Tagged with v20 …

Jan 02 2012
2 Comments
design, RPGs, Writing

Give ‘Em a (True) Hand

Something that has surprised me in the ongoing V20 work I’ve been doing is that I’ve taken a new shine to the True Black Hand.

Among the Vampire community, Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand can be an unpopular book. I’ve never been an apologist for it, and I can see what some people don’t like about it. It turns the idea of one of the most distinct Disciplines into something that’s thematically at odds with the rest of Vampire. Some of the powers get a little screwy. It has a few ideas in it that threaten to jump the shark, and the premise of the book itself comes perilously close to doing so, too — it leans on Vampire’s device of secrets within secrets a little too hard. Here’s this ancient weird sect you’ve never heard of before, and they’re pulling the strings of the other groups that you have heard of (so they’re not as cool anymore). A little fast and loose with the baseline Vampire experience, the True Hand is Vampire for people who want something a little weirder.

That said, there’s a lot it does well, and I’m really enjoying rooting around in its vaults again. In particular, here’s a list of what I like about the Tal’Mahe’Ra.

  • Perfect Vampire Tone: I’ve said this on panels and in forum discussions before, but the book absolutely nails the “wheels within wheels” conceit that makes Vampire tick. It’s a sect full of factions, and the sect itself overlaps with some of the other sects, and it even bleeds a bit into the thematics of the other supernatural types. What can you believe or trust? No one knows — and since the unknown is such a vital portion of the horror genre, the True Hand is a great sect for fomenting fear of the unknown by its very existence. It’s especially good for a Storyteller whose players know it all, being well-versed in WoD lore, because all that knowledge works against them in a dramatic way.
  • Exoticism and the Macabre: A slightly Eastern, Gnostic flavor mixed in with cyclopean tombs and the bleak resonance of the First City where vampires held sway. It’s a place where stones as old as Eden make up the halls where monsters plucked from their mother’s bosom as infants have never known anything other than servitude to Kindred — Kindred who claim to be shepherding them and protecting them. Everything they touch is twisted or becomes so, and the lament for what’s lost to their unlifestyle is either immediate and poignant or has never even entered their minds.
  • The Dark Side of Academia: There’s a strong monastic element to the Tal’Mahe’Ra, and it works wonders for Vampire. The idea that there’s such a thing as too much knowledge, that some secrets are better left unearthed, and the perils of what someone might do if only they could find out how — that’s a great motivator, both for or against the troupe’s Kindred. What is the morality of fighting to suppress information?

I’ve been scribbling notes for a True Hand chronicle I want to run, a sort of coterie-against-the-world thing that I don’t think should last too long, but would be an interesting exploration of digging some mysteries up and tirelessly hiding others. Tal’Mahe’Ra agents operating in a domain that doesn’t know they’re there but certainly doesn’t want them. When the whole of the local power structure is against you, but what you’re doing you do to protect it? That’s a theme worth telling a story about, I think

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Oct 05 2011
7 Comments
design, RPGs, WIP

An Anarch (Free) State of Mind

In revisiting Vampire for the 20th Anniversary Edition, I knew I wanted to go back and give the Anarchs a fair shake. The Anarchs took a beating in the revised era, largely as a result of metaplot advancements, but also because their identity at the time was missing a key compelling element. The Anarchs needed the Camarilla to remain relevant. They needed an established organization to rebel against, because without rebellion, what were they?

The other entities in the game with similar outlooks at least had cultural identities to help shape them. The Brujah are the key example here: They’re the clan of “rebels,” but they also have an historical identity tying them to Carthage and Egypt during Classical times, they have an ongoing feud with the Ventrue, and if all else fails, you can just let them be the Lost Boys.

The Anarchs don’t have that. Without the Man, they don’t exist. At least, they didn’t.

Anarchs get all the hot chicks.

That’s a shame. The Anarchs were a really great piece of first- and second-edition Vampire that lost relevance over the life of the game. I certainly have to shoulder some of the blame for that. So that’s why I feel like I owe them an empowering update.

The more I’ve been working on V20, the more the Kindred have showed their age. The Camarilla still cares about its pomp and circumstance, becoming very much Nero as, in the End Times, Rome burns. The Sabbat still wages its holy war, consuming as many of its childer in consecrated fire as it sends against the hated Antediluvians. But the Anarchs? The Anarchs had their ass kicked so bad during the Revised era that they’re still smoldering and black-eyed.

So with the ongoing development work I’m doing for the classic World of Darkness, the more writing I’ve been doing, the more the Anarchs have carved out their own niche in my mind, and I’m wanting to bring that to the supplementary material. Here’s the thing: The Anarchs are younger than the other sects, by individual and on the whole. Their rebellious politics and comparatively low numbers and power (when compared with the elders and officers of the other sects) put them on a guerilla path. To remain viable, the Anarchs need to maximize whatever advantages they can find.

To that end, it’s made increasing sense to me to have the Anarchs become the most technologically adept of the Cainite factions. With the technological and communication advancements since the end of the Revised era, it’s been the perfect opportunity for the Anarchs to grasp emergent technology as a weapon and wield it against the larger, slower, more hidebound sects. It makes sense, Anarchs using Facebook and Google+ groups to trade information, using Twitter to organize (#fucktheprince), and trading or even selling boons on a dedicated auction site. They dump scans of Elders’ incriminating documents into shared Dropboxes. They pass around cultural tokens like music and pictures on sharing services like Tumblr and they call out Kindred hot spots using code phrases on services like Yelp and Foursquare. (Smiling Jack just checked in at the Prince’s Manor.) Hell, some of the really savvy ones might have created their own apps for use on mobile devices. (A geotagged RackFinder? “The music here is good and the kine are way drunk Thursday through Saturday, so the blood is plentiful but boozy. Sunday is industry night. Bartender Ashleigh is a blood doll, so order your drink ‘dirty red’ to let her know what you are.”)

So long as there's 3G available along the way, this guy might join the Anarch Movement in your city once he has to flee his own.

There’s space for this to become silly (Smiling Jack is the mayor of the Prince’s Manor…), but when used with reason, moderation, an Anarch’s on-the-ropes mentality, and with an basic understanding that it’s all a part of a secret war among bloodthirsty predators, it’s actually a really cool way to fight the system. There’s no reason the Anarchs can’t stage innumerable Arab Springs of their own or mobilize like #occupywallst. And think what a group of Anarchs organized and skilled like Anonymous might do — assuming they’re not vampires among us already.

It’s all got me thinking: Is the idea, even, of “domain” outdated for the Anarchs? Is the new Anarch model a sort of enlightened, information-rich Autarkis state? Is each Anarch his own sovereign domain?

This last might be getting a little out there, but it’s certainly food for thought. It’d be worth exploring in a one-shot or chronicle, and can definitely alter the course of the nightly . Whatever the case, it makes the Anarchs fundamentally viable again, and no longer the whipping boy for the Camarilla (and the Sabbat, and the Kuei-jin…). It also gives a compelling reason and method for them to be fighting back from the whipping they suffered throughout the previous run of Vampire titles.

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Sep 08 2011
9 Comments
design, RPGs

Blood Botch

One of the development principles that I’ve always held close to my keyboard is the idea that a setting and system are like peanut butter and jelly. You can have one without the other, but when they blend, the result is unique. When I had the chance to get my hands dirty with the 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, that was the guiding beacon for the systems development.

Storyteller has never been a flawless system, certainly. Its strengths were that it was easy to learn, easy to use, and gave lots of room for fiat decisions that let the story return to the fore. To that end, it really is an ideal system for Vampire and the other World of Darkness games. With all of the emphasis the World of Darkness places on the story, having a system that’s easy to use and discard is a very string symbiosis between setting and rules.

"You definitely see something up there. Probably some kids going camping for the weekend." Welcome to Botchville, population: You.

That’s why, when working on system revisions, the point was to clean up and streamline the existing rules rather than to “fix” anything or rewrite it wholesale. As I was watching the feedback form the open development process, I saw a lot of very interesting comments, many of which were along the lines of (paraphrased), “Weird an fluky results belong in Vampire and are part of the classic experience.” That was remarkable to see, but the more I worked on the systems, the more I agreed. Storyteller is a mostly smoothly curved system, with occasional probability spikes that make for high likelihood of the dice causing an unanticipated result. The botch rules are a prime example of this — so I kept them. I talked to Ethan, Eddy, a few other developers, Rich, and of course the players’ community and we were all in general agreement. For V20 to evince the “classic” play experience, I could tune the botch rules a bit, but I couldn’t replace or rewrite them.

Listen to any troupe tell tales of its past chronicles and you’ll inevitable have a handful of “…and I rolled a botch and it all went to hell from there.” The bum was a werewolf, the gun went off in the Kindred’s face, the Tremere went catatonic as something nether scourged his soul, or the Nosferatu drank the Prince’s ghoul dry.

Awesome! That’s the stuff that throws a Coen brothers-like wrench into a coterie’s plans. Those are the points where the expected course of play swerves wildly. And, for a horror game, what better way to cause a thrilling feel than to upset the tipping point of what these entitled vampires expect to have happen? Sure, they sometimes got goofy, but some troupes like that. At that point, it’s a Storyteller call whether to bring a bit of levity by playing to the laugh, or to have the botch signify a truly awful development. After all, “You regain your senses only to find the walls streaked with blood, the broken body of the senator’s eldest son crushed in your rigid embrace” is one of the hallmarks of the genre and game. The math behind the dice might not be the expected curve, but when have then Kindred been able to rely on what’s expected?

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Mar 26 2011
8 Comments
design, RPGs, WIP, Writing

On the Community’s Esteem for Vampire

Last year, one of my goals was to undertake a collaborative project. I had a start or two, none of which panned out — I wanted something to happen with CLIO, but it didn’t really pick up any steam — but as of last week, I really hit the motherlode. The announcement of Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition and the open development process by which we’re doing it has really scratched the itch for me.

In some cases, it’s done its job too well (which is a wonderful “problem” to have). We’ve received so much feedback, I can’t personally respond to all of it. I’m watching everything that’s said both in the dev blog comments, the #v20 Twitter topic, and on the White Wolf forums, as well as watching a handful of other places where feedback’s going on, and there’s just so much that as much as I want to engage all of the comments in conversation, I just can’t discuss it all. As much as I want to, I have to actively remind myself that I have to get the book itself done. It’s certainly walloped my productivity here at my blog, too.

Much of the commentary is surprisingly good. Aside from a bit of grousing here and there about my involvement, lots of the feedback is remarkably insightful. While some of it falls outside the scope of what we’re trying to do, which is revisit the classic Vampire experience and not create a new “edition” of the game, the comments have been a wealth of input derived from years of playing the game and sharing it with players.

I’m gobsmacked. Even the stuff I can’t directly use is well-reasoned, demonstrably true in many cases, and obviously the product of people getting together to tell Vampire stories. To a creative person, a designer and developer in my case, this is the ultimate compliment. For my work — and of course that of others, as I certainly have no desire to downplay or exclude their contributions — to have entertained so many people, given them enjoyment, stoked their creative urges, or fueled a night’s debate whether it be on rules or the mysteries of the setting is the consummate validation of what I hope to have brought to the game.

If you’ve ever been a Vampire player, and especially if you’ve been one one of the contributors to the V20 Open Dev process, thank you. A hundred times, thank you.

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