The first game of the Vampire campaign went very well. Because the beginning was an intro to the world and the initial embrace it flowed a bit like a video game opening cinematic, but I warned my players that would happen and that it wouldn't be the norm.
The game opened with a little back story on how they were being prepared for the embrace ritual. I explained that they had been chosen and given the opportunity to become Gods like those they had worshiped their entire lives. Over a month of preparation they learned at least a little bit about what would be required of them once they became "gods" but honestly the important things were not shared.
They were cleaned and prepared in fine ritual robes and taken to the central court of their vampire lord. There several vampires and Mages held court and watched the ritual, but 5 specifically walked forward and took part. They were drained of all of their blood to the point where they were dead, but the last thing they remembered was some of each of their blood being collected in a chalice.
Then in the vague way you see things through the eyes of your dying soul when it is untethered enough to see but has not yet left your body the 5 vampires collected their blood in a chalice and the lord walked down and added one drop of his own blood. While the other vampires' blood was thick the lord's blood looked practically solid. The very nature of whatever allowed it to move at all obviously not of natural origin. When it touched the other blood on the chalice it merged and flowed and became as the other vitae.
The blood was then given back to the players now dead corpses. As with all embraces they rose at the first taste, but were left in a state of extreme hunger.
The court watched patiently as their bodies died and they suffered the agonies of first creation. When it was complete a group of humans were brought into the court in irons. They were introduced as those who had earned the death by committing crimes against their fellow man. The players were all held tightly and made to face one of the prisoners while bits of their human blood from before the embrace was splashed onto their faces. The smell of blood, even their own drove them into frenzy as they were only given enough vitae to fuel the change. Then they were released on the prisoners. However, they were not allowed to completely kill the criminals before them. Something powerful in the core of their blood was brought alive and pulled them back from frenzy. Somehow they were all aware that this power originated with their king. When they pulled away the vampires that made them moved in and the king spoke more words of the ritual. He spoke of the beast and death. His voice rang out in the hall and cried for the beast being so driving and so infernal that it can be summoned even by the scent of ones own humanity. He looked at the players, almost as if into all of their eyes at once and told them that the chained rabid thing in their gut is their beast. It knows not love or compassion, it knows not right or wrong. The beast knows only hunger and rage. The criminals which lie before them bleeding onto the court's floor are here to die, but they had not rended their throats out of justice or what was right. If they had killed those before them the beast would have taken a part of the vampires with them as it is always want to do. Death and killing are part of the world, but the beast must never be allowed to fuel those drives. Then their sires finished the criminals off in a cold calculated manner that, if anything was more unsettling and alien than their previous blood frenzy.
At this point in the ritual the corpses of the criminals were removed and the players closest human companions were brought into the court. The players characters were each put in front of their particular loved one and the king began speaking again, this time about the creatures they had become and the power and responsibility that they assumed as a part of that transition. Now it was time to understand the eternal nature of their new existence. Then their sires walked up behind them and staked them. After an eternity which both lasted for a time beyond agony and was only a few moments they re-awakened with the same loved ones in front of them, only 10 years had passed. A teenage son was now a middle aged boy, and a pregnant wife now stands with with her 9 year old son by her side. The ritual progressed from here with the characters being bound through the blood to the one thing in their life which both ties them to their lingering humanity and reminds them of the alien things they have become. The players are offered their closest loved ones to keep as ghouls. So that they could each have someone to walk with them through the long night ahead who can understand them, but who will give them a link to the mortal world they have left behind.
Their loved ones had been offered a special place standing eternally by the side of a god, and could hardly refuse. They they were all prepared for this moment. After their human companions were bonded to them the ritual was ended and they were taken from the hall and shown their new home, and told of the valley in which they all now live. Their first task would be to go down into the courtyard where the gypsy's were setup and gather information about the outside world.
The players went to the gypsy camp and each of them spoke with someone different. While the gypsies had a relationship with the king of this little mini kingdom they obviously did not hold him in high regard. Many of them were dismissive of the Lord's goals, which were revealed to be the recreation of the balance of the first city. After quite a bit of discussion and investigation one of the childer heard strange voices coming from one of the gypsy's wagons. He asked to look inside, but was refused. The sire who had accompanied them assured the childe that there was nothing to worry about. Though none of the players nerves were settled by that assurance.
They took the news of a coming war, and unstable times back to the king, and then proceeded towards their first day of sleep as new vampires. Though one of the childer was not satisfied with the dismissive approach of just assuring them that the unsettling voices they had heard were nothing to be concerned with. The players confronted the sire who accompanied them to their sleeping chambers and asked again what they had heard. When it was apparent that the young cainites would not be content to sit by and accept what they had been told they were informed that they had heard several names of the dark mother. They were told briefly of Cain's time in the darkness after the first murder and that he was taken up and cared for by the first woman Lilith. It was in her arms, and under her tutelage that he had come into his dark powers.
This satisfied the players and so they thanked the elder for his forthrightness and retired for the day.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Thursday, August 09, 2012
From the Dark Ages to Modern Times an Experiment with Elysium and Inexperienced Players
So I'm going to be making some role playing blog posts here on occasion. No promises about how often. There are some other blogs that I post to and I only have so much writing in me from day to day, but I do want to post the larger events in my chronicle to this blog. So first my concept and how I came up with it.
It all started with the current season of True Blood. The story about Lilith and the vampire "Authority" got me thinking about Elysium games. For one thing much as I'm happier with True Blood's treatment of vampire society this season than previous seasons I still find the overall story lacking. I blame White Wolf for setting an unrealistic bar on this front. I want the Lilith mythology in True Blood to be as rich as the mythology of Cain murdering his brother out of love and then twisting the power of God back around on himself as a curse for what he had done. I know not everyone reads the Book of Nod in this light, but I very much see the Noddist texts and the nature of Golconda to point to a mythology where God was actually totally ok with what Cain did. After all, it's a rather epic sacrifice. However, when he continues to offer Cain access to the kingdom of heaven Cain's own guilt warps the offerings into curses. Either that or God is so put off by the fact that he has lost the individual who gave him the greatest sacrifice imaginable that he decided to curse Cain instead of bless him, but he gave him a way out if he can overcome his own guilt. Between that and the role the Dark Mother plays in the creation story and the end days there is a richness filled with deep psychological torment and complexity that would make Poe blush at least a little. I really want that from True Blood, but while they are creating a ground breaking excellent vampire story if you look at TV history it's no Black Dog buffet.
So that brought me to wanting to run an Elysium campaign. Now I've always been very apprehensive about the idea of an Elysium game. You give players that kind of power and they are bound to run amok with it. Much like a good Wraith game you need players who are willing to dig into the story and aren't going to power monger. You also need a storyteller who can out think all his players. The last time I really played vampire I was in mid college and I wasn't nearly good enough at storytelling to do that kind of wrangling. However, I am now 30 (at least for a few more days) and I have an end times Mage chronicle that lasted over a year under my belt where at least one of the players wanted to take the story in a completely different direction than I or most of the other players did for at least 80% of the chronicle. I felt like on a basic skill level I could handle an Elysium game.
Awesome, so that's one barrier down. Now for the larger barrier. I'm not playing with experienced White Wolfers. My partners have both played a little bit of White Wolf since meeting me, and two of the other players in the campaign only have a Changeling game with a little over half a dozen sessions as primer in the WW universe. If I tried to jump into an Elysium game none of the good plot twists would ring true because the players don't have the lore knowledge to make any of it make sense. They are a talented, mature excellent group, just without lore context.
So I got to thinking about that problem and thought it might be interesting to play out the entire life of a group of vampires. You could slowly build up their understanding of Vampire society. It's also a fascinating opportunity to create organizations that are completely unique with a complete set of "errenous assumption", because let's be honest every group in the World of Darkness has their own set of assumptions about what is right and true, and they are ALL wrong. White Wolf was very clear about that one fundamental element of the world from the beginning. It was never your side, my side and the truth, it was 500 different sides on a slow day and a truth that no one ever actually understood but each storyteller could craft for themselves. That's what I have always loved about the game.
Ok, so now I had a rough framework, what was I going to do with it? I wanted the game to involve major meta lore, so that when the game moved into a modern Elysium style setting I could easily engage with major WoD events and have the players understand what was happening, and I had to figure out how to pace a game like this. The solution lied in the basic campaign model as described in the White Wolf books, that ironically very few people adhere to.
A chronicle in the WW model is a series of stories. Where each story has a conclusion, comes with extra experience and gives an opportunity to start a new story and take the chronicle in a different direction. So I thought each story could be a time period moving forward through history. The waypoints along the way could change based on inspiration, the direction the players take the story in etc. Each time the chronicle moved forward in time they would be given a chunk of experience that would represent the accumulation of power represented by the "Age" background in the Elysium book.
All that was left was establishing the first setting. Choosing something truly iconic in the history of the Vampire experience, but doing so without going so far back in time that I'd be dealing with Elders who's only place in a modern context would be Gehenna. After giving it some thought and pouring back over the Book of Nod and reading the Erciyes Fragments for the first time I decided that a recreation of the first city was in order. A city where man and vampire lived in harmony, and where vampires were worshiped as demigods, though they seek no worship. It goes against written cannon, but is hardly impossible that an elder survived from the first city and sought to re-establish that ephemeral Utopia again. It would be a naive act, but elders can be shockingly idealistic and silly when they put their minds to it. So the game is set in a recreation of Enoch, hidden in a valley in the Balkan mountains.
The players will be raised to live symbiotically with humans. Not exactly "mainstreaming" as the trendy kids are calling it these days, but also hardly the debauchery of modern Kindred living. While I wouldn't describe the results of this little experiment as being devoid of evil I wanted to create something with an idealism to it that will hopefully rub off on the players. Then as time progresses and they move into the world they will have to interact with and adapt to more pervasive Cainite norms.
I would love to post more details about my plans, but the first session hasn't happened yet, and I don't want to put anything in here that the players shouldn't know. I will hopefully be posting summaries of the games themselves and occasionally putting up NPC docs, and maybe even PC stat sheets and back stories. I'm definitely curious about what people think of the chronicle as it unfolds.
It all started with the current season of True Blood. The story about Lilith and the vampire "Authority" got me thinking about Elysium games. For one thing much as I'm happier with True Blood's treatment of vampire society this season than previous seasons I still find the overall story lacking. I blame White Wolf for setting an unrealistic bar on this front. I want the Lilith mythology in True Blood to be as rich as the mythology of Cain murdering his brother out of love and then twisting the power of God back around on himself as a curse for what he had done. I know not everyone reads the Book of Nod in this light, but I very much see the Noddist texts and the nature of Golconda to point to a mythology where God was actually totally ok with what Cain did. After all, it's a rather epic sacrifice. However, when he continues to offer Cain access to the kingdom of heaven Cain's own guilt warps the offerings into curses. Either that or God is so put off by the fact that he has lost the individual who gave him the greatest sacrifice imaginable that he decided to curse Cain instead of bless him, but he gave him a way out if he can overcome his own guilt. Between that and the role the Dark Mother plays in the creation story and the end days there is a richness filled with deep psychological torment and complexity that would make Poe blush at least a little. I really want that from True Blood, but while they are creating a ground breaking excellent vampire story if you look at TV history it's no Black Dog buffet.
So that brought me to wanting to run an Elysium campaign. Now I've always been very apprehensive about the idea of an Elysium game. You give players that kind of power and they are bound to run amok with it. Much like a good Wraith game you need players who are willing to dig into the story and aren't going to power monger. You also need a storyteller who can out think all his players. The last time I really played vampire I was in mid college and I wasn't nearly good enough at storytelling to do that kind of wrangling. However, I am now 30 (at least for a few more days) and I have an end times Mage chronicle that lasted over a year under my belt where at least one of the players wanted to take the story in a completely different direction than I or most of the other players did for at least 80% of the chronicle. I felt like on a basic skill level I could handle an Elysium game.
Awesome, so that's one barrier down. Now for the larger barrier. I'm not playing with experienced White Wolfers. My partners have both played a little bit of White Wolf since meeting me, and two of the other players in the campaign only have a Changeling game with a little over half a dozen sessions as primer in the WW universe. If I tried to jump into an Elysium game none of the good plot twists would ring true because the players don't have the lore knowledge to make any of it make sense. They are a talented, mature excellent group, just without lore context.
So I got to thinking about that problem and thought it might be interesting to play out the entire life of a group of vampires. You could slowly build up their understanding of Vampire society. It's also a fascinating opportunity to create organizations that are completely unique with a complete set of "errenous assumption", because let's be honest every group in the World of Darkness has their own set of assumptions about what is right and true, and they are ALL wrong. White Wolf was very clear about that one fundamental element of the world from the beginning. It was never your side, my side and the truth, it was 500 different sides on a slow day and a truth that no one ever actually understood but each storyteller could craft for themselves. That's what I have always loved about the game.
Ok, so now I had a rough framework, what was I going to do with it? I wanted the game to involve major meta lore, so that when the game moved into a modern Elysium style setting I could easily engage with major WoD events and have the players understand what was happening, and I had to figure out how to pace a game like this. The solution lied in the basic campaign model as described in the White Wolf books, that ironically very few people adhere to.
A chronicle in the WW model is a series of stories. Where each story has a conclusion, comes with extra experience and gives an opportunity to start a new story and take the chronicle in a different direction. So I thought each story could be a time period moving forward through history. The waypoints along the way could change based on inspiration, the direction the players take the story in etc. Each time the chronicle moved forward in time they would be given a chunk of experience that would represent the accumulation of power represented by the "Age" background in the Elysium book.
All that was left was establishing the first setting. Choosing something truly iconic in the history of the Vampire experience, but doing so without going so far back in time that I'd be dealing with Elders who's only place in a modern context would be Gehenna. After giving it some thought and pouring back over the Book of Nod and reading the Erciyes Fragments for the first time I decided that a recreation of the first city was in order. A city where man and vampire lived in harmony, and where vampires were worshiped as demigods, though they seek no worship. It goes against written cannon, but is hardly impossible that an elder survived from the first city and sought to re-establish that ephemeral Utopia again. It would be a naive act, but elders can be shockingly idealistic and silly when they put their minds to it. So the game is set in a recreation of Enoch, hidden in a valley in the Balkan mountains.
The players will be raised to live symbiotically with humans. Not exactly "mainstreaming" as the trendy kids are calling it these days, but also hardly the debauchery of modern Kindred living. While I wouldn't describe the results of this little experiment as being devoid of evil I wanted to create something with an idealism to it that will hopefully rub off on the players. Then as time progresses and they move into the world they will have to interact with and adapt to more pervasive Cainite norms.
I would love to post more details about my plans, but the first session hasn't happened yet, and I don't want to put anything in here that the players shouldn't know. I will hopefully be posting summaries of the games themselves and occasionally putting up NPC docs, and maybe even PC stat sheets and back stories. I'm definitely curious about what people think of the chronicle as it unfolds.
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