Was it a dangerous night? The Kościuszko Plaza in Łódź was quite empty on 2 A.M. Of course there was some people there, doing late shifts or returning from discos. The usual rabble, the denizens of the night. Not that anyone from these people could pose any danger to Franek.
It was a dangerous night, but not because of some brigands. It was dangerous because of Franek.
He had lived in that city for more than 150 years now. He stalked and hunted around the place since then. He remembered the very place built from a village to become a 1 million city. He was there when Izrael Poznański opened his textile empire, and he was there we Germans invaded 1939 and renamed the city to Litzmannstadt. He remembered the time when communists chaned it into the city of workers.
He still remembered the sweet blood of that SS-men beating up the little Jewish girl in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Oh how liberating it was to release the internal Beast back then. Sweet irony, the vampiric Beast became an angel of salvation, a punisher of human beasts. He still felt the anger of the moment. But right after the anger a feeling of warmth mixed with sadness followed because he made sure the orphan girl survived. He used all power and contacts he had to keep her alive and healthy. She has become a daughter to him for some time. He succeeded, she lived.
She died last year in Jerusalem, 77 years old.
Perhaps he should have Embraced her into the Childer of Caine
Franek felt peckish. He stood there, observing people leaving the night club, when he noticed two loud neo-nazis. He grinned.
In fact, the hunt and the war never ended.
That’s one of the ways to start an RPG session in Vampire the Masquerade. I have written before on the World of Darkness setting, and this is my favourite subsystem of it. VtM is an RPG that changed my life, without exaggeration.
As a teenager sunk into fin-de-siecle literature, fantasy and sci-fi books and games, I was bombarded by a magnitude of contradicting pictures and visions. The western world produced hip-hop and consumptionist lifestyle,, that was enchanting, yet we lived for decades in Poland without the consuptionist spirit and we were quite happy. There were always drugs here, but the amount of drugs on the market rose exponentially after the fall of Iron Curtain. Even the young generations bear the trauma of 20th century wars – we see their marks everywhere to this day, so we are naturally reluctant and reserved when it comes to foreign politics. Cynism and cautious behavior are a norm.
Fantasy systems from the West seemed to ideal, to perfect. I couldn’t immerse myself into those except for the darker ones.
And then I found Vampire the Masquerade.
We know vampires from pop culture and folk culture. We know it from books like Anne Rice’s books (Interview with the Vampire”. “Queen of the Damned”) and the movies (“Lost Boys”). We know them from literature (“Dracula”) and folk tales (the word vampyre is a form of slavic “upiór”/”upyr”, which often means “the undead”). And we often tend to think about them either as a cheap gore horror elements or a hillarious/love story storytelling entities. One of course can use them in VtM in a similatr manner, but the Wolrd of Darkness setting is a far deeper one. The player is bombarded with a questions from the very start: what are vampires? What is the meaning of this unlife? What makes one a monster – is it the hideous, undead look? Is it the rotten heart?
Players receive a powerful dark storytelling tool with VtM (and other WoD subsystems). From the very start fledgling vampires are sunk in the world of an undead intrigue and politics, dark magics and dark secrets. First of all, vampires don’t want to be discovered, they want to hunt and plot from the shadows (hence the Masquerade). They are fear embodied, nocturnal beings that were human but are human no more. Yet they do feel fear themselves – fear of far nastier and more ancient entities World of Darkness is populated with. This is a game of horror allright – be the horror and feel your personal horror.
Storytelling capabilities of VtM are enormous. Just think about the reminescence mechanics we know very well from “The Highlander” movie (in fact the Highlander fits so well into WoD there is an unnoficial subsystem incorporating McLeods & co into WoD…). On many occasions one of the vampires during my sessions started telling the story that happened 100 years before, allowing skipping from contemporary era to victorian ages… With suplements on the market as Vampire: The Dark Ages, Victorian Age Vampire ,etc, possibilities are countless.
The internal vampire politics turn around clans & bloodlines (blood strains have various powers, as vampiric mythology explains – coming from Caine the First Murderer – there’s 13 base clans and many more bloodlines) and sects (Camarilla, Sabbat, the Anarchs and Independents) – political orders representing different viewpoints on how to be a vampire and how to defend against the ancient vampiric and other powers.
And so the Jyhad, the war of the immortals (or rather – the undying), continues.
We touched but a tip of an iceberg with this post. To be continued.
Amazing Worlds 