Some years ago, I read through all of Vampire: The Masquerade 1st Edition. I covered the products from 1991 in a pair of posts and then kept up the posting on a Facebook thread elsewhere, and never posted about the books from 1992 in here. The pace of production was pretty stunning, straight out the gate. They got out nine books in 1991 for the first edition, followed by five more in 1992 before launching the second edition and even more books for that.

Milwaukee by Night was covered in the previous set of posts so I will not go into it here. First up, Vampire: The Masquerade Storyteller’s Handbook. This is a book of optional and “advanced” rules and storytelling advice. Reading crunchy bits for a game I do not intend to run is boring to me and I didn’t get much out of them. The book does mention that historical characters should be used very sparingly in Vampire, at a point in time when the game had already featured Menelaus of Sparta, Helen of Troy, Al Capone, Harry Houdini, Louis Pasteur, and the Aztec deity Mictlantecuhtli, with more to come. There’s advanced combat rules for when you absolutely need to get into detail about ammo calibres. There’s ideas for crossovers with games like Twilight: 2000, Cyberpunk 2020, and Call of Cthulhu! Like the Player’s Guide, it is wrapped up with a series of essays about the game, its themes, and storytelling. One of them discusses character creation based on the players themselves, which feels like a terrible idea. One that I particularly liked was Andrew Greenberg’s essay about drawing from the awfulness of the world around us and the avarice and duplicitousness of those who purport to lead us.

The Hunters Hunted was the first book about vampire hunters. In later years, there’d be a follow-up in the 20th Anniversary Edition, and of course this inspired the Hunter: The Reckoning game line. It’s also in the DNA of the 5th Edition’s Second Inquisition.

This was pretty nice. The book is specifically about vampire hunters as player characters, not antagonists, and offers rules for creating mortal characters, game ideas, equipment, and hunter organizations. There’s also some discussion of mages and werewolves as vampire hunters. Among the organizations there’s FBI, the vampire-infiltrated NSA, CDC who’s worried about strange AIDS cases, good old Society of Leopold, and the weird outlier of Children of Osiris, a vampire sect who are into asceticism, hermitism, and hating the Followers of Set. I didn’t really get a good grip on them from a player’s point of view and I guess that was a common experience since I don’t remember seeing them a lot in later books.

The book presents a lot of options, including some cool ideas how mortals can try to combat vampires through indirect means. I would’ve liked to see a scenario here to show how all of this can be applied in practice, especially as a vampire-killing job is a pretty obvious concept. A lot of Vampire’s readymade stories are a bit tricky since the game is so personal and players keep asking what’s their motivation in this scene. This could’ve been done by presenting a vampire NPC, its lair, its security measures, and how it hunts and spends its nights, plus a lot of hooks to get the PCs involved. The rest would be sandbox, allowing them to come up with their own approach.

Then there was Mummy. It’s pretty short and actually pretty cool. It’s the first book to present the mummies of the World of Darkness. They are true immortals, who can be killed, burnt to ash, dissolved in acid, and will just keep coming back once they’ve reconstituted their bodies. They’re not even monsters as such, and the horror experience is in their immortality, the ephemerality of everything around them, and how the bane mummies created by Set are legit awful.

The book’s trade dress is Vampire: The Masquerade and there’s a framing story of a vampire’s narration of their friendship with a mummy, but the book is intended for playing mummies. Because all of the mummies were created in the times of Ancient Egypt, they’ve been around for a really long time and they have skills, talents, and backgrounds up the wazoo. Additionally, they have their own magic. The rules play around with the Ancient Egyptian concepts of different parts of the soul, which is pretty nifty. I also dig Steve Wieck’s chatty authorial voice.

The odder part of this is that one of the aspects of their magic is alchemical potions, which is an interesting solution for someone whose stomach is in one canopic jar and their intestines in another.

This also opens up Children of Osiris from Hunters Hunted a bit more. In this mythical frame, Osiris, Set, and Anubis were all vampires, and Horus was the second mummy ever created. Isis was a mortal woman who was entirely over it with the bullshit these men came up with and refused immortality. Set destroyed Osiris and Anubis and is hunkering down somewhere to pull the strings on Followers of Set.

As an interesting detail, Horus is hanging around in Switzerland and dusting every vampire who shows up. I recently read Tim Powers’s The Stress of Her Regard, which also has a theme about the Swiss Alps being a bad place for vampires. I wonder if this is an element of an older story? Also, another mummy making an appearance is Heteferes I, probably best know for being the mother of the pharaoh Khufu, or Cheops.

Finally, there’s a story, “Hell’s Highway”, where mummies go on a roadtrip to close a gate to Hell, along Highway 40 outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Depending on the number of player characters, the vehicle is either an old Ford Thunderbird or a colourful hippie van. This is charming Americana, with elements of DC Comics’ Hell descriptions and a dusting of Hunter S. Thompson. The bossfight is also clearly lifted from the first book of The Sandman. I’d run this, but not with these rules.

Awakening: Diablerie Mexico is someone’s goddamn AD&D adventure. It’s a 56-page scenario about the taboo of diablerie. The PCs start out in Chicago where they cannot investigate because all of their sources keep getting murdered, but fortunately they have been mailed an ancient book that allows them to discover a lost Mayan city in the Yucatan, where the old vampire Mictlantecuhtli sleeps his thousand-year slumber. Also there’s a ritual that allows several vampires to diablerize the same target. Then they go to Mexico and the Yucatan jungle and find the city and then it’s a dungeon crawl. There’s traps and guardian monsters and everything. It’s not a bad dungeon crawl, though, and a lot of its contents attack the characters’ self-image and their fears rather than just doing so many points of Aggravated. It could see myself running this, but I’d probably excise everything that comes before they enter the city.

Finally, there’s A World of Darkness, about vampires around the world. This is a very uneven book that feels like it hasn’t really had a solid editorial vision, and it’s more like a bunch of writers being told to write whatever they figured was cool.

The results include a view of the British Isles, the hidden castle of the Inconnu in Romania, a general look at Europe, two different articles about Hong Kong except one of them isn’t even about Hong Kong and is instead about gaki, the vampires of Japan. There’s an uncomfortably exoticising chapter on Haiti, a really strange one about Petra in Jordan and the Assamite renegade who protects it, and finally a private club for vampires in San Francisco. It’s run by Oscar Wilde. The gaki chapter is our first whiff that the Kindred of the East might be different from our normal American vampires, as well as of the changing breeds, since it’s also got catgirls.

Other important celebrity vampires are Louhi in Finland, John Dee and the Malkavian Aleister Crowley in London, the Prince of Paris Francois Villon, and the Phantom of the Opera. Argh.

We are also told that the Inconnu, to conceal the castle of Hunedoara from mortals and the feared Tremere, have cut a deal with the demon Baphomet. Because of this, the highest-ranking Inconnu have forever lost their chance of attaining Golconda.

Also, the actual Hunedoara Castle is one of the bigger tourist attractions in Romania and in the middle of a town of 50,000 inhabitants. It was used as Castle Orlok in the recent Eggers remake of Nosferatu.

The Petra article, in turn, veers straight into alternate history, where the city remains concealed because the Nabatean elite warriors of the vampire Talaq slaughtered Johann Ludwig Burkchardt’s expedition in 1812 and it’s remained undiscovered for the next nearly 200 years.

What an odd book, replete with interesting things but also a font of just plain weird stuff. This concludes the first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. The second edition came out already in 1992, followed by the Revised edition in 1998. In 1992, the game line was joined by Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and in consecutive years, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion, and Changeling: The Dreaming. Hunter: The Reckoning would come out in 1999, Mummy: The Resurrection would receive its standalone game in 2001, with Demon: The Fallen out in 2002 and finally Orpheus, the last standalone game of the original run of World of Darkness in 2003. Not all of these were creatively or commercially successful, but it was a hell of a run. It resulted in hundreds of game books, a load of novels, a very unfortunate TV show, one pro wrestler, one classic video game, and an indelible mark in horror fiction and gaming.

I’ll keep reading.