Vampire 30-Day Challenge: How I Got Started?

Vampire 30-Day Challenge: How I Got Started?
While I've already posted here the story about how I got started in the Role-playing game hobby, I haven't really shared yet the beginnings of my gaming life with White Wolf Gaming Studios' Vampire: the Masquerade.

Way back in the 1990s, my friends and I were playing role-playing games practically every weekend. If we were not spelunking dungeons and saving kingdoms in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, we were balancing heatsinks and struggling with wrong facing in mecha combat. Our occasional jaunts included TOP Secret spy work, Marvel Superheroes heroics, science fiction awesomeness in Star Frontiers and a healthy host of Palladium games. One fateful evening, our then game master Ryan came up to us with a giddy smile. He had heard of this awesome thing called the Storyteller System and learned that the game was Vampire: The Masquerade! But we didn't really have a means to buy the book back then. You see, here in the Philippines most of the gaming related items one can find were either Dungeons and Dragons related, or were directly ordered stuff. At my young age then, I didn't quite have the option of ordering books then, so we had access to the next best thing:

Jyhad.

Jyhad was the original name of what most know to be Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, the collectible card game based on Vampire: The Masquerade. The card game was beautiful. While most of the world was celebrating Magic: The Gathering, I was adoring this game which allowed one to create Powerbases, Equip weapon, find Allies, call for Political Votes, Attack opponents, or indirectly strike at opponent's using various means such as Hacking, causing riots and other things. The game was unbelievably dense, and included systems to Influence more Cainites to service, sneak into opponent's Graveyards to destroy torpid vampires, or even form alliances with other Antedeluvians in the game while the Edge isn't held by someone else.

It was just beautiful. And even more awesome, many of the cards were directly inspired by the game. Discipline Cards allowed one to give Vampires new powers. Various cards allowed players to make use of these Disciplines, and in some cases even allowed players to create new Childer or acquire the services of Mages or Werewolves and Fair Folk to serve their purposes.

So without access to the actual books, our group had one last hope of feeling what a vampire game might be like: We homebrewed a game using the cards as our foundation and Palladium's system as the crunch. It sounds crazy, I know, but it worked for a good number of fun games. It was crazy though. Like having Celerity branched out to so many variants of the power to use for stealth, or dancing, or attacks, or defenses.. or how Potence can allow some vampires to throw things as deadly projectiles, or allow others to rip things free and use them as clubs.

But man, that was our first taste of what Vampire could be like. It was crazy, it was inaccurate, but it was glorious! We had debates with Anson and Democritus. We would attempt to seduce Camille Devereux who was our femme fatale in the game. We would freak out when Dr. Jest would show up, and we would trust on Bianca to cover our backs.

Eventually, Ryan would find a copy of Vampire: The Masquerade and we would discover how far off we were in the actual game, but there was no forgetting how much fun we had rolling d100s to determine if we could use Blood Rage when we tapped Thaumaturgy, or to project Govern the Unaligned when we focused on Dominate.

But yes, in summary, it was Ryan who got me bitten and Blood Bonded to the World of Darkness. And it was Vampire: The Masquerade that made a Blood Doll out of me.

And I definitely have NO regrets whatsoever.

Macross: Another Song : Palladium : Macross

02/20/2005
Macross: Another Song
Palladium : Macross

We decided to have a Robotech/Macross table top campaign. I had three players.  Seth played a micronized Zentraedi who really hates being with humans but likes the fact siding with them gives him freedom to have individuality and identity. Aldwin played a pure human who hopes to gain some fame and respect from the others soon. While Sam played a half-breed who hides the fact she is one for fear of ridicule and racism.

The game was set 80 years after the movie "Do You Remember Love" with many ideas liberally inspired if not outright taken from the Macross II: Lovers Again manga/anime which frankly I preferred over Macross 7 or Robotech. Although I do admit I loved Robotech, the whole plot of the Robotech Masters and E.B.S.I.S. just turns the whole thing into a hyper convoluted plot. And the time-warping ending just reeks too much of Star Trek for my liking.  (Sorry Rocky!)

So its back to the Valkyries, the Gerwalks and the Melzendi... back to the Marduk, the Emulators and the Lisa Hayase... and back to the Yak de Culture instead of "Protoculture!"

I have to admit, Palladium nicely captured the feel of having ten, twenty or fifty missles flying at you, and you making your Valkyrie take a spin in order to dodge them while you use your rifle to shoot down the next incoming thirty missiles.

I wonder when Macross will ever have a full-length live-action movie adaptation.  With today's computer generated graphics and green-screen technology, I'd love to see such a movie happen.

And for those curious, this is how the game ended. With the Marduk invasion in earnest, the heroes attempt to fold the Zentraedi Scout Ship into the Marduk despot's main command center. But the attempt fails and the heroes re-emerge 9 hours after the invasion with a dead Earth beneath them. Of the three heroes, one lone hero remains among the survivors, having lost a limb in the battle. But with the tragic turn of events the power of Macross and the secrets of protoculture are now lost as the invasion of an alien race called the Invid take over the planet.

The end.