had his goals, a set of resources, and secrets to hide. And I would play by โ€œgrabbingโ€ the player characters in those webs. When Iโ€™ve read the techniques in Sex & Sorcery for the first time (Crosses, Bangs, etc.), I said to myself โ€œGoddamn, thatโ€™s what I did well in that game!โ€. It was not perfect, due to the medium (not in real life and in direct interaction), but it was one of my best experiences of play at that time, because I was not trying to control the story. I thought for a long time that the play by forum online medium was the reason, before reading Sorcerer.

I could talk more about that kind of prep. The fact is that I had prepared a situation, and I had absolutely no preplanned story. What I wanted to highlight is that no one felt any loyalty to the official material, despite the obvious fact that everyone wanted to play that game and love that game. It was expected that you would destroy most of the published material and make it your own by changing NPC, throwing away stupid stuffs, and that most of what was official was dumb anyway. Also worth to  notice that the word โ€œMetaplotโ€ was considered both an insult and a joke, and the consider was considered stupid. โ€œHey why would I do thatโ€ โ€œbecauseโ€ฆ METAPLOTโ€ (shouted in choir). But in the same time, everything was not stupid. Some things were inspiring. Part of the fun

Today, Iโ€™m looking at that kind of relationship I had with official material with all those official setting-centered splatter books, especially Runequest/Glorantha. My own take on playing Glorantha, I think, would be

I want to call this way of blowtorching official material and recreating your own โ€œDecanonized thingโ€, your own โ€œheresyโ€, because thatโ€™s exactly what it is: killing the canonical element of the material. See what Effy has done with her own Glorantha, I quote her:

my partner said, โ€œOK, this character killed the canon guy by crushing his head between her thighsโ€ and we moved on.

This is exactly what Iโ€™m talking about. In my Glorantha, Kallyr Starbrow, Harrek, Argrath and other Leikas and whoever grand npc would definitely be blowtorched especially in a stupid way, something like โ€œstupid death in a barfightโ€. I was so pleased to read this, as it reactivated my own memories about my LA By Night.

I think that the chronicle description allowed to clearly state โ€œif youโ€™re just a fan of the publishing material, thatโ€™s not for you. This where we make this thing our ownโ€.

How dit it play?

I started alone with 5 players. Each of them would receive a word file with the aesthetic of the chronicle, and what we would play, and a brief brushes of my vision of Anarch LA, with a very short description of the backstory. The point was to show that we were playing a blowtorched version of LA, an idealized Araki style of LA, but also a small description of the baronies and their vampire npc gangs.

The players created a character, with all their backgrounds points and advantages and disadvantages. They would choose a โ€œbaronyโ€ where your character would go, with the explicit assumption of โ€œthatโ€™s where you want to hangout, and you know youโ€™re in those guys territories, you may want to move later, but just decide a good reason for why you choose that and letโ€™s stick with itโ€. Some players defined all their advantages (ie. if they have Contacts 4, they would give name to all their contacts, and sometimes provide a description), some would leave everything blank (just name in what social field this contact is).

Then, play started by playing with the Backgrounds points and the Advantages/Disadvantages.

That means that I would open a forum with just that player and take something from his sheet then play it. I had a Nosferatu with 4 in Contacts who described a corrupted LAPD investigator as a contact. I started the scene with that investigator showing up in some place to ask the character โ€œwhat do you know about Warehouse 49 in Huntington Beach!โ€ The player would interact with his contact doing regular stuff (dice involved if needed), ask me โ€œdo I know anything about that?โ€ โ€œNo, you donโ€™tโ€ then say, โ€œI want to find that Warehouse 49 and see what happened!โ€. There, he finds a crime scene where a tortured guy suspended by hooks in his skin would suddenly awake, screaming. But I had no plan, the player could have other priorities and do something. One way I used the contacts, advantages, allies, etc. was to play them active fictional entities, pro-active with their goals, themselves embedded by the backstory I had designed in relationship with each Leader Gang NPC.

At some point, I would โ€œcrossโ€ between scenes. That means, we post about what is happening for the character, for instance a PC is talking with her herd, and if I find it appropriate, I would put another PC in that โ€œforum/sceneโ€ and describe of how he enters the scene. So that character, who is a bee-queen is talking to her herd-fans, and that other character who just stole a car just hit one of the members of the herd, creating a crash. I of course described how the herd-fans reacted, then let the player state their action, interact, etc. I remember those crosses as the most fun part of that game, because at some point I had 30 players and many things to cross.

NPC were grabby. I had kind of two levels of play: the mortal games (the main ones), where most of the โ€œmortalsโ€ were elements taken from the character sheets. I would generally put them weird Araki stuff. Like that Nurse Ally who was necrophiliac. Not all of them, not always, and not so fucked up, but I really took heart to give those little dots on a sheet things to care for, plans to do, and cross, cross, cross. The funniest were the ghouls, of course. The second level was the โ€œvampireโ€ game. That would be playing the NPC gangs characters (each one their own little  diagram of betrayal, loyalties and secrets). Of course, these two levels would clash. The idea was to have some degree of grabynness, intertwining the dots of the character sheets and the diagrams.

Then at some point, the website needed some way to introduce new players. And this was a 5 players chronicles, but I had an idea. I offered the possibility to play what I called at that time a โ€œKleenex characterโ€. The idea was that you would play a mortal, absolutely any kind of plausible character you want to, we would put you in some kind of situation, and you would play one or two scenes. Then you could decide if you want to play a vampire. This was also a way to see if our way of playing would match.

I had the most interesting surprise at some point. One player wanted to play a queer vet. As instructed, the player wrote a 3-4 lines description of the character and we would define the basic attributes we would use (no full sheet, but a simplified version like โ€œyouโ€™re good at this = 6 dice,  youโ€™re not good = 2 diceโ€, youโ€™re average  = 4 diceโ€).

That character was not a caricature: it was very straightforward description of an intelligent and educated character with a love for animal and a queer philosophy and social life.

I had another scene/forum at the same time, where a player character organized a drive-by-shooting against another player character, and this character and his ghouls had been hit. I had described the beautiful bodyguard goth queen ghoul screaming as hell asking for help to her lover/master voodoo-inspired ganger. He asks for a contact who can heal her. I obviously open the first scene of the vet and let them describes what happens between them. When the vet accepts the screaming ghoul and her master (the players had no hint of who was a vampire or not), the vet suddenly describes the room where she treats them as a BDSM dungeon. So we had this scene of a suddenly silent ghoul looking at her Vampire master with anxiety, โ€œare you sure about that docโ€.

This is just a funny little anecdote. But the point was that, due to the written medium, and the time between posts, sharing authorities became an unspoken fact to play functionally. You couldnโ€™t just ask for every small detail โ€œcan I thisโ€, โ€œwhat color is the wallโ€, etc. We learned to share situational authority so we could move on to play. If something was logical and obvious, like a NPC reaction, the player would include, and if there was a feeling that it needed a roll, a roll would be sent without prompting the GM to do it. Sometimes, that would need adjustment sometimes โ€œwait, that canโ€™t work like this, I take this back, and this is how she reactsโ€, because there was some unknown information.

The infuriating thing is that I would lose that pleasure of play when I was offered the Vampire the Requiem books, who would teach me to forget all of this by shaping the preplanned story in the Storyteller Adventure System.

And thatโ€™s also why I was so hooked by Sorcerer, and all the conceptual background that comes with it. I could understand the techniques I was doing online to get that pleasure back on the table.

Not really a conclusion

I wanted to tell this story of how I blowtorched official material of a game I loved to play. We really loved Vampire the Masquerade, not because of โ€œthe loreโ€ or โ€œthe metaplotโ€, but because we could focus on specific things in the published material that inspired us, inside a strong culture of disloyalty to the publisher that would push us to rewrite what we wanted to. The pleasure actually came from the decanonizing practice, not by playing the canonical texts.

I asked myself, whatโ€™s the difference between Glorantha and Vampire in that regards? Why isnโ€™t it easy for me to just create my Glorantha Heresy? I guess itโ€™s related to the quality of the material. Most of the Vampire sourcebooks from the 90s are just dumb, so itโ€™s easy to blowtorch it. The content of โ€œcanonโ€ is stupid. Gloranthaโ€™s canon is not dumb. It contains a lot of interesting stuffs.

So, here is what Iโ€™m thinking.  I think Iโ€™m going to play again a game of Vampire the Masquerade, reconnect with my practice of Heresy.

And then Glorantha will be next. Iโ€™ll take one book, and Iโ€™ll blowtorch/90% of it, and just rewrite what I want.

So, this is a bit of a Manifesto, a call for roleplaying Heresies, the killing of canonical settings, the fall of sacred NPC and their statues. What would be your own Heresy?

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2 responses to “Vampire The Heresy”

  1. So, 7th Sea (first edition) has this lavish fantasy Europe setting with these fleshed out NPC Villains. But weirdly, it also has fleshed out NPC Heroes that are in various conflicts with the Villains. My read was the players (the actual real people) were supposed to become fans of these Heroes the way one would become a fan of a favored comic book or TV show character. Therefore, they would be delighted to have their PC swept up in an adventure either aiding or rescuing or otherwise teaming up with their favorite Hero. This struck me as supremely weird.

    So, I just deleted the Heroes. All of them. I then picked my favorite Villains (many of whom were, admittedly, pretty cool) and tweaked and retargeted their plans so they would be aimed at the PCs directly. Hell, sometimes they were aimed at one PC in particular. It worked wonderfully!

    And for me, that Glorantha problem you’re having is what I’m experience with Shadows of Esteren. Like I can’t seem to bring myself to just pick a chunk of map to carve out as my own and just play something, anything, right there about whatever I fancy. I’m not sure why.

  2. What a blast to read this write-up. That game sounded like a ton of fun!

    Your call for heresies reminds me of something the old Sons of Kryos podcast crew (Judd and Jeff) did once, or reported on some of them doing: the first scene of a new campaign set in the Forgotten Realms began with Elminster being crucified. Shocking measures are sometimes called for when things are held too preciously.

    As for me and what I hold too preciously, it is obviously Planescape. I am having the same problem Jesse is with Shadows of Esteren. I don’t feel afraid or hesitant to make the material my own, but I perenially feel that I need just a *bit* better of a handle on it before I do…

    (I am good at self-deception, in other words.)

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