Tag Archives: horror

Vampire: The Masquerade 1st Edition, Year Two

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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.

Playing ALIEN, or, How I TPK’d the Entire Party

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The ALIEN Roleplaying Game came out in 2019 from Fria Ligan. It was a bit of a surprise – on one hand, it felt like a likely very expensive, major license, but on the other, there was also the feeling that the more recent, very unfortunate movies had kinda killed interest in it. Certainly, I felt like that Alien’s very specific mode of survival horror in space was perhaps too narrow a frame to support the classical approach of putting out a big rulebook, adventures, sourcebooks, and an introductory boxed set. That’s the stuff you want in a long campaign, but long campaigns imply characters stay alive. This is Alien. People don’t do that here.

However, Fria Ligan makes quality stuff, so when the opportunity came to play, I jumped on it. Also, it’s not as though there’s anything else to do these days than play roleplaying games online.

We played the Starter Set’s introductory adventure Chariot of the Gods. The venue was Foundry VTT, where you can buy modules with all the necessary stuff already set up. I find it helps getting used to a new system when the VTT does half the work for you and tells if your roll was a success or a failure. Voice and video we got through Discord. Playing virtually also had the crucial advantage that we could send secret messages to the Game Mother without the other players seeing us pass notes, which can be a very important part of ALIEN.

ALIEN uses Fria Ligan’s house ruleset, the Year Zero Engine, used in Mutant: Year Zero, Tales from the Loop, and the rest. Basically, you roll a pool of six-siders and sixes are successes. Failure is very common, which fits some games better than others. It fits ALIEN‘s desperate survival horror very well.

The following, of course, will have SPOILERS for Chariot of the Gods. Proceed at your own risk.

ALIEN has two game modes, Cinematic and Campaign Play. Campaign Play is exactly what it sounds like, while the Cinematic mode has pre-written adventures with pregenerated characters, each with their own secret agendas. They’re long enough for a one-shot or a mini-campaign, and at least Chariot of the Gods lived admirably up to the “Cinematic”. The first session, our approach on a derelict ship in the dark between the stars, our exploration of its frozen corridors and disused laboratories, was straight out of the movies. Of course, this was also because that’s what we as players were there to do, so that’s how we played it. The characters were archetypical and easy to fall into – the crew of the Nostromo, basically.

We also observed a shift in style in the later sessions. After we had explored the ship, the fear of the unknown dissipated, and once we had fought some monsters and discovered them to be dangerous but killable, we went from playing Alien to playing Aliens, as it were.

The scenario also had an act structure, which governed the characters’ secret agendas that shifted as the situation escalated. Some of the goals were mutually exclusive and drove player-versus-player conflict. The corporate liaison, for instance, is pretty much Burke from Aliens. Oh, and one of the PCs is a secret android (because of course there is a secret android!) whose Act III agenda was to kill everyone who knows too much and stop any xenomorph crap from reaching Earth. Which I then proceeded to do. I think that was the first time I’ve effected a Total Party Kill from a player position. And it was total, since after shooting the corporate liaison and putting the other two crewmembers in cryostasis, I started the ship’s self-destruct sequence. No survivors, great game.

It was interesting to play a game that not only allowed lethal player-versus-player conflict, but was also designed to spark it. The Cinematic modules are such self-contained stories that they can allow for frequent PC death. There are also plenty of NPCs that can serve as replacement characters, and Story Points carry with the player and aren’t lost when your space trucker gets disembowelled by something that came out of the air duct.

One thing I am not entirely certain about was how the android worked in the narrative from the viewpoint of the other players, because our debrief was very brief indeed. From my point of view, it worked well, because I knew all along that my character was a synthetic, with double sets of agendas. For the other players, it just suddenly turned out in the third act that the roughneck Cham isn’t Cham at all but a synthetic, and then he shot Wilson and told his name was really Lucas, and then the story was suddenly over. I think there was little in the way of foreshadowing, apart from some players having realized that one of us must be a secret android because this is ALIEN and there’s always a secret android.

I think ALIEN also somehow redeems Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. I do not think they are good movies (to be frank, I think they should’ve quit after Aliens). However, Prometheus has a mythological gravity to its setting. While it doesn’t really work in the context of the previous films in the franchise and feels like Ridley Scott pulled it out of his hat, the ALIEN Roleplaying Game uses that mythological aspect to great effect and synthesizes it with the bug-hunting marines and space truckers of the original movies. Your crew may be just working joes hauling stuff from one colony to another for a paycheck, but they are doing it across the awful majesty of deep space. You might be a down-to-earth colonist on the final frontier, just wanting to make a living, but that earth is not yours. There are terrible secrets at the edges of the galaxy older than life on Earth, and they do not want to be discovered. Alien didn’t need to ask the question of why the xenomorphs exist, it just needed to have them there so hijinks could ensue. Prometheus… also really didn’t need to ask that question, but it did, and that’s why we have a setting to explore. I’m not sure we had that before Prometheus. Certainly the previous attempt at making an RPG of the franchise flopped hard. Then, the 1991 Aliens Adventure Game was also based on the ruleset of Phoenix Command, so it was never destined to widespread appeal.

I kinda want to run this myself, now. The idea of a longer campaign appeals to me less and I am already running three of those, but a series of adventures in the Cinematic mode, with conflicting character agendas, chaos, carnage, and few survivors, sounds just great.

The Esoterrorists, 2nd Edition

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I do admit that I am an easy sell on certain tropes. One of these is the conspiracy for good fighting against supernatural threats. In role-playing games, Delta Green is the classic, existing to date in at least four different rule systems. The Laundry Files, based on Charles Stross’s novels is another. ENOC: Operation Eisenberg is a pulpier take. And then there’s The Esoterrorists, the inaugural game of the GUMSHOE system, written by Robin D. Laws and published by Pelgrane Press. The first edition came out in 2007, and the second followed in 2013, which is about on par for how current I am with this stuff. I happened to read it just now, so here are thoughts. I cannot honestly call this a review.

GUMSHOE, of course, is the ruleset created for investigative games that abandoned the surprisingly long-lived paradigm in traditional games – most notably Call of Cthulhu – that to find clues, you had to roll Spot Hidden. When you have to roll for something, there’s always the chance of failure, and if the investigators had bad luck, they’d miss out on clues and if this eventuality hadn’t been planned for (and it usually wasn’t), there was the real danger of getting stuck in the investigation, and then the Keeper would get to come up with something convoluted and weird. GUMSHOE’s solution is that if your character has the appropriate investigation skill, you need only ask to receive whatever clues there are to get. In some cases, there is the question of perhaps spending skill pool points for more information, but in GUMSHOE, the investigation never gets stuck because your characters didn’t find a clue at the crime scene. After all, the book notes, in detective stories and TV shows, the interesting bit is never how the protagonists don’t find a clue. It’s what they do with the stuff they find.

I have previous experience with GUMSHOE from Trail of Cthulhu, and I prefer it over traditional CoC. The system is very simple, and since apart from multiple flavours of horror investigation (The Esoterrorists, Fear Itself, Trail of Cthulhu, Night’s Black Agents) it also does time-traveling hijinks (TimeWatch), superheroes (Mutant City Blues), and space opera (Ashen Stars), it’s evidently easy to teach it new tricks.

The Esoterrorists, then, is a very tightly focused game. The characters are agents of the Ordo Veritatis, a secret society fighting against the Esoterrorists. The Esoterrorists are a conspiracy of loose cells that seek to break the Membrane between our world and the Outer Dark. This is accomplished by fomenting fear and panic in the public and undermining the consensus reality. The OV’s job is to figure out something is wrong, follow the clues, put down any gribblies, either apprehend or take out the bad guys, and then feed the public a line of bullshit to cover it all up as something mundane.

It’s a really strange read in the media landscape of 2020.

Unlike OV’s cousins the Delta Green and the Laundry, it’s not a conspiracy within the government nor a state-sanctioned top secret outfit, but a very loosely defined group with a cell structure and some sway here and there (ok, there is also a sourcebook on the Ordo, but I haven’t read it yet). Information on the Ordo Veritatis is distributed on a need-to-know basis, and you don’t need to know, because that’s outside the mission parameters.

The mission, then, is where the tight focus comes in. The Esoterrorists sells a very specific session structure, where the characters are called into the location of some supernatural hinky stuff, given a briefing by Mr./Ms. (or Mx., I suppose, but this is from 2013) Verity, and then it’s off to find leads, follow them, probably get into a fight with the other guys, follow some more leads, have a final confrontation, and then sweep everything under the rug so that people can sleep at night.

A really, really strange read.

The book also has another campaign frame, “Station Duty”, written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, where the OV agents set up a watch station in a small town, and set about unravelling its larger mysteries together with some locals. It’s suggested that the local characters be built using the rules of Fear Itself, a game that I understand is a lot more about running away than shooting back. It’s a very evocatively written chapter, and I like the format of its presentation. The town is very much fleshed out yet given to the GM and the players to develop, and the gallery of NPCs is each written up as a potential victim, someone influenced by the Outer Dark, and as a full-on Esoterrorist.

The Esoterrorists is very light on mythology, though it clearly has Call of Cthulhu in its DNA (but then, which horror RPG doesn’t?). In addition to Health, agents also have Stability, and when Stability runs out, madness follows. The rules for mental disorders are funky. For instance, if the agent gets afflicted by selective amnesia, the group together comes up with a new fact from the agent’s life, such as a marriage, that the PC has now forgotten.

That kind of thing is possible because of the tight mission focus, moderate to high lethality, and fast character generation. Characters are liable to be whipped up quick and enter play without an extensive backstory, and get to work fighting crime. There is a system for dependants and pillars of stability, but it is not very fleshed out. The focus also makes the game look ideal for convention games.

Though the Lovecraftian influences are clearly there, The Esoterrorists is also very different in its aesthetics. Where Call of Cthulhu is all about the nameless horror, indescribable creatures, and the slow erosion of sanity as you discover that everything you thought you knew about the world is not just wrong but also that you being wrong is meaningless, The Esoterrorists is more about highly-trained individuals with a hard, scientific world-view engaging with definable and classifiable horrors that will eviscerate you and then wear your skin for a suit. It’s a graphic, gory horror that does not suggest things. It shines a cold, bright light on the chunky salsa so the forensic pathologist can get to work.

No game is for everyone, which goes double for horror games, but The Esoterrorists looks like an accessible and elegant piece of work, once you wipe off all the blood.