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[Cthulhu]

Thousand year old vampire looks pretty cool, getting ready to try a game.  Solo artsy RPG, kind of frou-frou but a really interesting premise, you're a vampire and you're immortal but your brain's still a human brain and wasn't designed for immortality.  Over centuries your memories fade, get stored in journals, get lost when you're forced to abandon your lair, vaguely persist in mementos and tokens you still carry long after you forgot what they used to mean to you, get ground to dust by eternity until there's nothing left of you but a shambling pile of disconnected thoughts.  Interesting concept, and a way of doing vampires I haven't seen before.  Everywhere at the end of time but you're a vampire.

[Loud Whispers]

Thousand year old vampire looks pretty cool, getting ready to try a game.  Solo artsy RPG, kind of frou-frou but a really interesting premise, you're a vampire and you're immortal but your brain's still a human brain and wasn't designed for immortality.  Over centuries your memories fade, get stored in journals, get lost when you're forced to abandon your lair, vaguely persist in mementos and tokens you still carry long after you forgot what they used to mean to you, get ground to dust by eternity until there's nothing left of you but a shambling pile of disconnected thoughts.  Interesting concept, and a way of doing vampires I haven't seen before.  Everywhere at the end of time but you're a vampire.

[ oppressive BOM BOM BOM BOM BOM BOM starts playing ]
[ your kiss was was such a sacred thing to me ]
[ I can't believe it's just a burning memory ]
Vlad Dracula just dancing alone in his castle but it's 2512

[scriver]

[synthoelectric boink boink boink starts playing]

I'll linger here
Your ring upon my finger, dear
And sing till dawn a song of you and me and what and why
For time is all
I have to keep between these walls

And half asleep
The days go by
A million little nights and days go by
And I don't mind

Parades go by
So many beautiful parades go by
Leave me behind

I'll sit and stare
How could I venture anywhere
And let the centuries fall where they may but never die
For I have loved
And so I lost the world above

Beyond the moss
The days go by
A million little nights and
Days go by
And I don't mind

Parades go by
So many beautiful parades go by
Leave me behind

Or maybe he fell in with a Crowd of Drifters

Sometimes the road is too long
You meet all kinds of people
Some of them cast no shadow
They have no reflections
Take a look in your photobook
I'm not there anymore

I was a travelling salesman
I got lost on the backroads
Fell in with a crowd of drifters.

Sometimes the sun is too bright
And it burns you like acid
You get to love driving at night
The moon is so close you can kiss it
I used to remember you smiling and waving
I don't think I can any more

I was a travelling salesman
I got lost on the backroads
Fell in with a crowd of drifters.

We come, unnoticed, at sundown
At the start of a blackout
We set bonfires all over town
And it's over by morning
Sometimes we bring the rat and the wolf
And sometimes the worm

I was a traveling salesman
I got lost on the backroads
Fell in with a crowd of drifters

or maybe he was Born On a Train

or maybe Stephin Merritt just really like vampire romanticisms

[Cthulhu]

Or just go with this one, which is literally about vampires, she even puts on a vampire fang-mouth voice

I went with a Janissary, a Bulgarian Christian taken as blood tax and raised in Edirne in the early 1400s.  Got captured by a bulgarian vampire and turned; before he could kill me my best janissary bro rescued me but I was crazed with the new turning and killed him.  Went back to Edirne, told my secret girlfriend everything, she was terrified of me and in the panic I hurt her, so she turned.  Started feeding on animals, my battallion's commander caught me and I killed him too.  At this point it was all too much for me and I just ran to live in a cave and eat animals and whatever travelers passed by.  A Bohemian nobleman vampire found me and captured me as a slave, taught me how to properly handle the cattle.  After a hundred years we went on campaign against the Ottomans and I escaped somewhere in Hungary.  I chafed at servitude but we're mostly in agreement on methods and philosophy re: humans

A rural priest took me in, tried to rehabilitate me, I made him bring me travelers or I'd feed on his flock instead.  Took up residence in a little ranch with pigs, borrowed Jan's methods.  I take the people nobody will miss, feed on them slowly, use instruments instead of fangs so they don't turn, chop them up when they die and feed them to the pigs.  That's where I am now.  I'm roughly 130 years old and almost all of that was spent serving a full-on Bathory style vampire so I'm pretty fucked up, we'll see if I ever change my feelings on humans.


My secret girlfriend showed back up and exposed me as a murderer, I was forced to kill the priest and some of the other villagers and ended up fleeing to Munich.  I found another vampire and blackmailed her to steal an incantation for binding newly-created vampires.  I insinuated myself into a minor noble house, stole its fortune, and eventually wiped it out and moved on, wandering through the city and surrounding environs, accidentally created a vampire and bound her to silence but couldn't bring myself to kill her and didn't want another vampire around.  It's around 1650 now and memories are fading.  I don't remember anything of my life before that village, I still have my saber and janissary hat but I don't remember being one, as far as I know they could be trophies or gifts or something.  I know the vampire that exposed me was from my earlier past but I don't remember who she was or why she wanted revenge against me.

[Loud Whispers]

That reminds me of this one vampire movie called Byzantium where two vampires are running around contemporary times, being hunted down by some nefarious gangsters. At first it presents the first vampire as being ancient for being born in the 19th century, with all the film taking place around the Byzantium Hotel. The film was all right, bit lacking in some areas, but the ending where one of the gangsters pulls out a curved sword and mentions off-hand it was a sourvneir from Byzantium was one of the coolest vampire moments I've seen on the pictures

[Horizon]

Praise be Maglubyiet

[Cthulhu]

Ive stopped on my vampire, now that ive got a feel for the game i may do another round with a more elaborate writeup.

Janissary guy is in the 1700s now, still in Munich. He kidnapped a scholar to teach him history since he'd just slept for a century, and his memories are beginning to fade and entangle badly now.  He thinks he was a hungarian crusader in the ottoman wars, thinking the sword and hat are trophies from campaign, and some other memories are half-erased.

It's a kind of slow spectrum of inner deaths, continually moving and reinventing yourself as times change and youre forced to shed your skin and change your name under scrutiny, the vampire is less an immortal and more a succession of mortals blurring together at the edges.  Your body is haunted by the fragmentary remains of past selves and one day your life will be somebody else's vague memories

[Rolan7]

That reminds me of this one vampire movie called Byzantium where two vampires are running around contemporary times, being hunted down by some nefarious gangsters. At first it presents the first vampire as being ancient for being born in the 19th century, with all the film taking place around the Byzantium Hotel. The film was all right, bit lacking in some areas, but the ending where one of the gangsters pulls out a curved sword and mentions off-hand it was a sourvneir from Byzantium was one of the coolest vampire moments I've seen on the pictures

My first time playing Vampire was as a newly-embraced otherwise-human young adult with his own human life he was desperately trying to hold on to.  Sure he was "dead" or whatever, but he kept up with his anarchist-hacker friends (at night) and managed to feed them intel and even got our coterie to do a nonlethal site-op to free some information.

That character's sire, a Mekhet of course, encouraged such humanizing activities.  Disregarding the details.  The sire was oddly insistent that my character hold on to something, anything, important.  Unusually good advice, bought with (IIRC) two Mentor points on chargen.
The Storyteller didn't kill him, the dice did.  A werewolf caught up to our *INSANE* little group and ripped his head off through the back window of our car, pushing the gas between cities.  Exploding dice are a heck, but both player and ST eventually accepted that there was no BS'ing this away.  Good childe had a good run.
Eleanor didn't remember being a WW2 medic.  She knew she had been, of course.  Sometimes her Ventrue sire mentioned it when in a weird mood.  Sometimes 3-4 times a year he would do so, and she would nod, and he would scowl and go back to his garden, and she would return to the housework.

And the cats.
Cats are permissible, they eat pests.  Eleanor also eats pests.  Eleanor is like the cats.

Eleanor has to leave the grounds.  Eleanor doesn't like that.  A lot of things happen very quickly, but that's okay.  Pests she wasn't allowed to kill did very annoying things, and she had to help them, and then they died by being stupid.  A very strange few weeks. Quickly forgotten.
Eleanor has a lot more cats now.

Eleanor also has a "rank" for doing well.  Eleanor isn't sure how to feel about that.  Maybe in a decade or two it will make sense.

[My second vampire character started with no additional stats or bonuses but had been a neonate for a stupidly long time, because the Ventrue are like that.  also her sire was hilariously bad at using phones, much less modern tech - so was she.] [oh also she saved her sire from dying on the battlefield, from wounds even a vampire can't survive.  This was the reward]
Edit:  Something that stuck with me from the first character is being captured by some Hunters and being interrogated... well, sorta.  They wanted info, but they were also... shoving our misdeeds in our faces.  Trying to convince us that...
That we were no longer the humans we had been, that we were monsters...

My silly hacker neonate deeply believed in nonlethal methods and had strong human connections (and mechanically, humanity) and said as much.  The sort of argument you don't want to win, in retrospect.  This poor Hunter acolyte was being forced to hurt one of the very few good vampires in town, and having his faith shaken by doing so.  Bad luck for both kids.

Final note:  Eleanor survived almost entirely on rats because that's what she had done for decades.  The good hacker kid fed on people.  He never killed them, but he took a LOT out of several people.  Was it worth whatever good he did?  He's too dead to say, but the werewolf who killed him wasn't wrong.
Eleanor did taste human blood, and it tasted absurdly good. too good.  It had to be a trick.  She dried her dead lips and made a note to report this to her sire, and not to taste such things any more.

[Kagus]

So, first session with new characters after the wipe, and... Hoo boy

DM hadn't done much prep on account of being completely wrecked during the weekend, which was honestly great for me because my own prep was awful and I slapped together a character the day before session. However, someone else had clearly been thinking about their character design for a while... Much to our detriment.

Yes, I am of course referring to the delightfully loud fellow who once decided that he'd made the clever tactical decision that I did in my first session with them. The one who thinks he's involved in every scene, and is the star of every show.


His new character is an artificer, battle smith to be exact... Which is already a lot of bookkeeping for someone who can't remember what his proficiency bonus is or what it really even does. But technical know-how and spending less than 5 minutes completing your turn aside, the personality he's gone with is... Something special.

He's a warforged artificer, with a personality that is very clearly modeled off of C3PO. Confused, incessantly chattery, and loudly (repeatedly) proclaiming that we're doomed and he wants nothing to do with any of what's going on. While blaming his mecha-dog, who is apparently taking the part of R2D2.

On top of that there's a bit of a Who's On First thing going on, seeing as his character's name is RU-01, or "Arryu". "Are you a threat?" "Are you a threat? Wait, I'm Arryu! Are you? I have friends!"


It's... Wew. It's something alright.

[delphonso]

At least one person at the table is having fun, Kagus.

I DMed what is meant to be a three shot, but is potentially going to be a longer campaign. Here's some highlights.

A count and his spymaster recruited three guards (our players) to perform an assassination on a local baron. They were given effectively free reign to do it as they saw fit, and some gold up front to cover the costs.

The three immediately cased the baron's holding, snuck into his vault, and pilfered all of his earthly treasures. They then played on that vulnerability to join the baron's guards (only one was wise enough to use a pseudonym), and waited until they had duty in front of the baron's chambers.

A planted agent by that spymaster took out the other guard while the party rushed in and 'Julius style' stabbed the baron to bits. They returned looking for their rewards, but were instead pinned with the crimes! A classic twist to tie up loose ends!

Next session starts with the count's son arranging for a show execution and hiring the party to kill the count who had betrayed them. We'll see if they learned their lesson or not.

[Loud Whispers]

-snip-

Thanks for sparing the time to write that up, the characters really shone through your prose

We'll see if they learned their lesson or not.

Narrator: they did not learn their lesson

[delphonso]

We'll see if they learned their lesson or not.

Narrator: they did not learn their lesson

Session in about 4 hours. I'm very excited to see if they did or did not. It feels good to get back into gaming - it's been a long time since I played something more than a one-shot (or a two-shot with my wife, which didn't last long because apparently newborns require a lot of attention)

[Scoops Novel]

What's a better name then Dungeons and Dragons?

[Egan_BW]

almost nothing, if you're going for brand recognition

[Horizon]

What's a better name then Dungeons and Dragons?

Pathfinder ^jkjkjk but really there are very good names in older TSR products my favorite being Dragon Quest (not the video game it has no relation)