Picking up right where we left off - with Aaron naked in a hot tub filled with horse blood - we explore more of the world of the Kindred in Los Angeles as Aaron begins to understand just how many sharks he is swimming with.
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...Wut. What. What? WHAT?!
ReplyDeleteYESSSSSSSS.
(he kept it in)
DeleteHow could I not?
DeleteI bet a hot tub full of blood would be a huge pain in the butt. Think of how many towels you would go through - I'm thinking that they're pretty much one use only in this circumstance. And imagine if you forgot one. You'd have to run through the house, dripping blood everywhere. And on top of that, the deck and hot tub would probably both be horribly stained. Just seems like a big mess.
ReplyDeleteThat's what the ghouls are for. Cleanup crew.
Delete(But in all seriousness, that occurred to me too. I don't even want to know what the filtration system looks like. But then, that's Karen for ya. Never lets reality get in the way of theatrically.)
DeleteThat was so good.
ReplyDeleteWhere did you dig up that manifesto? Was it an old prop from your past games?
Nah, I made it for this game. (This is actually the first time I've ever run "classic" Vampire--I ran a few Dark Ages sessions back in the 90s, but otherwise I've mostly been a reader of oWoD material rather than a player/Storyteller.)
DeleteHow I made the handout: I have a PDF of the Anarch Cookbook supplement, which contains the complete manifesto, so I copied the text into a Word doc, slapped on a grungy font, then printed and stapled it like a zine. I then splashed some water on it, folded it up, and walked around with it in my pocket for a day--instant beat-up handout! ;)
Never let it be said that Larkins doesn't go the extra mile: he walks it with a beat-up zine in his pocket!
DeleteNice. :D
DeleteNice. :D
DeleteI'm curious to know what it feels like to play Vampire as a sort of historical exercise - even if it's an exercise in playing in a time and place in which you have lived.
ReplyDeleteAs I commented on a previous episode, Vampire for me is very much located in a particular early-90s ambiance (although October 1989 just about manages to fall within the crucial window defined by the original publication of Sandman).
But that's in hindsight - at the time, the appeal lay in taking the world outside my window and redefining it as secretly run by vampires, so that stories could be set in places I walked past every day.
But what is it like running it as a conscious attempt to reconstruct the end of the '80s?
Thanks for asking! It's definitely something I put a fair amount of thought into. I suppose the seed was planted with the "New Wave Requiem" supplement they put out for nWoD, but that's much more firmly planted in the 80s. I wanted to move the timeline up a bit so that it toed into the more classic zeitgeist of VtM. To me, that game IS Tim Bradstreet characters in leather jackets and long, well-conditioned hair.
DeleteIt's a bit unfair to V20, actually, since the game goes out of its way to update certain aspects of the VtM world, talking about how vampires interact with the internet and social media, etc. And future chronicles (whenever those may be) will probably be set in the modern era. But for my first "proper" VtM chronicle ever, I had to revisit the times from whence it was spawned.
So I guess it's partly nostalgia and partly just what feels right to me about the setting. Plus, I have a fondness for that period of approximately '89-'92 from a pop cultural perspective.
Certainly, one does lose the immediacy of thinking "this is like our world right now only with monsters," but I find that less compelling than I did 20 years ago. Plus, there's the advantage of historical hindsight, and being able to anticipate real-life events and plan accordingly on folding those into the narrative.
Also, I had to laugh at the "What the hell does Protean mean?" conversation. Vampire is the perfect game about being a teenager in so many ways.
ReplyDelete"Vampire is the perfect game about being a teenager in so many ways."
DeleteToo right. Just flipping through the V20 rulebook can be exhausting, but as a teen I would've gobbled up all that lore and specialized terminology.
Conrgatulations Aaron, you've finally gotten someone to write down everything you need to know about being a vampire, and can finally have a bunch of people sit down and just exposit what you need to know.
ReplyDeleteAnd then you left it unattended off-screen. Ah well. At least you now know you definitely have magic eyes. For whatever reason.