Unleashing the Beast

Those of you who keep up with my increasingly irregular diatribes on the House of Paincakes have no doubt bewailed and bemoaned the recent loss of my RPG mojo (and if you haven’t, I don’t wish to hear about it, so could you just feign a spot of bewailing and bemoaning for the sake of appearances? ta very).

The good news is, I’ve found it again, down the back of a sofa in Wolverhampton. Over half term, the Dark Ages Vampire game received a monumental boot up the arse as I finally got to run a proper RP session of some eight hours. With all respect to the in-house group, whose preferences are clear, valid and informed, two and a half hours of intermittent play is not as rewarding as eight hours of sustained play, and that’s an end to it. The Dark Ages game is everything that I think a good game should be – by turns moving, hilarious, wildly improvised by the minute but excruciatingly planned in the grand scale.

Much Ado About Not Blogging – WM Slow Grow, WoW RP, Dark Ages Vampire

Ahem.

So.

That promised ‘every three days’ schedule isn’t really working out, is it?

Let me explain, and then perhaps your ire will be cooled, a little. Not that it should go entirely unspent; content was promised you, and has been withheld, and certain dues must be paid and reparations made if that’s to be forgiven. I hope that comes to pass, in time.

The thing is, I moved house two months ago in order to get busy. Work was drying up, and if I were to continue the practices of eating food and living indoors (practices for which I confess a certain ingrained fondness, born out of habit as much as actual value), not to mention keeping Hark in Goblins and hair dye and whatever else she subsists on (tea and pastries, mostly, it seems), I had to seek out a fresh wellspring.

It hath been sought, and it hath gushed. I have written at least two dissertations’ worth of exemplary material for various bodies in the last two months; I have taught a young man half a century of social history in a week, amending the damage done to him by the professional neglect of others; I have regular invigilation work, and an evening class to teach.

I have also been playing games, shocking as this assertion may appear to you.

Dark Ages Vampire: Regret Is A Shortage Of Necromancers

I’m enjoying the Dark Ages Vampire game enormously, which probably indicates the lack of meta-thoughts and general chit-chat about it on this ‘ere blog thing. However, in the last few weeks a few things have happened that are probably interesting enough to warrant a brief discussion.

Specifically, things I regret.

Dark Ages Vampire – Istanbul’s Still Constantinople – Non-Player Characters

This week, in Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is, yer Uncle Von will demonstrate how all this story-game theory comes together into practice.  In this second post, I’ll be showing how I integrated ‘what my players want to play’ with ‘the WoD metaplot’ and ‘what I actually want to run’.

From the players’ choices, I need developed characters and infrastructures for Nosferatu, Brujah and Tzimisce – it also means I need some Cappadocians handy in case Hark wants to leap that way later.  This stage occurred sort of concurrently with the beginnings of the city design – while I was learning about Constantinople I discovered underground rivers, mazes and holy springs, and really wanted to have a sort of holy turf war going on underneath the city between two Nosferatu bloodlines (different ancestors, different faiths).  So I want two lots of Nosferatu.

From the metaplot… WHOO.  Constantinople’s fall in 1204 is the turning point for the Dark Ages metaplot, so there’s a lot of baggage there.  For starters, I count four Methusalae involved somewhere.  Michael (4th generation Toreador, thinks he’s an angel, dies in the siege, and the whole ‘Vampire Paradise’ was his idea so when he goes down the dream dies with him), Antonius (Ventrue, decided to make him 5th generation, he’s dead before 1204 but he will have descendants and such), Mary the Black (5th generation Baali… bugger that, there’s too many clans already, and the Baali’s archetype works perfectly well with a member of a proper clan, so let’s make her a Toreador too) and the Dracon (4th generation Tzimisce).

Dark Ages Vampire – Istanbul’s Still Constantinople – Player Characters

This week, in Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is, yer Uncle Von will demonstrate how all this story-game theory comes together into practice.  I’ve been harbouring a hankering to run some Dark Ages Vampire for a while now, having botched my first attempt so very badly (wrong game for the group, who were much more Victorian than Medieval in their interests, and a bad start, with ready-made vampires rather than settling into the Dark Ages first and the Vampire second).  There’ll be at least two parts to this, maybe three depending on how long it runs.