[OSSR]The World of Future Darkness

[Ancient History]

OSSR: White Wolf Magazine


Issues 36, 37, and 38: The World of Future Darkness




Actually no.




Still no.




Also not that.




Not that either.




There we go.

Cyberpunk and Gothic-punk are a natural crossbreed; the Vampire naturally slips into the mean streets of 2020 with a vengeance.

AncientH

Back when I did the GURPS: Vampire: the Masquerade OSSR, I mentioned that one of the hallmarks of doing a GURPS port is that you could more easily combine Vampire with other settings, which it was traditionally bad at. I meant that in a couple of ways - within the World of Darkness itself, various spin-off or parallel properties like Mummy or Demon Hunter X traditionally failed to really bring across a new aesthetic to the basic GothicPunk sensibilities of Vampire: the Masquerade - made all the worse in wholesale setting ports like Dark Ages and Victorian Age vampire, where you might not have firearms or cellphones, but not much else has really changed.

Likewise, the setting of Vampire: the Masquerade in the present basically prevented any substantial efforts to combine the other major Punkpunk genre of the late 70s/early 80s: cyberpunk. While Vampire would, sadly, have hacking and phone freaking rules, it would not have cyberware to any great extant, and the corporate dystopias promised by William Gibson & co. were only hamfistedly squeezed into a couple corners of Mage products. Which is probably for the best, because mixing vampires in with your cyberpunk gets complicated, as Shadowrun found out.

However, there was one attempt to do a serious crossover with Cyberpunk 2020, which ran in three parts in White Wolf Magazine #36, 37, & 38. So set your chronometers back to 1993...

Frank

You might think that the inevitable crossover between Cyberpunk: 2020 and Vampire: the Masquerade would have gone into White Wolf Magazine's “Near Future Issue” but that was actually Issue 30, which had some Shadowrun rants and such. Back in the early 90s, gaming companies were a lot less adverse to acknowledging that other game companies existed. I'm not going to say things were less acrimonious since obviously TSR would still sue you for making a logo that used their trademarked font, but companies in general were less “brand conscious.” I don't think any RPG line had someone whose actual job title was “brand manager.” And so you had official game magazines that just published weird rants tying various other games together or reviewing or expanding on other games. Whether you picked up a White Wolf Magazine or a Pyramid Magazine or whatever, the chance that it would have only White Wolf or only SJG material in it cover to cover was pretty much nil. I'm not sure when Dragon Magazine stopped having Warhammer stats and reviews of Marvel Superheroes in it, but back in the day such things were commonplace and sometime in the 21st century all the portcullises went up and now the idea of an official D&D magazine having an article about Vampire or vice versa seems like an impossible dream.

In any case, early Vampire very much considered itself to be a “punk” game that was already on the spectrum with Cyberpunk to begin with. So in the world of 1993 where inter-brand cross promotions was even possible such a combination was kind of inevitable. The mixture of supernatural elements and cyberpunk elements of course predates Vampire: the Masquerade (for fuck's sake, Vampire uses dicepools because Shadowrun already existed), and the mixture of various retro- and futuristic elements to make punk aesthetic material is pretty much what the genre has always been about.




Tears in Rain!


The World of Future Darkness articles come in three bits: the main bit in Issue 36, a tirade about the Night City location in Issue 37, and an adventure called... sigh “Gypsy Switch” in Issue 38. We'll be going over them in roughly that order. The first bit is 11 pages, but these are old school magazine pages with a full page picture of a rasta vampire holding a brain for some reason and a quarter page advert for the 6th edition of Wiz War. The second bit is 12 pages, but it contains more ads, including one where it wants you to mail them a $20 check for “very very sensual photography” which is I think how porn got disseminated in the days before Pornhub. The last one is 13 pages, but is broken up by more ads still and also is seriously called “Gypsy Switch” because it was 1993 and people thought that sort of thing was OK. All sections are written by Deirdre Brooks, who was a member of White Wolf's C-Team – the people who got co-writing credits on various fill-in-the-blank books that kept the game being current and made people feel like it was being supported. Shit like the Get of Fenris Tribebook and the Euthanatos Tradition Book. Stuff that I don't actually care about, but which kept people engaged and demonstrated commitment to the brands.




I'm not sure if this is the edition of Clanbook Assamite that she worked on and I don't actually care.


What's really weird is that there's no real modern equivalent. Dungeons & Dragons no longer has a C-Team and produces a real book just twice a year and a fluff offering or adventure module twice a year. When Paradox bought the White Wolf IP it would have been trivial to get a dozen or a hundred fanboys to make “official” rants about various parts of the setting – but they didn't do that. Instead we get a whole bowl full of nothing. And it's important to realize that while these C-Team books are surely cheap to produce, being basically just the ravings of 2-5 fans put into vaguely presentable form by a typesetter and padded with art (some of which is reused), they weren't noticeably worse than things done by the A or B teams. Because the reality is that very few people are actually good at game writing, and enthusiasm counts for a lot.

AncientH

Technically this VtM/Cyberpunk 2020 was actually preceded in 1992 by Night's Edge, a third-party licensed product by Ianus (now Dream Pod 9), which basically was set in an alternate version of the Cyberpunk 2020 timeline with vampires, werewolves, and psychics. So the conceptual ground was already laid, the only real question is execution.



And the funny thing is, GURPS also did a port of Cyberpunk, which Frank and I did an OSSR of. GURPS Cyberpunk was 1990 and GURPS V:TM was 1993, so really this three-part article was competing against both of those games in terms of execution. There are advantages and disadvantages there.

The major mark against Night's Edge, besides being an abomination, is that there are no Vampire: the Masquerade trappings. You'd have to port in all the setting-specific material.

The major mark against bringing GURPS Cyberpunk and GURPS V:TM together on the table is getting the rules and setting to jive. There aren't actually any real mechanical discrepancies between the two products - you can fold in hacking rules and blood magic just fine - but there's also no stated limitations on vampires getting cyberware and no real guideline for making the V:TM setting to work together with the Cyberpunk/Cyberworld setting. Yeah, you can do it, but it's going to be very ad hoc...and there are no real syncretic elements, like special bonuses for Booster Gangers that use vampire blood to become ghouls or anything like that.

So, that's sort of the stick against which this three-part magazine serial has to be measured.

Frank

On the other hand, Cyber won't stop Dominate.

There are several ways you could approach the crossover of cyberpunk tropes with vampires. You could make an alternate setting where you added magic to your cyberpunk or vice versa. You could introduce magic to your cyberpunk world like the Great Revelation in True Blood. You could have your urban fantasy world have technology advance and become a cyberpunk dystopia. Or you could just clumsily run both things together and try to skate by on attitude.

Naturally this article chooses to do that last bit, which is understandable because honestly there's not a lot of room for it to do much else. A Magazine page could fit 700-1000 words, but it doesn't. Between all the visual elements and white space and shit, I'd be surprised if the average words per page was over 300. Each article probably had a word cap of less than 5k words. So don't expect a deconstructionist essay on the inter-relatedness of tropes from different fantasy/science fiction punk sub-genres. We name check the fact that loss of humanity is a theme in both games and then we move on.

So we go into a rambling tirade about how cool it is that there are people with supernatural strength and people who have cyber strength and people who have both, and how this means that cyberpunks can keep up with vampires in combat (true), but ominously warns us that cyberware cannot stop Dominate. Now that isn't strictly speaking true. Vampire: The Masquerade posits mental commands that require eye contact, and with cyberware you can replace your eyes with a 360 degree sonar emitter or some fucking thing and never get eye contacted again. What she probably meant, was that the whole Cyberpunk genre is pretty unprepared for people who can turn people into permanent mind slaves just by looking at them. There's a lot of genre baggage about corporate masterminds and secret societies and corrupt government officials and covert operations teams and shit, and taking those things apart is child's play when you can give any member of any of the organizations the stink eye and have them tell you everything they know and also start working tirelessly to betray other members of the organization and arrange for them to be in situations you can use your persuado-vision. It's like an FBI rollup of a criminal syndicate except that instead of weeks or months of painstakingly gathering information and evidence and negotiating plea deals and shit you just win a forty second staring contest with each member of the conspiracy in turn and move up the chain. Oh, and instead of the organization knowing that various members have been captured and reacting accordingly, they don't get to know shit and anyone in the room could have become a Vampire pawn just by glancing at someone in a restaurant or looking at the sexy lady in elevator.




Sounds complicated. Sorting this out will take several nights.

This isn't to say that Vampires in Vampire don't have weaknesses or can't lose. Obviously they do and can. For all the fapping to Vampire speed and Vampire strength, such abilities were actually very shit in Vampire: the Masquerade. Your super speed burns your blood so fast that your power battery is measured in seconds. And while it does make you fast enough to convincingly win a fencing match, it's pretty much useless for all other purposes. Masquerade vamps have so many weaknesses and tells that they can't hold a job, go to court, or effectively hide from 21st century technophiles who really want to find and identify them.

It's just that the typical Cyberpunk antagonist of the implacable bureaucratic edifice with unlimited funds and dispatchable strike teams is completely helpless against Vampiric domination. Which is actually why it's so fucking weird that the V5 people decided to go for that as their primary antagonists for the latest reboot. That's the thing that's totally non-threatening to Masquerade vamps.



While you were out, I collared and took ownership of your secretary. She gave me copies of all your files.

But the basic situation of course is that it's trivially easy for someone with enhanced smell, hearing, temperature sense, extended spectrum vision or basically any sensory enhancement you can imagine to detect vampires in Masquerade. The vampires described in that game were inherently not very good at pretending to be humans, and once you bring enhanced sensory suites into the mix the wheels fall off completely. Which leads this article to say that basically yes, anyone with even a little bit of cyber probably has a sensory booster of some flavor or another and vampires basically can't hide the fact that they are abnormal. This leads the article to just shrug and say that further, a significant number of cyberpunks just know that there are vampires. But we're not committing to the Great Revelation here, it's just that the Masquerade is in “open secret” territory and what that means for the purposes of the world is left up to the MC.

Now I know what you're thinking at this point: “Isn't the Masquerade pretty much the central concept of Masquerade? If we don't have a functioning Masquerade anymore, what the actual fuck is going on?”


¯\_(ツ)_/¯


There's probably going to be a race war or something in the extremely imminent future and essentially no one seems to have a plan for what to do about it. That's the setup. Which is certainly a cop out. But it's also not a bad a campaign seed. Like, The Great Revelation happens, but instead of it being a planned media event by vampire hunters trying to destroy the leeches or a planned media event by vampire elders trying to arrange themselves golden parachutes and soft landings, it just sort of happens. People saying that vampires were real gradually became mainstreamed and some Ventrue Elder wakes up to read the evening edition and the fact that vampires exist and you already knew that is just an assumption of some piece on the front page. And now everyone starts trying to formulate plans to throw enemies under the bus and whip up sympathy and erradication patrols and whatever the fuck.

I'm not sure how well either Cyberpunk 2020 or Vampire: the Masquerade are set up to handle some kind of world changing campaign like that. Actually that's a lie, I know that both game systems have no real means of satisfactorily influencing public opinion and that such a campaign would be made of 99.44% mind caulk. But it's certainly bold and interesting for something this half-assed.

AncientH

"You don't understand; the Masquerade will be outdated inside the next thirty years. Technology has advanced to the point that nearly anyone who cares to spend the cash can identify Kindred. We must be prepared for the inevitable exposure of our lifestyle.
"The Canaille possess the means to destroy us now! What will they have in five years? Ten? Twenty? Adapt, die, or get the hell out of the way."
- Margali, 4th Generation Ravnos, in a letter to the Camarilla, 1994

One of the great conceits of Vampire: the Masquerade is that it was set in the Modern Nights - not the 1890s or 1920s like Call of Cthulhu, not in some vaguely medieval setting like Ravenloft. Even in 1990 the Masquerade was wearing a bit thin, and the War of Ages was struggling to adapt to the pace of human technological and social change. That was part of what made the vampire dynamic interesting: it wasn't about some dotty old nobleman in a castle, it was vampires living as bums and in shitty camper vans. The Gothic Punk sensibility saw vampires pushed away from the glitzy faded nobility of Gothic castles to the social edges - and conversely, in the modern nights many people had forgotten how to fight vampires, being more informed by movies than by the ancient tomes of lore.


Can I get that on PDF?

Cyberpunk was about the high tech/low life split. The future was coming, with amazing technologies and immense wealth disparities - and that was the thing: most of the people living there were going to be poor, or cogs in the corporate machine, and the street would find its own uses for the new technologies. The protagonists (one hesitates to call them "heroes") of cyberpunk stories struggle with the definition of human, and are likewise pushed to the edges of things - because it is only there that they can make a difference.

So there is a very real potential for collision here, depending on whether you're playing from the Vampire perspective where suddenly the mortals are a lot more dangerous and you've got a bunch of Elders who are stuck in their old habits and don't understand that you can't just snag a virgin from the village for a snack anymore, or whether you're a cyberpunk protagonist that finds out that along with all the black market tech and illegal shenanigans that the Corps get up to oh yes there are also vampires and shit to deal with!

And some of that could play into interesting stories. One of the things about Anne Rice's take in The Vampire Lestat is that older vampires would embrace people so that they had someone to help guide them through a new period - to periodically re-acquaint themselves with how the mortals lived and how the vampires could adapt to that. Imagine if some vampire that went into Torpor in 1718 would react if they woke up in 2018. How do you explain the internet and FBI database to a centuries-old serial killer? Now imagine explaining the Matrix and cyberware.

Brooks...doesn't have room to really address this. It's basically Cyberpunk 2020 as a setting, but the V:TM-specific organizations are crammed in there, and the Masquerade is going to break under the weight of it.

in the playtest Chronicle it fell apart in 2021

Frank

All vampire groups that the author could remember get a one paragraph rant. Also there is a new faction dedicated to softening the landing of the oncoming Great Revelation and creating a lasting peace between humans and vampires. Because of course what Vampire really needs is more secret organizations.

Vampire: the Masquerade has too many layers of secret societies. Too many flavors of supernatural creatures. The demographics of Vampires are thin sliced like a garnish radish to the point where none of the “groups” that are discussed could possibly have enough members to have meaningful things said about them as groups. Night City has five million people in it, so presumably it has fifty vampires. These are divided into five “organizations” (Camarilla, Sabbat, Children of Carthagos, Inconnu, and Anarchs) whose members are in turn drawn from fourteen different clans plus innumerable bloodlines and special snow flakes. This means that in Night City there are literally more organizations a vampire could belong to than there are members of most of the clans. Further, getting into the nitty gritty of the various clans we find that they in turn are divided into factions – for example the Lasombra have ten factions and the Tremere are divided into 49 ranks and twelve secret societies. But there are like four of these assholes in the major metropolis the game is set in, which means that even if all of those are factions of one guy giving himself “secret handshakes” while watching futa porn that still leaves more groups unrepresented than represented in the game's primary sandbox.



Sometimes a player would want to play something really obscure like a were hyena or some fucking thing. But the reality is that there were so many more groups than members that everything was obscure in-world. Some things got a lot of ink spilled on them and some things did not, but for practical purposes it was very hard to justify there being more than one of anything in any campaign.


We get a rant about the Camarilla, the Assamite, the Followers of Set, the Gangrel, the Giovanni, the Malkavians, the Nosferatu, the Ravnos, the Toreador, the Tremere, the Ventrue, the Caitiff, the Inconnu, and the Sabbat. The Camarilla gets 3 paragraphs instead of one, but it spends those extra paragraphs talking about the Children of Carthagos and the Anarchs, who don't otherwise get a heading but therefore get the same share of paragraphs that all the clans and other organizations do. You might have noticed that that leaves off two clans, which would be the Lasombra and the Tzimisce. Those are two “mostly Sabbat” clans, which I suspect means that the author had not at the time of writing this book read the Player's Guide to the Sabbat, though it came out several months before the magazine article was published. The little rant about the Sabbat doesn't really imply that the author knew anything about the Sabbat as such, they are apparently nomadic enemies on the outskirts of town that have fights with cyberpsychos. Back in 1993, they really wanted us to care about the Inconnu. They were super secret and you couldn't join. And they were up to something. But the reality is that the other shoe never dropped and in the proceeding 10 years the Inconnu plotline never went anywhere and eventually someone put it out of our misery.




The Inconnu went straight from “background” to “falling action” and never really got a satisfactory resolution either. So it's not so much “Story Mountain” as “Story Abyss.”


Now let's be honest, a single paragraph isn't much to inform the reader about much of anything. And these are not large paragraphs. The entire Ravnos paragraph is actually a 28 word run-on sentence that conveys two pieces of information: Ravnos are Nomads. And Ravnos are “looking for fun.” That's fucking it. There is nothing to be learned about what level of clan organizational versus organization organizational hierarchies you can expect to deal with as say: an Assamite Anarch or a Nosferatu Child of Carthagos. We could go in-depth and pick apart these statements like how the Nosferatu are supposed to be masters of information gathering but they don't actually have any abilities that meaningfully help with that – but that's sort of beside the point. The broader point is that there's too much crap in the World of Darkness and a magazine article cannot possibly be anything other than frustratingly superficial with that kind of survey work.


One thing that Vampire: the Masquerade was always terrible at is the multitude of identities characters are supposed to have and how those are supposed to fit in the world and create alliances and conflicts. Your character is a member of the 12th generation, a member of the Ventrue, a member of the Camarilla, a member of the Coterie that represents the players actually playing the fucking game. Within the city you're supposed to be of one of four different ranks when you have your Ventrue clan meetings (which is quite a trick, considering that there are only four of you in Night City and thus all the Eiren below the rank of Questor is “Steve from accounting, the guy we refused to promote to Questor because he's such an asshole.”). And how exactly that's supposed to work is certainly a puzzle. So this magazine article off-handedly mentions that “the Giovanni” have business conflicts with “the Ventrue.” But if your character is a Ventrue, what does that mean to you? I have no idea. Neither does anyone else.


Also of note: there is a brief roundup of the non-Vampire groups that the author cared about in 1993. That's Mages, Mummies, Spirits, Werewolves, and Vampire Hunters. It's important to realize that this was 1993 and it wasn't obvious yet that Mummy was stillborn, and Wraith: the Oblivion hadn't actually been finished yet (it came out in 1994). So the “Spirits” section is just a single sentence pointing out that there are rumors on the net about ghosts. Also, Hunter: the Reckoning wasn't even on the release schedule (it came out in 1999). This is a reference to the hunter groups originally drawn up in The Hunters Hunted, which at that time was reasonably fresh (1992). So here we're talking about The Society of Leopold and The Arcanum, two groups which gradually got less and less important as various new authors promoted various other pet antagonist groups. It's probably fair to admit that the Arcanum and the Society were never that interesting to begin with and if someone had made new substantially more interesting hunter groups that would have been a net plus. Instead you just got stuff like Demon Hunter X with new organizations such as the Shih and Strike Force Zero and they didn't get future support either, to be casually tossed aside for new antagonists in each and every new production about anything.


You'd think the relentless rummaging through a sock drawer of enemies that characterized World of Darkness would have caused White Wolf to radically rethink their life and stop that shit for nWoD. But instead they thought they'd learned exactly the opposite lesson. That it was a problem for people that organizations like the Inconnu and the Arcanum languished at the periphery of the setting and eventually got discarded without accomplishing anything – so they decided to start discarding all the antagonist groups immediately upon being written and just never call back to anything. Which means that every antagonist from every book in NWoD was just a disappointment in the precise vein as the Inconnu the very moment it was printed. Those relic weapon people or the emotional void people from nMage? Those were complete abandonware. Everything was abandonware. Looking back at works from 1993 talking about how all the stuff was going to get supported just makes me feel sad. And the nWoD conclusion that they didn't live up to that promise so they weren't even going to try is just sadly emblematic of how terrible decisions got made for nWoD.

AncientH

Part of the problem is that roleplaying games in general hate to throw anything away, and players tend to bitch when they do. There are still people upset that the Ravnos bought it, or that Squats were phased out of Warhammer 40K. Yet at the same time, games need to present a steady stream of raw material for players and Keepers, so stuff just...piles up, and sometimes gets lost. The squeaky metaplot gets the grease, and sometimes you have entire cities which go unmentioned for a decade in real time before the focus is on other things.

For Vampire, it's especially tricky because a lot of the divisions are hardcoded into vampires. Your generation is static, barring diablerie or bullshit magic. Your clan is hardcoded, barring joining the Baali or bullshit magic. Sects and coteries are the limit of your purely social and artificial obligations. So your options for reducing coverage is either 1) just ignore whatever you don't want to deal with, or 2) pull some bullshit out of your butt to merge a couple clans or bloodlines together. But, like I said, people hate throwing things out so we get these really inadequate write-ups of the different clans/sects.

Brooks focuses on the Vampire side of thing pretty much to the exclusion of the CP2020 side of things - they don't list which megacorps that the Giovanni and Ventrue supposedly control, for example, although that would be important in any real game. Clanbook: Nosferatu didn't come out until 1994, so she can be forgiven for not working in reference to SchreckNet or any other bizarre early-90s internet references, but the gist is that she didn't give much thought to the infrastructure of how things work at all.

But like I said, you have to keep in mind that anybody that wanted to do this on their own with GURPS would face the exact same challenge. They might or might not take Night's Edge as inspiration, but they'd still have to find a way to fold Vampire into CP2020, and come up with their own solution to why the Masquerade works or fails. So Brooks at least brings these things up, even if she doesn't really have the space to address it.

Some of the stuff she does waste space on, you wish she wouldn't. For example:

The Center for Disease Control has not discovered the cause for the mysterious spread of AIDS. Petrondon, the Nosferatu Justicar, called a Conclave in Atlanta in 1994 with the intent to solve the problem. Currently, a small group of Vampires are responsible for insuring that CC research into the problem goes nowhere. Unfortunately, this manipulation will not last much longer.

As Frank ranted on about at some length, Vampires don't spread HIV, and the implication here is just stupid.

Frank

Every piece of Masquerade expansion material added new magical disciplines, new blood lines, and new extraneous crap to make things more excessively baroque. And bizarrely these new bits were always excessively top heavy to a degree that's hard to even imagine or explain. So each of the expansion clans was basically “one guy's character” that was extremely specific and non-generalizable, but for them to exist required us to have 13 generations and thousands of years of vampire politics to support some fucking Vampire Steve. For fuck's sake, the Giovanni are an incestuous family of Venetian businessmen with necromancy powers who all drink cold blood from the fridge. And yet despite being from Venice, we are asked to care about them in regards to central California because once a vampire type got claimed we were fucking stuck with it no matter how weirdly specific it was.




And yet we didn't have the ability to play the flying vampires from Lost Boys because there “wasn't room.”


So Vampire desperately needed to get its shit together and purge the clan rosters of all the weirdly specific crap and do a better job of covering actual source material. It did not do that. Ever.

But fuck it. This set of magazine articles is a Masquerade supplement of sorts, so obviously it has a bonus Clan for you to play: the Cyberpunks.




Yes. They are actually called “Cyberpunks.”


The official music of the Cyberpunks is Black Sabbath. I would have thought that it would be something like Skinny Puppy or Chemlab, but sure.

The Bloodline is currently confined to Night City and all of its members are Anarchs. They are not well known to Carlo or Helen.

Even by V:tM standards, that's insanely specific. It's literally just a couple of people who know Margali and Eryn and don't know Carlo or Helen. Given the high level generalities of the rest of this article, this level of intense specificity is a major stop and reread several times moment. I mean... Carlo? I think they mean Carlo Giovanni, who is a character that appears in the Night City writeup that came out the following month. Similarly, Helen is probably Helen Matthews, who is a Ventrue from the same bit. I assume that in Deirdre's original writeup that it was all in one section and it got split up across three separate issues because of the layout visions of the magazine editor rather than that being a particularly good idea. So in this first article we're left with hanging references to characters who would ultimately be printed in a separate magazine published at a later date.

In any case, the Cyberpunks have the disciplines of Potence, Celerity, and Technica. Technica is a new discipline and the other two are notable primarily by not being on the discipline list of the Ravnos, who are theoretically the parent clan. Like, I honestly have no fucking idea why or how these guys are supposed to be a cadet branch of the Ravnos. What does that even accomplish?

So the actual discipline of Technica does... um... stuff? I honestly can't evaluate how functional it is because much of it doesn't tell you how it works. The very first level lets you have a direct connection to any device if you can touch a port or connection cable. That probably sounds pretty standard, and maybe a little underpowered what with not being able to wirelessly connect with routers. But Cyberpunk 2020 has tech that seemed questionably retro even at the time. I mean... you could subdermal tape recorders. In that context, plugging different kinds of jacks into ports was supposed to be a big deal. And the ability to create a contact connection to fucking anything was kind of a big deal. I don't know what the rest of the levels do. Technical Touch lets you roll your technical skills to “understand” a device, and then you use your hits as your skill if you don't have the skill. But you had to have the skill I think? Fuckit. I dunno. Level 3 lets you use your Willpower instead of batteries, but it doesn't tell us how long a Willpower lasts or whether it lets us power Energy Weapons. Level 4 makes the other powers wireless out to 100 feet, but it doesn't tell you how many things you can run off Willpower simultaneously, which is kind of important because you can potentially have a lot of devices within 100 feet of you. Level 5 lets you communicate with machine spirits, which is a function call to Werewolf, where the power, knowledge, and disposition of those spirits is unexplained. Also it doesn't tell you what dice you roll or what the difficulty is, but it does tell you what happens when you roll various numbers of successes with that undefined dicepool against an undefined target number. And finally, level 6... exists. That means that at least one of the Cyberpunks is Seventh Generation and now we are all super sad because it means we have to talk about generations.


The idea of generations is that the first vampire blood that goes down your throat when you die sets how potent the blood your vampire body makes for the rest of forever. This is fucking terrible, because there's no practical reason for anyone to be embraced with anything other than Elder blood. There are 4th generation vampires up and walking around, and there's honestly no reason for anybody to embrace any new vampire with their own blood instead of buying some elder blood and pouring that down their throat. The whole thing is stupid, and the logical responses it promotes are awful. This is one of the few issues that nWoD actually solidly addressed – creating a Blood Potency stat that started at 1 and moved up as vampires aged. Fuck that solved a lot of problems.


But the long story short is that the Cyberpunks exist to support like one character who does a trick where nothing in her apartment is plugged in but it all runs on the strength of her Will. And that's... an exquisitely terrible use of conceptual space – but sadly typical of the period and the edition.

AncientH

A couple years after this, Vampire: the Masquerade would introduce Technomancy as a path for Thaumaturgy and a couple varieties of garden-variety Psi powers for interacting with computers. And if you were going to do a more up-to-date version of this basic World of Future Darkness concept, then you'd probably have the Tremere as the Nerds of the setting, and they would default to Technomancy in place of Path of Blood and occupy the role of Hackers. Then you could have Brujah as Solos, Toreadors as Faces, etc. and marry the rest of the Cyberpunk 2020 roles to specific clans/bloodlines which were best suited to those roles.

Or not. We'll pick that thread up in a bit.

There's not much else to say about Technica and the Cyberpunk bloodline at this point because...nothing ever came of it, neither were referenced in any other material, ever. Which is probably for the best, because Digital Web came out for Mage in Nov 1993, and Vampires in the Matrix is six shades of headache that nobody wants. What does lethal biofeedback mean when you're a vampire? Can you just ignore Black IC? Or develop a discipline that lets you feed over an internet connection? (Which sounds alternately stupid and awesome in a stupid horror movie kind of way.)

One thing Technica demonstrates is at least a half-assed attempt at syncretism - at creating a group and set of powers which deliberately works to bridge the two settings. That's something which is a little trickier in the GURPS version of things. Not impossible, since you can basically steal whatever you want from any GURPS book and rebrand it if you so choose, but it's a lot easier to imagine a GURPS Vampire: the Cybernights game using Technomancy as a jumping-off point rather than creating a whole new discipline. Why? Because "Thaumaturgy" in GURPS V:TM just uses the GURPS Magic rules, and GURPS Magic includes technomagic spells for awakening machine spirits and recharging batteries and crap.

So in a hypothetical GURPS V:tC game you could port that shit over automatically. It still wouldn't make sense for it to be Ravnos, but you could still have a Cyberpunks bloodline (if that was necessary) and give them a limited version of Thaumaturgy where they only get technomagical spells and that still gives them a good chunk of abilities. Or you could just stick with the Tremere and make them hack technology using blood magic. Whatever.

Frank

Probably the biggest draw for mixing Cyberpunk and Vampire (or Cyberpunk and Vampire as the style guides at the time would have us write them) is to have cyborg vampires.

Because it's awesome. That's why.

I mean, we'd also accept cybernetic zombies, but we obviously are here for the cyber vampires. Because obviously. Anyway, the short version is that if you turn cyborgs into Vampires they keep their cyberware and there's a thaumaturgy ritual to let you slap that shit into someone who is already a vampire. Now “there's a thaumaturgy ritual for that” is basically exactly the Vampire: the Masquerade equivalent of “a wizard did it.” It actually involves actual wizards actually doing it.




Now you may wonder why we're having Wizards making our cybervamps when we literally just introduced fucking Technica users whose entire shtick is that they use their vampire magic to interface with technology? I got no answer to that. People were so used to circumventing the limits of the setting (which were indeed crippling) by writing up Thaumaturgy rituals, so they just did that even when there was a much more obvious answer right at hand.

Now the much more subtle question is how neural plugs and shit work on Vampires at all? I mean, vampires in Masquerade are practically animated statues with no real biological processes going on. So the issue of “how do you get the cyber parts to not fall out when the vampire reforms next?” is actually not that relevant. The real question how any cyberware manages to be anything other than jewelry when your body isn't 37 degrees. It's an important and unaddressed point. They tell you how to get magicked up so you can go to one of the Eurosource clinics (specifically like the clinics in Eurosource in that it references that specific book for... reasons), but puts no particular thought into how maybe adrenal pumps wouldn't do anything if you don't have circulating blood.

Apropos of nothing: the submitted title of this article was “CyberFang.” It was changed to World of Future Darkness in the heading, but the editor didn't catch all the references to CyberFang in the text. Because editing is hard and White Wolf Magazine wasn't particularly known for not being terribly edited even at the time.

There's a brief run down of some rather arbitrary rulings about how various pieces of cyberware interact with various common disciplines. Enhanced Senses can't enhance your vision enhancement from cybereyes, but it can enhance your olfactory booster for... reasons. There's a justification for it, but I don't see it solving more arguments than it causes. Protean gets boned if you have robot parts, which basically just reminds us all that Protean is offensively terrible at its job in Vampire: the Masquerade.

AncientH

Shadowrun ran into the vampires/cyberware issue too, but for different reasons. Shadowrun Vampires are all technically living beings with a disease, so no problem there: but they also largely have Regeneration, which makes cyberware implants...problematic.

This is really a subset of a much larger problem with Vampire: the Masquerade, in which basically nobody sat down and laid out exactly how vampires functioned as corpses vs. human beings. Did their undead hearts beat? If not, how did the vitae flow through their veins...or did it? They don't have to breathe, or eat (and in most cases, can't eat), are immune to disease an don't heal or grow hair or grow old naturally. In some supplements, Vampires can spend a blood point to ape some of the general features of life, and this might have been a workable alternative: make the vampire spend a bloodpoint to activate their cyberware for the night.

Or you could go the Mage route and "cyberware" are all magickal artifacts being embedded in your flesh. Which sounds like it should be a Giovanni (necromancy) or Tzimisce (fleshcrafting) job, and if I were re-doing this setting today I'd probably have multiple competing means of augmentation, with the Tzimisce being the old-school way vampires got augmentations, with greater refinement and demand in the Cyberpunk Nights, and the Giovanni using necromantic rituals to place new 'ware in dead flesh, which then requires vitae to power.

This is one of those things that GURPS would handle either brilliantly or badly, depending on your point of view. On the one hand, GURPS does not give a shit about whether or not vampires are walking corpses: you pay your points and get your cyberware. And if you're fine with that, great! If you're having trouble with trying to reconcile in your head why your Toreador can get a tape deck installed in her head...well...yeah, that's a problem, and one which GURPS isn't equipped to handle. You'd have to create your own mechanic from scratch to deal with that situation.

One of the hallmarks of Cyberpunk 2020 is Cyberpsychosis, the idea that getting cyberware causes you to lose part of your humanity; Vampire at this point was also interested in characters losing their humanity, so Brooks included a conversion guide... This requires calculating a Humanity Index (basically, current Humanity x 10) and then subtracting points whenever you get some 'ware. Which gets tricky because CP2020 costs are measured in d6s and Vampire uses d10s, so there's a wonky little conversion...

Frank

The last page and a half is conversions from the stats of various cyberware and equipment in the Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook to Vampire: the Masquerade rules. It doesn't do a terrible job. For the most part, stuff in Cyberpunk is on a 2-10 scale and stuff in Vampire is on a 1-5 scale and if you divide everything by 2 you get numbers that aren't terrible. But while I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that an article published in White Wolf Magazine assumes that you're using White Wolf mechanics for your crossover. But honestly you should not do that.

Cyberpunk 2020 has pretty famously terribad mechanics. But at least it isn't Vampire: the Masquerade. Googly moogly these are awful.

AncientH

If you're running GURPS, you're running GURPS mechanics (3-18, mostly), so it's moot. And while GURPS mechanics aren't great, they more or less work as long as you don't get too creative.

There's a brief section on how Disciplines interact with various bits of cyberware (poorly), a section on Vampires netrunning (implicitly, they are damaged by IC), a weird list of recommendations...

All you new Licks feeling ?
What do you do when...
Two thirds of the Solos on the street have Thermographic Imaging?
Learn Masquerade, Choomba.
You were Embraced before Cyberware?
Pick up Celerity. A lot of it. All you can find.
The guns are bigger than you?
Buy even bigger guns.
Everyone you fight is stronger/faster/tougher than you?
Burn blood. If you win, you can have their Vitae.
If you lose, it doesn't matter.
Remember, the tech is there for everybody to use.
Just because you're Kindred doesn't mean you have to be stupid.

Noble (?) sentiments; they're not kidding about the Celerity bit, btw. A lot of the cyberware, when converted into World of Future Darkness stats, gives straight-up levels of Celerity or Potence. This more-or-less explicitly ignores generation caps on disciplines, sort of like how Werewolf powers are faked with Vampire Disciplines in Vampire books.

This is probably the single section that they spent the longest on getting just right, and is sadly also the least useful part of the whole thing, because it requires cross-referencing this list with the rules given in various Cyberpunk 2020 Chromebooks and crap to figure out what the 'ware costs and actually does. GURPS Cyberpunk might give you less variety to choose from, but at least you don't have to convert it and it doesn't muck about with discipline ratings.

Not all of this 'ware is beneficial, either. For example, there's a neural chip designed for dieting called Fish N' Chips, which:

Will work on Kindred. It can be used to limit the amount of blood a Kindred will drink before feeling sated. This can be used to limit a Lick to, say, 3 Blood Points. Nasty.

Which is...okay? I mean, kinda silly, but that's the Cyberpunk 2020 aesthetic

Frank

Next: San Luis Obispo

AncientH

So far...how does World of Future Darkness stack up? Well, the setting material is not so much bare-bones as a pile of undifferentiated stem cells that some intern is trying to coax into being osteocytes. The mechanics are pretty quick'n'dirty, and you're converting from a bad system to a notoriously bad system. It's really just one idea, lightly hammered into shape. There's been some work put into it - Cyberpunks and Technica, vampire cyberware - but not a lot of thought. There's certainly less thought to how vampires work in the Cyberpunk 2020 setting than in Night's Edge.

You could build this with GURPS. You could, actually, probably do it better and faster with GURPS, speaking strictly from a mechanical standpoint. You would face the same problems when it came to deciding how the setting would work, and you would maybe have to adjudicate if vampires could get cyberware and when and why and how...but none of that is really much more work than you're already looking at with the World of Future Darkness.

[Longes]

Those relic weapon people or the emotional void people from nMage?

Weirdly enough - no. The relic weapon people are the Aegis Kai Doru, and they are a playable compact in nHunter. Or so I assume. Could be that you are talking about completely unrelated relic weapon people.

Of course there's still a problem that nHunter has like fifteen compacts, and generally doesn't support the compact crossover. So no one ever actually plays Aegis Kai Doru, because everyone plays Task Force VALKYRIE. And in a cross-compact game still, no one plays Aegis Kai Doru because there are way more interesting compacts than "dudes with a few magic artifacts".

nHunter is a very bad execution of an overall decent idea.

[Username17]

Those relic weapon people or the emotional void people from nMage?

Weirdly enough - no. The relic weapon people are the Aegis Kai Doru, and they are a playable compact in nHunter. Or so I assume. Could be that you are talking about completely unrelated relic weapon people.

Of course there's still a problem that nHunter has like fifteen compacts, and generally doesn't support the compact crossover. So no one ever actually plays Aegis Kai Doru, because everyone plays Task Force VALKYRIE. And in a cross-compact game still, no one plays Aegis Kai Doru because there are way more interesting compacts than "dudes with a few magic artifacts".

nHunter is a very bad execution of an overall decent idea.

I was referring to the Ananke, the people who literally are relic weapons like Ifurita from El Hazard. As far as I know, they are never referenced again, not even outside their own chapter in the book they are introduced in. I don't think the Aegis Kai Doru were ever referenced before Hunter or ever referenced again in any other context.

-Username17

[Longes]

Aegis Kai Doru are definitely referenced in some book (possibly Guardians of the Veil?) and they are basically just dupes some mage in ye olde times tasked with gathering +1 swords for him. The mage died of old age but Aegis is still around, still gathering +1 swords.

[DrPraetor]

Guide to the Technocracy has a Cybernetics background and some cybernetics you can get as well.

As a mage you didn't want it, even though it was broken, because it gave you permanent paradox points and when you have pattern magic you don't care what else is written on your character sheet.

So does Tribebook: Glasswalkers, apparently? Or at least it has gifts (spells) that do things if you have cyberware. I kinda want to see what is in Tribebook: Glasswalkers now.

So your vampire might as well take a night job with Pentex, get him some robot parts and wyrm gifts.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: White Wolf Magazine

Issue 37, Night City

Chaos reigns. Events happen constantly, sometimes for no apparent reason.

Frank

Night City was the default location of most of Cyberpunk. It's going to be the sandbox you run around in the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. It's been in a lot of Cyberpunk related stuff. There was even a very obscure reference to it in Shadowrun where Damien Knight had Ares create some arcology in that part of California, thereby creating “Knight City.” Get it?

Anyway, Night City is a fictional city on a fictional bay in Central California. It's not quite Metropolis to New York or Central City to Chicago, in that San Francisco and Los Angeles still exist in this setting. We're in a fictional hybrid city and I'm not really sure why Cyberpunk decided to do that rather than just picking an actual city and having it be a cyberpunk dystopia in the future. Shadowrun, for example, decided to use Seattle as its default city and that seemed to work well enough.

Night City is located on the map about where San Luis Obispo is, but it's on the coast and laid out like San Francisco. And I do mean exactly like San Francisco, in the sense that it's on a peninsula and has an East facing harbor – which for obvious reasons is somewhat rare in California. What I've never known is whether putting Night City around San Luis Obispo was a reference to anything or not. That could have just been someone throwing a virtual dart at a map of the US and almost missing. But San Luis Obispo is the home of California Polytechnic State University, which was very big in early RPGs alongside its rival the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. So it's possible that Mike Pondsmith (who went to school at UC Davis) put Night City in SLO as a specific dig at or homage to some of his other RPG friends who went to school in SLO.

In any case, Mike Pondsmith designed it as a heavily fictionalized location with elements drawn from various other places around California that he'd been to. Here's an early draft of where he's drawing the fictionalized coastline on top of the real coastline of Morro Bay.

Cyberpunk involves a future timeline that was incredibly compressed, with things originally going full Cyberpunk with implants and national collapses in the nineties. The original edition was 2013, and it got bumped up to 2020 to make it slightly less insane, but obviously we've still caught up to that and I still don't have my fucking neural plugs. The latest works are going to the old Shadowrun standby of “about 60 years from now” as their setting, which sets off less bullshit alarms.

Indeed, the bullshit alarms of Night City as a Cyberpunk 2020 location were very loud klaxons that went off constantly because of the compressed timeline. The corporations were supposed to give cradle to grave good life for the haves and constantly shit on the have nots. But even in 1993, the distant year of 2020 was only 27 years away. There just wasn't time for anyone to have been born and raised in the corporate system. A 60 year time frame is better, it allows for there to be a generation who were raised by the generation who were raised in the future – and thus gives time for these things to be “speculative” rather than “insane ramblings.” Mike Pondsmith never bothered dreaming small, but certainly one of the reasons no one ever bothers to talk about Cyberpunk 3.0 is that its future is just way too silly for the amount of time that supposedly happens. Just the fact that it takes place in the year 203X, because apparently we lost all our calendars in the next 12 years, but also because it involves nomadic tribes of uplifted orcas traveling through the parched deserts of what was once known as Kansas despite not having had an entire generation pass.

Anyway, the storyline of Night City is contrived and compressed, but the long and the short of it is that there's an extra metroplex in California in between LA and SF and it's also heavily fortified because it's near a border now that the US has fallen apart. And if that sounds suspiciously similar to the pitch for Shadowrun's Seattle, that's because it's a pretty good pitch for a Cyberpunk RPG starting city and Mike Pondsmith was here first. This is an example of Shadowrun copying a good idea out of Cyberpunk 2013 and not the other way around, because the first edition of Shadowrun came out after the first edition of Cyberpunk.

By this point, Cyberpunk 2020 already had a complete book that was a location sourcebook for Night City. So this article naturally enough assumes that their only task is how to stuff the established city location full of vampires. Now it might not surprise you to learn that I don't fully agree, but given that this is a three part magazine article rather than a full-length RPG sourcebook and probably has a twentieth the word count to work with, I certainly sympathize.

AncientH

To add to what Frank was saying a little, Cyberpunk 2020 is very much "Twenty Minutes Into The Future" in a way that was pretty typical of early cyberpunk fiction. Hell, Neuromancer was written at a time when it looked like the Soviet Union was going to last forever. Mostly, you can chalk this up to the idea that the insane speed of technological growth and social change experienced from 1900 to 1979 was going to continue to accelerate.

It's also worth remembering that "the City" was one of the core themes that Cyberpunk 2020 and Vampire: the Masquerade had in common. These settings weren't just urbane, they were explicitly urban. The Modern Nights for vampires was generally not about living out in the wilderness, because you needed a population to prey upon and the Lupines would kill you as soon as look at you. Cyberpunk saw urbanization eat up vast swathes of territory, the increasing population density of the post WWII urban spread translated into something like dystopia.

So that, on its face, is one of the thematic angles where Cyberpunk 2020 and Vampire: the Masquerade actually work together, in that they both have a focus on urban landscapes as the setting. Moreover, they both presume that the dense population of those cities supports specialized, obscure subcultures (Vampires et al. on the one hand, highly arcane criminals on the other). In that respect too, the various vampire clans and sects aren't meaningfully different from some of the more esoteric criminal enterprises that you see in Cyberpunk...the Giovanni, for example, aren't radically different from any given primarily Italian-stereotype driven Mafia family, except or the necromancy and incest. It would be rather easy to reimagine the Vampire clans as folding into the Cyberpunk 2020 milieu, with some people aware that they're vampires and others thinking they're just really badass or well-connected or something.

Brooks did not quite go that route.

Frank

The background is that when Night City was going up, one of the Giovanni got in on the ground floor and used vampire powers to turn the city founder into his blood bitch. Then apparently the reason Richard Night is dead is because Ventrue and Assamites murder stabbed him as part of a power grab against the Giovanni.


While you were out, we took ownership o your CEO. He has agreed to the merger.

This is actually pretty solid, and is the kind of thing that Vampire: the Masquerade should have been doing but rarely did. While the meteoric rise of Night City is fictional, that kind of thing is pretty much the story of the 20th century. Major metropolises with a million plus people in them were small villages at some point in the past, and for all the cities in California that past was really quite recent. On the scale of vampire lifespans, the major cities of today are generally pretty young. Los Angeles was founded by 11 Mexican families in the last 200 years. Even in the old world, a lot of the bigger cities are new up-and-comers on the timeframes that vampires might care about. Birmingham was a hamlet of less than two thousand people in the 16th century and the urban area didn't reach the 100,000 person mark that Vampire: the Masquerade thinks is necessary to sustain one Vampire until the 19th century. And yet, in the 20th century it had become a million+ metropolis with its own suburbs and shit.

The fact that major cities of tonight have vampire ruling councils and shit at all necessarily means that various licks went all-in betting on significant population growth for various arbitrary spots on the map in the quite recent past. Maybe they used their vampire magic to make sure the rail line went from Chicago to Los Angeles and not from Chicago to San Diego. Maybe they did a lot of real estate research and successfully figure out where major cities were going to happen. Or maybe they were just lucky and there are various vampires who went all in trying to get in on the ground floor of Button Willow or Green Acres. That's a very interesting piece of world building that actual V:tM completely neglects. That while various ancient vampires can probably beat you in a fencing match, the reason you care about Vampire society at all is all the power and influence – and those structures were mostly invented the vampire equivalent of five minutes ago.

Further, the fact that most big cities are pretty new (with the odd exception like Rome or Tokyo of course) means that vampires should be able to go set up shop in cities previously uninhabited by vampires and crown themselves princes. If Carlo and Helen hadn't come to Night City, there'd be no powerbase here at all. And most of the world is like that. China has produced a hundred cities from whole cloth in the last few decades, every one of them following basically the logic of Night City. It's physically impossible for there to be enough Elders to have camped all of them and made a Primogen Council in each.


They built it. People will come.

Also there was a mob war. There are some named characters who died four years before the action started. That's actually important setting information, but it's probably less important than whatever the fuck is going on when the campaign actually starts. Given the profoundly limited word count, the life and death of Guido Salvatore seems like a weird rabbit hole to dive down. It's possible that this is a reference to one of Deirdre's Cyberpunk or Vampire campaigns. I dunno. Various RPGs have been guilty of spending word count on getting minor events from their home campaigns into canon and I admit to being guilty of that myself so I can't throw stones.

AncientH

The focus on city government and behind-the-scenes power struggles neglects...a lot. But then, there's not a lot to work with, given that most of the various clans got at best a couple sentences in the last article and that Cyberpunk 2020 doesn't focus on the kind of infrastructure that a lot of vampires would care about. So there isn't talk about Toreador all adopting Eurostyle or controlling the local fashion industry, the Tremere aren't split between the younger members that are going all-in on databases and the older members that are hoarding hardcopy books, the Gangrel with animal features may or may not be able to pass themselves off as gang members with exotic animal grafts, no one knows what the blood bank/medical waste situation is or if the Nosferatu are experimenting with artificial blood substitutes, the Tzimisce may or may not have trouble finding enough dirt to actually sleep in now that the entire city has been paved, etc.

The lack of feeding strategies is...pretty egregious, but maybe understandable given that Vampire itself usually does a terrible job at addressing how vampires get their night-by-night sustenance. They discuss a popular nightclub, but not vampires having difficulty avoiding being seen, or maybe acting as Edgerunners and getting paid in blood, or receiving a stipend in blood from a sire whose Megacorp controls a chain of hospitals or something.

I can't fault the article too hard, given the limitations of the space, and in the hypothetical GURPS mashup you'd have to think through all this stuff anyway.

Frank

Cyberpunk posits that Night City is divided into zones which are starkly different and comically named. There are Corporate Zones that have rich people and effective police forces and Combat Zones where people just fucking shoot at your ass. And the player characters were supposed to be Edgerunners, characters of dubious legalities who took jobs as deniable assets by various corporations and interest groups while moving between anarchic Combat Zones and the fascistic Corporate Zones. And if that setup sounds suspiciously exactly like Shadowrun with the serial numbers filed off only halfway – actually it's the other way around. Shadowrun is originally pretty much exactly someone taking alternate handfuls of tropes and terms from Cyberpunk 2013 and AD&D.



This article posits that different groups control different zones. Like, the Anarchs control the Combat Zones, while the Ventrue and Giovanni control the Corporate Zones. But like.... what the fuck? I mean, what does it mean to “control” an anarchic combat zone? I get that if you were making a board game or a card game or something, the Anarchs would obviously have powerbases in and draw resources from the crime filled shanty towns. But in the context of actual characters doing actual things in the fictional world, I genuinely have no idea how this sort of thing is supposed to work. See, as we've mentioned before the Vampire dominate power basically lets you roll up any conceivable hierarchical organization in a few hours or nights. You take over one member, have them betray the next member to you and so on up the chain. It's like playing a harem Eroge with a button that lets you skip to the next scene. But that doesn't actually work on chaos. Your persuadovision really only hits one person at a time. If the “organization” in question is just two million people living in a hive of squalor and stabbing each other for packaged cheese slices your domination powers don't mean that much. You can put together a reasonable goon squad, but you don't actually control anything. No one controls anything, that's the whole point!

Now there's the separate issue where Ventrue and Giovanni are bloodlines and Anarchs are an organization and it's totally possible for a player character vampire to be both a Ventrue and an Anarch at the same time. This is a fundamental issue with Vampire: the Masquerade and one which comes up over and over in a host of contexts. Separately, the Ventrue and Giovanni are listed as being “public allies” but waging a secret war. But both the Ventrue and the Giovanni are secret vampire families. They don't have a public face.

AncientH

The whole Anarch thing had echoes in Cyberpunk 2020 too, largely because anarchy was (and to a degree is) a relatively popular axiom among punk in general. It's why Shadowrun had Neo-Anarchist Guide books. The thing in cyberpunk fiction is that it was posited that nation states were generally 1) bad, and 2) declining in influence. You can definitely see how people might come to the former opinion during and after WWI and WWII, and the massive wealth inequalities and growth of globalization certainly seemed to underline the latter opinion. Individuals interested in liberty and no longer concerned with the normal legalities and social norms would probably graduate to an ethos that supported that - anarchy (if they ever chose to put it in formal terms). The idea of a breakdown in societal structure outside the rigidly organized corporate work-lifespace made a lot of sense to people in the 80s and 90s. See Demolition Man.

Ironically, Vampire Anarchs are actually way older, since instead of rebelling against nation states and corps they're rebelling against these big vampire Sects that tell you what to do and how to live your unlife. You could have some actual philosophical arguments there, if the Camarilla and Sabbat ever focused on how exactly they maintained the Masquerade/kept population growth in check/kept vampires fed, although no-one ever did that - but the whole thing about the World of Future Darkness is that the Masquerade is coming down, and none of the clans or sects seem to have any social support in place. It's like trying to run a town government without any civic planning, just a group of assholes that will rip your head off if you don't do what they say. Why wouldn't you be an Anarch in those conditions?

The collision of Vampire Anarchs and CP2020 anarchy isn't handled well. The thing is that Vampires are social creatures, but they're also basically serial killers that prey on the local population. They could have some Anarch leaders that reveal themselves to like-minded humans and form deals with them, like a collective blood tithe in exchange for protection or something, but we don't really get a sense of any of that.

Frank

Aside from a rant about a fictional bar that is a franchise from a Sanfrancisco nightclub called “The Metal Church” which I can't recall if it was real or not and can't look up online because of course “Metal Church” is the name of an actual Metal Band that has been in semi-continuous operation for 34 years, there's a full rundown on 9 Vampires in Night City. Each gets most of a page, and each has a little illustration that looks exactly like it was done by one of the people who made the Contacts pics for Shadowrun and probably was. Also we get namechecks for 2 more vampires that are helpful to the players and you aren't intended to fight so they don't get stats. We are assured that Night City has nearly double the normal number of Vampires, at 95. Which is notable in that it basically highlights how tragically undersized the vampire population actually is in Vampire: the Masquerade. Night City is the 10th largest metropolitan area in the United States, being slightly smaller than Atlanta and slightly larger than Boston, and despite that it needs to have nearly double its allotted number of vampires to meet the minimum standards for this campaign sandbox. If you wanted to have your campaign set in some tertiary city like Indianapolis, the wheels come completely off with regards to demographic limitations. We're supposed to care about the balance of power between this group and that group, but when we have to cheat the population numbers just to get a second member of any rando secret society, that seems a severely pointless endeavor.

Like, there's all this tiptoeing about with regards to Carlo Giovanni, but he's just a 7th generation vampire embraced 73 years ago. You could send a couple of Solos to his house and beat him to death with hammers. Which underlines the tenuousness of vampiric control in the World of Darkness. The creatures of the night have immense personal ability to warp society to their own ends and amass personal power. Carlo Giovanni can have the entire boards of megacorporations vote for any proposal he thought was important or hilarious. But they don't have factional depth. If Carlo Giovanni goes away (by getting staked or just leaving town) there's no infrastructure in place to replace him. The various ensorcelled board members are mind thralls and blood slaves to him, not to vampires generally, the Camarilla, or even to the Giovanni family.

Cyberpunk, both as a specific setting and as a genre is almost completely immune to assassinations. If you get rid of the CEO of Euro Business Machines or Zetatech, they will be replaced at the next board meeting and probably have an interim CEO promoted automatically. That might be worth pursuing if you wanted to change the balance of votes on some board directive or something, but it wouldn't meaningfully destroy the corporation as an entity. Similarly, if you kill the mayor of Night City the city government (such as it is) doesn't stop existing and there's a new acting mayor immediately. If you kill the chief of police some precinct captain becomes the interim chief of police. Shooting anyone, whether they have great personal power or not, is largely symbolic and ultimately futile. The wealth and power is all inherited by others and the great bureaucratic edifices continue to roll and clang like nothing fucking happened. But powerbases in Vampire: the Masquerade are not like that. If Carlo dies, no one inherits his mind thralls. They all go uncontrolled and he doesn't even leave a list of contact numbers to any would-be replacements. Indeed, Carlo Giovanni does not seem to even have an understudy in town at all. There's not a Sylvio Giovanni or a Giuseppe Giovanni slumming around waiting to take over.

I don't think Vampire: the Masquerade ever really wrapped its head around how vulnerable they had made their organizations. So this article talking about careful political maneuvering and deadlocks of power bases and shit is pretty typical. It's also what the fans wanted, and mostly mind caulked into place. The fact that the entire setting really had no answer to “and then I drive a bulldozer into my opponent's haven and set fire to the ruins in the middle of the day solving the matter permanently” was something that mostly got mind caulked away. People wanted there to be lines you dare not cross and the threat of Blood Hunts to be something that kept an uneasy peace. But the numbers involved were so small and the bureaucracies so non-resilient that such promises and threats were illusory at best.


Time to cut some knots.

AncientH

The relative sensitivity of vampire power structures to the individual could potentially be a bonus - because vampires are immortal, and unlike people don't expect to ever grow old and retire, though they might enter torpor at some point. The Very Important Personal Connections are therefore very important indeed because the more invaluable you are to other vampires, the less likely they are to kill you and take your spot - because short of moving somewhere with no vampires, that is the only fucking way you are going to advance in vampiric society, over a freshly drained corpse or pile of ashes. But there's no indication that the White Wolf writers ever worked that out, even when they pretty much underlined it in games like Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom where there was no upward mobility at all except outliving everybody else.

Quick rundown of the stat'd NPCs:

Bradley Wilkins, 8th generation Tremere. Insufferably British.

Carlo Giovanni, 7th generation Giovanni. All business.

Chucko, 11th generation Malkavian. Clown gangster.

Jeremiah "Cobra" duBois, 10th generation Setite. Racist drug-dealer catering to white people playing with Voudoun.

Cynthia "Sin" Razor, 9th generation Toreador. Rocker. One of the plot points in her backstory is the threat of being blood bound, but she has the Unbondable merit.

Helen Matthews, 7th generation Ventrue. Princess.

Margali the Wanderer, 5th generation Ravnos. Nomad/Rocker. I will not use their word for her. Has a special ritual that makes her vitae toxic to other vampires, only character with any dots in Technica, along with various other special powers. Mary Sue.

"Shark", 9th generation Brujah. Rebel with a vague cause.

David "Tolliver" Tailiafero, 8th generation Toreador. Diablerist.

...it's a mixed bag, and honestly some of the entries read like they were written by different people. Margali is the standout at being older, more powerful, and independent of everyone else. (A Mage enchanted her harp. WTF?)

Frank

With only 95 vampires in town, you wouldn't think that we'd have space for “some random clown.” And to be honest, we do not. But one of the 9 vamps who gets a full writeup is a member of the Bozos, who are basically the Jokerz from Batman Beyond,but obviously Cyberpunk did it first. The existence of “Chucko the random member of a novelty gang who happens to be an 11th generation Vampire” underlines a lot of problems with the way Vampire: the Masquerade handled things. First of all: this guy isn't meaningfully a boss monster, he's an antagonist that you might spend as much as an evening investigating and bringing down. Think about what that would mean for something like a TV series – each Chucko is worth one stand-alone monster of the week episode, and in a standardly paced 13 episode season with a mid-season hiatus cliffhanger you're probably going to have 6 or 7 of those. To raise the threat level for the other episodes you're going to throw in groups of Chuckos, explicitly more powerful vampire antagonists, or both. So in a fairly minimalist storytelling exercise you're going to go through like 15 of these fuckers, and that's a really big proportion of the entire vampire budget the setting has budgeted for itself. It means that if you want to keep having adventures without radically overhauling the setting you have to go on a road trip almost immediately.


Obviously a sadistic vampire clown is an appropriate antagonist for near future vampire cyberpunks to come into conflict with. But it's not going to be a large chunk of your antagonist budget in the episodic serial medium that is a role playing campaign.

But it's actually worse than that. Because Chucko isn't just a stand-alone Vampire Steve. He's an 11th generation Malkavian. That means that for him to exist at all, he has a pedigree. There is a 10th generation crazy vampire that made him (whose name is apparently Dan Covington), and a 9th generation vampire who made him, and so on and so on. This throw-away antagonist has an enormous foundation of other characters in world that have to exist for him to even be here.

AncientH

That's an issue with random vampire NPCs that you don't get from your average mook. There are 95 vampires in Night City, there are millions of people. You can stat out an average rent-a-cop or gangster, but an average vampire? They're a little too unique.

I think it's worth mentioning, most of these vampires don't have cyberware and don't actually interact with the cyberpunk aspect of the setting at all. As far as the vampires listed above are concerned, the Net might as well not exist. They are basically too much your generic blend of kooky WoD NPCs. Most of them could be randomly dropped into a Chicago by Night game, without any real tweaks...and that feels like a mistake to me. If you've gone out of your way to create a mashup game, you should try at least a little to mix things up.

What if Cobra was selling vitae to Solos, ghouling them up? What if Chucko figured out how to use Dementation over the Net? What if Bradley Wilkins was gearing the local Tremere as the purveyors of cyberware implants to Kindred? What if Sin embraced a Gothrock persona as a vampire, basically cosplaying as a vampire to her audience so she could get blood and hopefully stave off breaking the Masquerade? What if Helen Matthews was behind a scheme to corner the market on clonal blood to increase her power base against the Giovanni (Operation Blood & Circuses)? Why doesn't Tolliver...uh...I actually hate that character just on general principles, but what if he was the local Council's go-to for hiring vampire Edgerunners?

See, there is potential here, but not a lot of exploration of it.

Frank

Vampire: the Masquerade did not have “levels” as such. What it did have is characters whose dice pools and power levels exceeded what you were ever allowed to buy. So Margali the writer self-insert overpowered character is a 5th generation Ravnos. This means that she is stupidly absurdly more powerful than any player character is allowed to be. She not only has more Thaumaturgy powers than any of the players will have (note: she is not from a Thaumaturgy clan), but her stats and primary disciplines are simply higher than PCs are allowed to bring them to regardless of how many XPs they acquire in the future. She's supposed to wander around slumming it up pretending to be someone vaguely on the power level of the PCs and then pull out the bullshit super saiyan crap if the players don't do what the MC wants them to do. Ugh.

What's odd is that there's actually no particular reasons for her to be 5th generation. None of her powers are off limits for 6th generation vampires, and the Cyberpunk Caitiff she made is 7th generation. So I suspect that at some point she was legit supposed to be a 6th generation character and then someone *whether author or editor) changed that number to a 5 so that it would be more intimidation.

AncientH

Ending the article are a handful of "Story Ideas"...and they read basically like generic Vampire story ideas. They aren't really cyberpunk themed to any extent, they aren't adventures unique to a cyberpunk/vampire mashup campaign. If the PCs are supposed to be vampire Edgerunners, then I would have preferred if they really ran with that concept, highlighting how the PCs have to encounter and solve unique problems, like intercepting an Anarch courier with a head full of encoded data on the vampiric condition, or deal with Cobra's juiced-up ghoul Solos, or maybe assassinate Corporate Pawn #3 so that Corporate Pawn #4 (who is blood-bound to someone else) can be promoted in their place. Maybe a Megacorp is working on scientific vampires and one escaped, and the PCs have to deal with this potential threat to the already strained Masquerade. But we don't get that.

Frank

The final portion of the final page is given over to some story seeds. These are extremely bare bones, as you might expect from the limited word count. Most of these are barely a random encounter. It's like, “You turn the corner and there's a fucking werewolf, what do you do?”


Well, these encounters are certainly random.

What story seeds could actually lead to real stories rather than mere encounters are deliberately unfleshed out. Like, there's a package that Carlo and Helen want, and depending on whether you're on Team Anarch or Team Camarilla, one or the other will hire you to go get it. No suggestions are made as to who might hire you if you're Team Sabbat or Team Children of Carthagos.


Package delivery?

AncientH

Actually, I don't think the Children of Carthagos are mentioned at all in this. Seems like a weird oversight.

Frank

Next Up: A Larger and More Fleshed Out Adventure Seed.

AncientH

I talk a lot about wasted potential in RPGs, but this article really is underwhelming to a great degree. There's not enough material here to base a campaign or a character on, you still have to build most of the setting yourself. Even with the constraints of size, I feel this space could have been better used looking at the individual clans and how they interact than stating out some NPCs.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: White Wolf Magazine

Issues 38: The World of Future Darkness Part 3

Adventure: Gypsy Switch


Get It?!

AncientH

This is a story intended for Kindred, preferably anarchs, who dwell in the futuristic Night City. The story begins when the character become embroiled in a feud between two powerful Kindred while attempting to rescue a vampire who is being held against her will by one of these two.

Initially, this story will seem like a simple strike against a Toreador ancilla. Tension should build rapidly, as this is a short story. As with any other story, do not allow this one to devolve into a shooting match. Rather, keep the players on a knife's edge throughout. This may be difficult, as there are plenty of
opportunities for combat, some of them against unfavorable odds.

The first take-away about this brief synopsis is that it doesn't sound like much of a Cyberpunk story. It doesn't depend on there being a dystopia ruled by megacorps, or a global Net full of information, or advanced cybernetic technologies. It sounds rather like the kind of Vampire story that could take place in any time or setting. The basic setup could work for Dark Ages, or the Victorian Era, or the Wild West. It is almost timeless.

That's terrible.

While not every single aspect of a mashup game needs to be a blend of both flavors, when you're dealing with such a limited space, you really need to sell the concept. Emphasize what the mashup has to offer that is unique and gripping. This...isn't it.

Frank

Before we can really go anywhere in describing this particular adventure, we gotta get the casual racism directed at Roma out of the way. There is, bizarrely, a lot of casual racism directed against Roma in White Wolf and TSR products of the early nineties. That's... very weird to me. Like, there isn't casual racism directed at Malaysians or Manchu, we don't have weird racist stereotypes of Uyghurs or Hmong drawn up as fantasy races or vampire clans. And when people say shitty things about Akan people, mostly folks stand up and say “That's racist. Stop it.” and did so even in 1993. But for whatever reason, the Roma hit that sweet spot where they were well known enough that clueless white people felt like they could talk about them, yet still rare enough that there weren't any actual Romani people on hand to tell them to cut it the fuck out.

The major MC self-insertion character is a Gypsy, and the entire adventure is a complex scheme for her to steal some crap. Because she's a Gypsy and she likes to steal things. The fact that this is roughly the equivalent of having a black character's driving motivation be “watermelons” or a Jewish character having the primary motivation of “drink the blood of Christian babies” is apparently lost on everyone on the White Wolf side of things.

Now, it should be noted that even Cyberpunk wasn't completely immune to this sort of thing. I mean, they never gave Roma people fucking magic thievery powers, but there is that weird tirade about how many of the hoboes in Europe are Gypsies in Eurosource. But I point out: that's not exactly a mainline book and it was genuinely outsourced to actual Europeans. The stuff put out in the core Cyberpunk material has some kind of weird things to say about Japanese and Italian people, but it doesn't really punch down at disadvantaged minorities the way TSR and White Wolf products routinely did.


This is Mike Pondsmith. And for whatever reason he seems to have had a more understanding viewpoint towards disadvantaged minorities in his writings than the various sheltered Midwestern and Southern white people who did most of the writing for TSR and White Wolf. We may never know why.

AncientH

The thing about Weird Roma Stereotypes is that it isn't even a peculiarly Gothic trope. There are stupid and terrible legends about Roma in Europe, but a lot of what White Wolf was replicating was bizarre Hollywood depictions of gypsies from old horror movies and shit. The whole connection between Roma, fortune-telling, and tarot cards and crystal balls really isn't that old. It was tasteless and thoughtless and still is here...and yet it was deeply, weirdly intertwined with the early metaplot, because both the Gangrel and the Ravnos were supposed to have Roma connections.

Cyberpunk fiction, not so much. I can point to one or two stories, but those are deeply strange and don't involve traditional negative stereotypes or portrayals.

The "Days of Future Darkness" series (WW36-WW38) is a crossover between R. Talsorian Games' Cyberpunk® and White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade (TM). It is acknowledged that Cyberpunk® is an exclusive trademark of R. Talsorian Games, and that all information in the articles directly pertaining to the Cyberpunk® game and its related products are copyright R. Talsorian.

We didn't get this in the earlier articles...where someone at R. Talsorian had a cow or whether someone woke up White Wolf's legal department from their Wild Turkey dreams, I'm not too sure, but obviously asses needed to be covered.

I'm going to emphasize at the start that the PC's coterie are implicitly working as Edgerunners. This is a gameplay perspective that should probably have been explored in greater depth earlier, because one of the main drawbacks to vampire is finding an excuse for player vampires to work together, and literally joining forces to do a job to get paid is often a very good excuse for assembling a disparate team of people that have nothing else in common and maybe would otherwise work at cross purposes. So the idea that the PCs bring unique skills and abilities to the table and need to cooperate to do a job is something that most Vampire settings don't advertise, but which would be really useful in this instance, if they had thought to make a bigger point of it.

Anyway, the nominal plot is that Asshole A (Bradley Wilkins, Tremere) wants the PCs to rescue new vampire Cynthia Razor from Asshole B (Taliaferro, Toreador); this is part of an elaborate plan by Wilkins to use the PCs as pawns to do shit that they'd probably be quite happy to do if he just paid them some money. Complicating matters (because of course) is Asshole C (Margali, Ravnos methuselah) who knows what Wilkins is up to and decides to Xanatos Gambit the whole thing, manipulating the players to do draw him out of his Chantry so she can loot it.

It's actually more complicated than that, which is three times more complicated than it needs to be, and you'll notice that none of that really has anything to fucking do with Cyberpunk. And that's terrible.

Frank

The core plot of this adventure is one of those things where if the player characters did not show up at all and just stayed in their apartments ordering pizza girls and watching pornography the core events would turn out pretty much the same. The character who is supposed to win is ridiculously more powerful than the character who is supposed to lose, and honestly the players showing up to do or not do any particularly thing isn't likely to derail this train.



Specifically the character who is supposed to win has “Far Fatuus” and “Horrid Reality” which when combined allow her to create completely real illusions of absolutely anything with complete control of the horizontal and vertical anywhere in the world just by visualizing how the location actually is, and then imagining a new set of contents for that space. It's... very powerful. It's like the maggots/rice scene from Lost Boys except unlimited in size, scope, contents, or distance and the illusions last as long as she wants them to and are real enough to kill people if that's what she wants them to do. The high end of vampire powers went past “pretty good” to “completely fucking insane” with very little in between. That same power at the levels player characters would typically have it allows the character to make small motionless holograms appear in their hands as a party trick. Meanwhile, the other guy is named Wilkins and he is 8th generation which due to the stupid way background points worked was probably not different to the PCs. He has less Thaumaturgy than Margali and that is his primary shtick. Obviously his rating in the illusion magic that is the winner's forte is zero.

Now the thing is that aside from the ability to transform anywhere in the planet into a David Lynch season finale whenever she wants, Margali isn't very powerful. She is obviously stronger, faster, tougher, and better looking than all the PCs, but none of that actually matters all that much in the context of people having equipment from Cyberpunk 2020 lying around. See, in Vampire the Masquerade there was just a general social understanding that using weapons more powerful than swords was somehow “playing the game wrong.” There was social stigma against doing so. It's not that anti-tank rifles and such didn't exist, it's that using them was unthinkable. But in Cyberpunk it was just sort of assumed that people would use military hardware all the time. And man-portable machine guns turn World of Darkness Vampires into swiss cheese. So there's a very real chance that this whole adventure goes sideways real fast because one or more players are more familiar with the Cyberpunk aesthetic and equipment list than the Masquerade one and just blast the ever unliving fuck out of the entire adventure.


Everyone is carrying a machine gun. Also titties.

Now Deirdre Brooks does plaintively plead with the reader to do something to make it not end up like that.

As with any other story, do not allow this one to devolve into a shooting match.

Noble sentiments, and pretty typical for a Vampire: the Masquerade piece of storytelling advice. But honestly, it's fucking Cyberpunk. Things ending in hails of bullets is so common that there are jokes about it. Heck, back in 1993 there were already memes about that sort of thing, just disseminated in BBS format because the internet was almost unbelievably primitive at that point.


Notably absent is the rule “don't upset the apple cart by escalating armaments and violence.”

AncientH

Part of the problem with all this internecine bullshit is that it absolutely doesn't forward the core concepts of the Vampire/Cyberpunk mashup at all. At a time when the Masquerade is threadbare and could break at any moment, when you might find a likely-looking victim and end up with a mouthful of oil, when any mortal can go out and buy more Celerity than you start with as a neonate, when the secrets of the ages are a datasearch away on the Net and hypothetically some fucking college student could do a facial analysis of old paintings and photographs to identify your elders...

...it just seems to unbelievably petty. And that's before you add in the Mary Sue.

The players, for their part, get the Call To Adventure in the form of a physical note with drops of blood on it, a literal damsel in distress. In Cyberpunk 2020. Send a fucking email! Or a hologram.



If the players take the bait, they probably go to the Metal Church, which is nominally neutral ground, but the text assumes that the PCs are probably going to start shit anyway (good bet). There they <do something> and <free the girl>, with the added complication of <'roided up ghoul cyborgs>. You could just about write this adventure as a fill-in-the-blanks. Hell, why didn't White Wolf ever release that as a product?

Frank

There's two parts of this mission, and the intention is that you'll run the two parts in an unconnected way. That is that you run part one (a simple assassination/extraction mission) and then drop it for a while and do other stuff. Then you pick up the threads and try to blackmail the PCs into getting involved some more with some heavy handed threats where all their havens get revealed and secret admirers threaten to expose their actions from part 1.

There's a lot wrong with this structure. The first is that the player characters are presumed to be Anarchs, so shooting some Toreador in the face isn't a “crime” that they can be blackmailed about at all. This is Cyberpunk's Night City and not only is their faction literally called “Anarchs” but the thing the game expects them to do is shoot someone in an area that is literally called “The Combat Zone.” That is its actual name. If people say “We have evidence that you shot someone in the Combat Zone!” the correct reply is “Yeah, so what?” So the bridge between Episode 1 and Episode 2 is pretty much a non-starter. I don't know how those pieces would ever actually fit together in a real game – the hook isn't “oh shit, we have to bargain because someone's got dirt on us!” it's “oh shit, we have to move, because someone knows where our havens are!”


We'll move the important stuff first.

But even the first bit is kind of... not right. The setup for the extraction mission is that you're “rescuing” some lady who is being kept captive by a vampire who has embraced her and tried to blood bond her (she has the Unbondable trait). Now here's the thing about Vampire: the Masquerade: vampires are just plain allowed to blood bond people and keep them as pets. That's not a thing that vampires typically go on rescue missions about. Vampires just take ownership of various people, that's just a thing they do. And while the whole thing about embracing some other vampire's girlfriend and keeping her as a pet is certainly dickish, it was a thing that all the involved parties agreed to (well, the new vampire didn't agree to it, but she was human at the time and her vote didn't count).


While you were out, I took ownership of one of the local rockers you like because it amused me to do so.

Now that's not to say that extraction missions where you run off with some vampire's childe don't have precedence. Various vampires are at literal kill-on-sight war with each other, so shooting someone in the face and making off with their daughter is well within the scope of “fucking with other vampire groups” that various vampires do, have done, and will do in the Vampire: the Masquerade setting. It's just, the whole “rescue mission” part doesn't make any fucking sense because it's considered perfectly normal for vampires to keep their newly embraced children as decorative pets for up to fifty years, and the Toreador in question is not presented as an outlier in that respect. And couldn't be an outlier in that respect unless the rocker he was keeping on a short leash was Janis fucking Joplin.

Janis Joplin was declared dead in 1970. If that was a front for her being turned into a Vampire and whisked off to some Toreador's sex dungeon, it would officially be considered “too long” by other vampires in 2020. That is the time scale vampires operate in, and this entire adventure seems premised on the players not remembering that.

The theme of the adventure is supposed to be “Freedom and Slavery” but it's pretty weak sauce. I mean, Vampire is pretty much always about freedom and slavery. Especially the slavery part, because the entire vampire powerbase revolves around enslaving people. Enslaving people through addiction to magic blood. Enslaving people through magical mental domination. Enslaving people by physically torturing people and even eating them as literal food. Bizarre ruminations about whether people are “slaves to passions” or some shit is rather missing the point. Vampires in this setting keep people in actual cages so that they will be on hand to be used as a future meal. Metaphorical slavery is entirely beside the point. And if you were going to do something about the nature of freedom and whether it truly exists and shit, you're in fucking Cyberpunk. There's a whole thing about “wage slaves” where people in Night City are compelled to follow orders in rigid hierarchies for the rest of their lives by the invisible bonds of the economic system. That is very low hanging fruit if that is something you want to philosophize about.

AncientH

Frank and I got a little off-synch in our ranting, so let me just re-emphasize how mind-numbingly generic this is at the moment. The PCs are expected to act like heroes and rescue the girl while the real villain twiddles their mustache. The only thing vaguely cyberpunkish is that the heavies are ghouled cyborgs with machine guns, rather than ghouled bikers with shotguns or ghouled men-at-arms with pikes and shit. Yeah, the cyberware and automatic weapons with incendiary rounds make the scenario a bit potentially deadlier, but you know what we don't see?

Run a Net search on Cynthia and Taliaferro. Hack the security system at the Metal Church to figure out the layout, where the bodyguards are, see if Cynthia is even there. Prep a distraction and a getaway vehicle. In Shadowrun this neonate-nabbing would be planned with all the care of a corporate extraction, but here it's...I dunno. Amateur hour.

Frank

The adventure starts in a night club and a clueless courier hands the player characters a note. This is the most lazy setup I can imagine, but it's a fucking magazine article so it gets a pass. What doesn't get a pass is that while the adventure is rattling off various reasons you can't do anything to figure out what's going on, it casually mentions that if you drink the blood of the hapless messenger that you get one step blood bound to the Tremere guy. And that is not how blood bonding works in Vampire: the Masquerade. There is no transitive property of blood bonding. It's weird because despite the blood drinking rules not being all that complicated in V:tM, I come across wall bangers were the process is incorrectly described in pretty much every book and article we review.


People don't seem to know how blood works.

Now, the way blood drinking works in V:tM is bad. It should not work that way. The whole thing where you're supposed to avoid drinking from people for fear of becoming submissive to them is fucking insane. Vampires are supposed to drink your blood as a form of signifying their dominance over you. Making the relationship one of predator and prey. Having blood drinking be a submissive act in some circumstances is genre destroying. But obviously it was out of the scope of this article to offer a radical re-imagining of how the blood drinking dynamic worked. It's just... the rules in V:tM are so terrible that pretty much everyone ended up mind caulking so much that the people ended up forgetting which parts were their house rules and which parts were out of the book.

Such as what it must always be, because V:tM wasn't really playable as written. So people who were big enough fans of it to play it a lot also necessarily had extensive house rules – most of which were probably not written down. People who were big enough fans to want to write articles for White Wolf Magazine were probably also deep enough into the weeds to have forgotten how many rules they had ignored.

AncientH

The whole blood-bonding thing was based on Dracula, where the forced exchange of bodily fluid was both a blasphemous parody of the Eucharist and a metaphor for rape and sexual conquest. So I can see why feeding your blood to somebody would lead people down the path to blood bond in Mark Rein*Hagen's imagination. The idea that people became enthralled by an exchange of fluids was part of a deliberate setup, but in practice it gets problematic - to work, the person doing the drinking has to not want it. It has to be rape. If they're doing it willingly, or accidentally, then you're doing it wrong. But that's how Vampire set it up, so there are lots of stupid little blood bonding tricks.

Frank

Step one is that British Tremere vampire guy acts as a Mr. Johnson figure who attempts to hire the PCs indirectly in order to get them to murder stab the Toreador and extract his unhappy offspring. Also there is a Booster Gang that starts shit for no reason. The Booster Gang thugs are slightly above chaff level opponents for a Cyberpunk game, but would absolutely tear the ever living fuck out of most Vampire teams. So if the PCs haven't figured out that they need to Cyberpunk it up and militarize like they were playing a Cyberpunk game, they just get shredded in the prelude's intro combat.

Of course, if the players are Cyberpunking it up, I don't see how this adventure even starts. Mr. Johnson shows them a hand written note (in Cyberpunk!) from some chick who is unhappy staying with her sire, and then does not offer any cash up front. I don't think I've ever seen a Cyberpunk team who would accept those terms.



The second part is that the players are supposed to go do the hit and the extraction at The Metal Church, which is the night club described at reasonable length in the second article. Assuming the players have the desire to do this mission at all, they have the option of carrying it out in the Nightclub where there are a shit tonne of witnesses and also extra security staff, or not being fucking idiots and attempting to do the hit either before the people get there or after they leave. The player characters know the guy's car, so I'm honestly not sure why it would even occur to people that they should do the hit in a busy nightclub full of heavily armed security staff instead of doing it out on the street somewhere.

The bouncers are all ghouls with 6th generation blood sustaining them.

What the fuck!?

Anyway, the bodyguards have like grenades and shit, meaning again that if you didn't get the memo that you were basically playing Cyberpunk when selecting your character's armor and weapons, you are having a problem and will not go to space today. That being said, characters with speed boosting cyberware and machine guns can mow these fuckers down in the street rather easily by any of a number of means, and this hit is not particularly hard for dedicated edgerunners.

The core issue here is that there isn't actually any payment for this mission. Cyn is grateful for you getting rid of her sire, who she hates, and she gets to go off and restart her rock band. And... that's it. That's all you get, which is not actually enough to make Edgerunners do anything.

AncientH

Anyway. A week after the PCs succeed (or not, I guess it doesn't really matter if they get their asses kicked and thrown out on the street, or if Cynthia dies or whatever), you get another physical note attached to the door of your haven, with a short message and a phone number.


This is not a difficult concept!

I'm going to admit, I've written an adventure where the PCs were blackmailed into doing a job. I'm not proud of it. It was silly, and only a little creative in that the Ms. Johnson had stolen the PCs genetic material and impregnated herself with it, to hold the fetus hostage. You have to add some twist to it, because it's such a moldy oldy trope for cyberpunk games that it's hard to think of the Johnsons that don't end up betraying you.

I should give this adventure a little leeway, as it is far too short to go all-in on the kind of detective legwork and preparations that a normal Cyberpunk game would demand. But at the same time, this adventure is being set up like a Vampire game with some Cyberpunk NPCs, and if the player vampires approach this like it was a normal Vampire game then:

1) What is the point of doing a mashup, and

2) They are going to get murderdeathkilled.



So I want to emphasize that not only is the adventure failing on a Cyberpunk level, it's failing at a Vampire level too. From both a high conception and an execution standpoint. There's no reason for the PCs to get involved, and even if they do they're probably fucked.

Frank

The second part is in three parts.


There is another thing where the second part has three parts and it amuses me.

The second part begins with someone sneaking into the havens of all the PCs and giving them a note threatening to expose the PC's move against the Toreador to other members of the Toreador who would take vengeance by sending their ghouls to go murder stab the PCs during the day. There is a lot wrong with this. As previously noted, if some enemy proves that they know where you live in Vampire, you don't make nice nice with them. You move or you kill them. The expectation that the players are going to waste valuable time being coerced into doing another job for no cash upfront is simply puzzling. Obviously the players are not going to go along with this.

And it's super pointless. If the players were willing to do the last job on spec, the Tremere guy could just offer them more jobs. There's no reason for any of this on either side of the MC screen.

The mission itself is to go report on the location of a young vampire Cassandra who is a hot guitarist in a hot band that doesn't have a contract with any of the big labels because she's too cool for that. And actually, she's Cassandra is a fucking Methuselah named Margali in disguise what the actual fuck? Of note: Margali basically breaks the Mary Sue test despite the incredibly small amount of total words in these articles. Something about her being a superhumanly beautiful person from a distant and foreign land who is a legendary rock guitarist who constantly has to turn down offers of fame and fortune who has magic powers that previously did not exist in this setting and is also just generically far more powerful than everyone else in the city but holds off on showing it because of modesty. I assume that Deirdre Brooks is bi-sexual or homosexual, because I can't even imagine writing that character without masturbating while doing so.

The thing is, this bit doesn't actually go anywhere. The band is in Los Angeles at the moment. This is the 21st fucking century and people have super cars. It's 190 miles from Night City to LA, so going there is totally possible even for how fucking gimped Vampire the Masquerade Vampires are for overland travel. The stated mission is to gather information on the movements of the vampire in question, and successfully finding the vampire and turning over that information is extremely easy. There's no reason whatsoever to get into a conflict with anyone if you go through with the mission. Which brings us back to the core issue where the obvious thing to happen at this point is for the players to ignore the mission, change havens, and start looking up the asshole who keeps offering zero payment missions and threatening them. The adventure admits that's a potential complication, but doesn't really pursue it.

AncientH

It was this or "Fuck you, pay me."

I'm tired of ranting about how none of this really interacts with cyberpunk in any reasonable way. I'm not even going to rant about how NPC Tasha is magically the virtual twin of NPC Mary Sue Margali.

...okay, that's a lie, I'm totally going to rant about that.

Mistaken identity and impersonation depends entirely on lack of and control of information. Identical cousins and shit is the low end of the scale, played for farce in comedies and soap operas; Vampires have more options, because Vicissitude and illusion magic are both things. You don't need to wait to find your perfect stunt double or doppelganger, because you can make one. More than that, this is Cyberpunk. They have arbitrarily good cosmetic surgery. You don't need to hunt the earth for centuries to find a mini-me, you can just fucking pay somebody to go under the knife. Hell, you can blood bond them and then have them volunteer to do it. So the whole thing about NPC Tasha is just...a failure of the imagination.

I think that's a thing a lot of people don't get about RPGs like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk. Part of the appeal of the fantasy is agency. You can do things in Shadowrun that you can't in D&D. Shadowrun magicians have a lot more options than D&D wizards and sorcerers. You aren't limited to buying bigger and bigger swords, because the high end of the Shadowrun tech tree has tactical missiles and lasers and rail guns. Money obviates a lot of otherwise insurmountable problems. It's only when you're broke, stupid, and have no other choice in Shadowrun that you resort to playing fair.

It is something of an alien mindset to Vampire: the Masquerade writers. Because "buying a bigger gun" or "throw money at the problem until it goes away" are distressingly mundane solutions, and they want more emotional involvement with the narrative. But the player vampires in Vampire: the Masquerade aren't the good guys, and the stories suck at providing any real incentive. The carrot is a lie, there is only the stick.

Part of the problem is, Vampire does not have a lot to incentivize player vampires with. They don't track money closely. They don't like to hand out XP willy-nilly. Magical artifacts are supposed to be rare. Clan standing and prestige have to be earned by spending XP and/or arbitrary bullshit. They go out and hunt their own blood. Knowledge of Disciplines and magic rituals is closely guarded. If you're sufficiently competent of a vampire to manage your own night-by-night existence, the local Prince or Elder has almost nothing to offer you except the continued right to exist.

Which is doubly stupid for the World of Future Darkness, because all the gear has prices in Eurobucks. One of the great advantages of folding in some of the material from Cyberpunk 2020 is that you get an honest-to-Cain price list for equipment and things you might want to buy. Money should equal power in a cyberpunk setting, and Diedre Brooks' complete failure to recognize this is at the root of so much of what's fucking wrong with this adventure.

Frank

If the players don't check the band's MySpace page and go to LA and instead wander around Night City asking people in bars if they have seen the sexiest of sexy ladies, we get to the second part of the second part. That's where sterotypical Roma use illusion magic to be disconcerting and mysterious in a racially insensitive fashion and if you try to attack them they develop swirling cloaks and teleport away.


Like this, but on the streets of Night City. Because obviously Romani people don't wear like baseball hats and shit. That would be insufficiently ethnic.

They are supposed to get the players to talk business in a moving car, which I cannot imagine why the player characters would be willing to do. Like, I can kind of see the cinematic scene playing out in Deirdre's head, but player characters do not get into cars with mysterious possibly hostile strangers after they have demonstrated trickery powers and refuse to offer any evidence that they know anything useful. They just... don't do that.


They don't even have any candy!

If for some reason the PCs do get in the car and they agree to turn on their employer (keep in mind that getting this offer at all requires them to have gone through several hoops not turning on their employer when the obvious time to do so was at the beginning of this chapter), then they hand the PCs a staked vampire who looks like Cassandra/Margali. In Vampire: the Masquerade, staking vampires isn't lethal. In one of V:tM's more mysterious design decisions, vampires are not vulnerable to being staked through the heart. They are specifically resistant to being staked through the heart. Sticking a piece of wood into their heart is less damaging than smacking them in the head with the same piece of wood. When you stake a Masquerade vampire, they go into hibernation and when you pull the stake out they wake up. It's a thing that vampires do voluntarily to themselves when they need to wait for a period of time and don't want to burn blood while doing so and it's a way to imprison people safely. Vampires staking their friends and handing the inert bodies around is actually totally normal behavior in this setting.

More puzzling of course is why anyone thinks this is a good idea. The mission wasn't to capture Cassandra. It wasn't to kill Cassandra. It wasn't to deliver Cassandra staked and gift wrapped. It was to identify and find the woman in the picture. If you paralyze her by staking her through the hearts you've only “identified her movements” in the trivial sense that “she isn't moving any more.”


That's certainly proactive of you.

So my problem with this is that if the players remember what their mission was supposed to be, and they have somehow gotten to this part of the story without refusing the mission or solving the mission, and they put up with Ravnos doing their racially insensitive displays of power and attitude long enough to take the whole car ride and get given the Ravnos counter-offer, there's no reason why the players would accept it. The players would at that point say “Hey, that actually wasn't our mission, and if we bring this decoy lady in, things are obviously going tits up. Like, fucking obviously.” Now there's some contrived bullshit about how the body double lady isn't really staked and blah blah blah. But none of that's necessary, and even without the triple or quadruple cross or whatever going on it's just obviously not a piece of bait the players are going to take.

AncientH

I want to repeat this: this isn't a high stakes adventure. This is not a low stakes adventure. This is a no stakes adventure. The PCs have nothing to gain by participating in any of this. They don't hold any crucial information, or any unique abilities, to make them the center of attention of all these different people. That's important, because in Cyberpunk the very thing that sets the protagonists apart is something crucially different from everybody else. They may have skills, or a piece of tech, or a unique bit of information, or some specific connections or relationship that connect them to the ongoing pattern of whatever activity is unfolding.

The player vampires...are none of these things.

There is a reason for that: it's hard to write generic adventures. You can't know what the exact skillset and connections the PCs might have, so you can't really tailor the adventure to those particular characters. You need to write an adventure which you can slot any potential group of room-temperature bodies into. Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun adventures sometimes acknowledge this by suggesting that you might want at least one competent Netrunner or mage in the group to overcome the planned challenges, but even that is rarely a showstopper - talent can be hired. Part of the challenge in writing adventures is to do so in such a way that players and gamemasters can adapt it to work with their group.

In that regard, it's understandable to write a generic adventure for a generic group of vampires. Wilkins wants a group that is competent enough to be successful, but not so competent that he can't destroy them. Also, vampires he doesn't have to pay.

There's a lot of ways this scenario can fall apart, mostly by the PCs either fucking up or just refusing the call of adventure. There's a fair few ways the PCs could potentially break the scenario - a good thaumaturge, for example, could trace back the original note and locate Wilkins. A particularly bloodthirsty group could just diablerize the helpless staked form of Tasha. That would certainly net the PCs more personal achievement than following the plot as written.

Frank

The last part of the adventure starts with a fight with a Solo. She's again badass enough that if the players aren't geared up for Cyberpunk combat, they are going to be slaughtered. But you survived the Booster Gang and the entourage street fights, so I assume this is just a puzzling speed bump.

Then we get to the big choice part. If you hand over the “staked” super vampire who is slightly less super than her lookalike super vampire, the PCs actually get paid about 50k Euro. Then the Tremere leave and send a booster gang to kill the PCs “for no reason.”

If the players tell the Tremere about the triple cross, then nothing's actually different. There's still a meeting and the Tremere still send a Booster Gang to kill the PCs after the meeting is over. Just now for even less reason than before.

AncientH

Not included in this adventure are the various "pit stops" to refuel, because the cyborg fights have to be burning at least some blood points. Really, if the story was going to go into an escalating series of bloody battles, they should have started with regular human gangsters, then cyborgs, then ghouled cyborgs, and finally a badass cyborg vampire solo. But we don't get that.

Frank

And that's it. That's the whole adventure. It comes in five mini-sections and it's fairly difficult for me to imagine how it grinds through any of them. Coming at this adventure from the standpoint of a V:tM coterie or from the standpoint of a Cyberpunk Edgerunner team would leave you dead or disinterested multiple times over before you got to the end. The NPCs who are dicking with each other are so far above the PCs in every possible way that engaging with them on a Vampire to Vampire level is pretty much hopeless. On the flip side, none of these characters are really min/maxed in a Cyberpunk fashion, and the PCs could actually blast their way through any of these assholes with big guns and speed boost cyberware.

A huge problem of course, is that none of the three articles have a real character generation section. Starting characters in Vampire: the Masquerade are feeble in every respect. On the flip side, starting characters in Cyberpunk are reasonably bad ass, able to blast their way through well armed opposition and look cool doing it. I'm just genuinely not sure what the characters in this are supposed to look like or be capable of.

Vampires in V:tM aren't really that good at much, especially as starting characters. Layering Vampirism on top of most Cyberpunk characters wouldn't be much of an improvement. Mental domination beats the ever living fuck out of what Face and Media characters can do, but Vampiric super speed is pretty much a joke to Solos.

AncientH

I'm not even sure how Cyberware-enhanced Celerity works from a spending Blood Point perspective.

I'm not sure what else to add at this point except...I expected more. When you have a mashup like Vampire/Cyberpunk, you need to throw out some concepts that specifically address the shared high concept. Maybe there's an artificial blood substitute that is making vampires sicken and explode. Maybe the adoption of thermographic cameras for "crime prevention" threatens to destroy the Masquerade. Maybe a megacorp was experimenting with scientific vampires, and one escaped and real vampires are being framed. Maybe someone is selling vitae to the Juicers. Maybe the Hunters are organizing on the Net.

There are many legitimate and pressing issues which could be significant enough for a team of vampiric Edgerunners to be hired to deal with them. This politics jerking around is just...tired War of Ages crap. Not even good War of Ages crap. If a team of neonates used quantitative analysis to figure out where the haven is of an Elder in torpor and committed diablerie on his ass, hiring the players as a Blood Hunt to bring them to "justice" would be fine. But this...<sigh> Who gives a fuck?

Frank

Next up: Rantings and Wrap Up!

[ArmorClassZero]

I'm not sure whether I should be impressed that White Wolf managed to make a business out of selling a setting that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny and shovelware that doubled as thinly veiled fan-fiction... or deeply disappointed.

[Thaluikhain]

Oh, that looks like a VTM: Bloodlines screenshot, but I can't think from where in the game.

Controlling people with your blood sorta kinda makes sense to me, if you are going for "blood borne disease" or something, or maybe blood magic. But then you can diablerise people, which also makes sense, but not at the same time.

[Omegonthesane]

Ritually feeding people your blood should probably work differently to having your blood taken by force.

Gah, still reeling from the GM trying desperately to cake on mind caulk to justify why the "journey of the serial diablerist" should be left intact and not fucking distorted by the ability to stake an elder and offer up a bunch of civilians in sacrifice so that your coterie can share in the diablerie up until you're all one gen below whoever you captured.

[Longes]

So how wouls you guys mash up VtM and cyberpunk (not necessarily Cyberpunk)? What would be good ideas for the setting and good adventure plothooks? I was thinking about running Cyberpunk VtM recently, but never got past the drawing board.

[ArmorClassZero]

I would have the setting be in the future (like 2100) but avoid cybernetic elements. I personally don't think the whole 'jack-in' brain-machine interfacing / networking thing will ever be possible. We view cybernetic augmentation today like how people viewed flying cars back in the 50s.

I think it would be sufficiently dark and depressing to have a society disillusioned with future progress altogether. Like very little scientific or technical progress has been made over the past 100 years. 3D printing happened and is as ubiquitous as refrigerators and microwaves. Androids are a thing, but the physical limitations could not be overcome - they're still clunky and uncanny. AI exists but does not pose any serious threat, basically being glorified Siri and Alexa updates. Cloning is a thing but cloning humans has a huge negative stigma and is only quasi-legal for megacorps. The fuel crisis of 20XX has made trams and trains the primary means of travel except for the super rich who can still afford private automobiles. We never colonized Mars or even made it back to the moon.

[DrPraetor]

There are two questions there:
[*] What kind of high-tech dystopia do you have?
[*] What kind of vampires do you have?
which, in an ideal mashup, would be mutually reinforcing.

Myself, I would have widespread augmentation (after all, how else is it cyberpunk?), and also have blood magic be the only game in town, magic-wise. Much of the augmentation is blood magic dependent, as a practical solution to the many technological problems associated with giving someone super-speed by grafting electronics onto their nervous system. Whether you look borg or not is entirely a fashion choice - the dehumanizing effect is from the blood magic and shows up whether you give yourself super-speed by neural-grafting or by getting storm oni tattooed on your arms with virgin blood.

So there are vampires, but the border between vampire and blood-sorcerer is deliberately hazy.

There are replicants - who are probably made using the assistance of blood-sorcery - but who aren't worth blood points unless they learn to be human.

To drive your dystopia, taking blood points from people messes them up. Recovery times are long enough that if pressed for blood points you may inflict long-term injury even if you have a sizable herd. People who are more messed up are worth less blood points total, and suffer more when they lose blood points. So you are incentivized to take vibrant young people and drink their blood so they turn into meth addicts, who may or may not fully recover, which is genre-appropriate.

Synthetic blood, blood from mindless clones/replicants, etc., is worthless magically speaking. Because blood magic is widely used, the future dystopia has a market in human misery which is accepted by the various corps.

An odd side note. The vampires in V:tM are deliberately sexless - they're allowed to have kinky torture thaum but not regular whoopie (the supposed reason for this is because the thirst for blood is supposed to replace their sexual appetites.) Meanwhile, the cyborgs in Cyberpunk are supposed to be sexy, but there is a failure of genre emulation because your seduction is based on your humanity attribute which drops when you get 'ware (including the Mr. Studd's implant whose only benefit is a + to seduction tests.)

[DrPraetor]

In the example above, by the way, I'd suggest troupe-style play. Everyone creates a Blood Mage/Vampire, and everyone creates a cyborg/flunky, and you trade off which one you play.

But, let's say you want a less dystopic cyberpunk future. Shadowrun isn't entirely a dystopia, and neither are Pattern Recognition or other later Gibson novels.

So, maybe we want to explore the conceit - the cyborgs are human, in spite of having metal parts, while the human-seeming vampires are really the monsters.

That's a fine conceit, but there are two things to keep in mind:
[*] If people can't play vampires, you are wasting your time in creating a vampire-cyberpunk mashup.
[*] If people can't play a hacker and a solo/street-samurai, you are wasting your time in creating a vampire-cyberpunk mashup.

Now, maybe everyone plays a vampire cyborg, maybe people play a mix of vampires and cyborgs. But, even if the augmented are fighting a heroic war against the evil undead, you had better be allowed to play both.

As with many such mashups, I would keep the extraneous supernatural elements to a minimum. Non-magic vampires don't make any sense, so magic is clearly real which poses... essential problems, which you do want to resolve in some minimalist way. Again, my suggestion is that all of the wizards and such in history are vampires, that vampirism is the way humans get access to meaningful amounts of magic.

Maybe you have psychic sensitives and ghosts, maybe some vampires can animate the dead (thus there are zombies) - but I don't think a mashup of vampires and cyborgs survives the addition of magi and lupines as background setting supernaturals, because it almost-immediately transitions from a Vampire-Cyberpunk mashup into a Fantasy-Kitchen-Sink-Cyberpunk mashup - which is fine for what it is but not the same thing.

[Ancient History]

CyberFang!

Wrapup and Rantings


This also came out in 1993.


Cyberpunk Vampires will never not be cool.

AncientH

Throughout this OSSR, I have been sortof half-assed comparing the contents of this article to a hypothetical homebrew that could be arrived at by combining GURPS Cyberpunk and GURPS Vampire: The Masquerade. I can do this because both of those products were available at the time, and that kind of off-the-cuff grab-two-GURPS-books-and-combine-them approach is nominally the GURPS aesthetic. It is a system designed for Step Zero: Build The Game You Want To Play. Instead of waiting for TSR to come out with Ninja vs. Vikings, you grab GURPS Vikings and GURPS Martial Arts and possibly GURPS Japan and go to town.

Because in a very real sense, most of the GURPS books are deliberately open-ended, aimed at providing no single set "canon," but rules to address and accommodate nearly every play experience (except XXX-rated ones, for the most part). Licensed GURPS products and setting-specific stuff are a little different, in that they have some actual setting constraints to deal with...so in effect, if you have three different groups that choose to do a GURPS Vampirepunk mashup, you will end up with three very different settings - which will probably be mechanically compatible ('cause GURPS) but which from a setting perspective might be wildly different.



I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing - GURPS Blood Types was literally a book where they tried to see how many different flavors of vampire they could cram into 128 pages, and covered a lot more philosophical ground than GURPS V:TM ever did - but it does put the onus on the gamemaster to do all the work of building the setting, because taking the GURPS Vampire: the Masquerade setting as-is, dialing the year up to 2020 and adding cyberware, Netrunning, and Megacorps by itself is not going to work, unless the players are either very stupid, or are willing to suspend disbelief for why the Masquerade hasn't broken yet.

A "raw" mashup also doesn't address all the compatibility issues (can vampires take cyberware?) or syncretic issues (can vampires survive on clonal blood?) Some of these can be addressed over the course of the game - if the Player Vampires wake up from torpor into a cyberpunk world, for example, the issues only come up as players discover them - but they're still important issues to sort out, and it's all on the gamemaster to do it.

So while yes, you can do GURPS: Vampirepunk by yourself, it's probably a more sizable undertaking than you might first think.

Frank

One thing I want to make very clear is that despite the fact that I keep ending up praising Cyberpunk, it is and was a pretty bad game. It was revolutionary and had a lot of good ideas and was very culturally influential, but it was still an 80s game that was only middlingly crafted from a structural standpoint for the time. Graded on the curve of “things published contemporaneously with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition” it stands reasonably tall in both mechanical and narrative innovation; but that is a very generous curve. It's competing against GammaWorld and Palladium's TMNT. But you should not play Cyberpunk. You should not play Cyberpunk 2013 and you should not play Cyberpunk 2020. There was an abortive attempt to make Cyberpunk 3.0, but it never went anywhere because it was the 21st century and fucking obviously you shouldn't be playing Cyberpunk. There are better things to be playing. It's not 1988 and hasn't been for a long time.

But on an entirely related note: Vampire: the Masquerade is also a bad game that you shouldn't be playing. Like Cyberpunk it got by on attitude and novelty. Graded on the curve of “games that let you play gothic horror monsters in an urban fantasy milieu in the early 90s,” it gets an A. And that's because Nightlife gets a B on the same scale. But as we've hinted at repeatedly, Vampire: the Masquerade had a ruleset that was bad even for the period, and the Vampires it presented were pale imitations of things you actually wanted to play. The Vampire disciplines were too weak for the amount of magic juice they gave to actual PCs and the vampiric restrictions were too restrictive on things you'd actually want to do.

Ultimately the plan to port Cyberpunk into Vampire is worse than porting Vampire into Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is the better game, low though that bar is. Dropping the Cyberpunk cyberware into Masquerade was always going to highlight just how fucking awful the core mechanics of that system really were.

AncientH

And that doesn't even get us into things like Netrunning, which World of Future Darkness largely ignored. You might not remember it, but in the first Highlander film the cop successfully ID's Macleod as an immortal in about five fucking minutes, and that was before there was an internet. A big part of the whole Cyberpunk concept is that there's a world of information at your fingertips, and even in 1984 when William Gibson was pissing about imagining such a global Matrix, it was patently fucking obvious that this was going to be a gamechanger - and that applies to roleplaying games as well. We don't quite live in the Panopticon (thought the UK certainly seems to be trying), but we still have CIA directors that put tape over the lens of the webcam that comes standard on their laptop so nobody will hack them and take embarrassing pictures of them wacking off or film what their password is as they manually type it in. Even if you make the generous assumption that older vampires are not tech savvy like your Greatest Generation grandparents, any recent Bloods should know their asshole from a smartphone.

Unfortunately, Vampire: The Masquerade is generally poorly set-up to deal with game-changers in technology. They were aware of the internet in the 1990s, and like a lot of prognostication at the time they did not really understand what was happening or how it would affect things. If you were doing vampire today, Schrecknet would be part of the Dark Web and you'd have vampires trying to score blood and swapping Thaumaturgy rituals for bitcoins like assholes, and the Camarilla would have bots in place to keep idiot neonates from doing stupid shit with ebay...but this isn't stuff that is really addressed in vampire books, in part because they learned the crucial fact that trying to tie your setting to any current technological standard makes it automatically out of date by the time it hits print. Even the Path of Technomancy and Technika are so nebulous in what they do and how they do it that a lot of the success of those abilities is going to devolve to oral skills and knee pads.

Frank

A major issue with low fantasy, whether it's urban fantasy or near-future scifi or some hybrid, is the demographics of potential antagonists. If you're doing some sort of high fantasy deal, there are like orcs over there, and however many enemies you need come from that essentially inexhaustible pool. If things take place on Earth, even if it's “Earth with extra special sauce” that's not exactly true. The number of people who are potential antagonists have to exist before they become antagonists. They have jobs and lives and have to be integrated into the alternate Earth history you are providing.

Low Fantasy is easy because it means that you can just have locations like Las Vegas and Cairo and organizations like the Freemasons and Taco Bell. You don't have to draw maps to show where the mountains and rivers are and you don't have to come up with realistic island names (which is harder than you think, considering that actual island names like Danger Island and Easter Island compete with deliberately ironic names like Greenland). You don't have to do the full Tolkien to write up languages and discuss ancient movements of people and so on and so forth – all that shit is done for you and French and Estonian are already designed and placed on the map for you. You also get additional buy-in from the players, where they might want to play a character who is Russian or who comes from New Zealand, they probably have no opinion about a purely fictional high fantasy ethnicity like Framnians or whatever.


Ghostbusters didn't have to spend any time or effort explaining New York, a major advantage and set of shortcuts for Low Fantasy world building.

But Low Fantasy also has limits. Change things too much, and things become unrecognizable. And when that happens, people end up wanting you to explain everything. And the fact that the actual Earth is really big means that going back and explaining everything is off the fucking table. As we discussed in the OSSR of Ars Magica, things simply become impossible to know or agree upon if the Earth gets changed too much. And at that point it becomes very difficult to do much of anything. If Europe isn't recognizable as Europe, what is it?

So there isn't unlimited room for secret cities, secret cryptids, secret societies, and secret criminal enterprises. For Earth to be remotely recognizable, the super majority of people need to be going to school and working normal jobs and shit.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't room for terrorist organizations. Boko Haram has over ten thousand militants in Northern Nigeria and more in neighboring countries. In the 1920s the KKK had four million men (back when the US population was only 120 million, meaning that 1 in 15 American men was a member of a terrorist group). The Italian Mafia has about 25 thousand members (most of whom are in Europe). The Yamaguchi-gumi has about 28 thousand members. Criminal organizations can and do get very large – even far too large to meaningfully fight your way through Kill Bill style in a typical RPG. What's actually limited is death and mayhem. Most criminal organizations keep things reasonably low keep. The vast majority of KKK members never actually put a noose around the neck of a black man, the worst most of those assholes did was to stand in a crowd and shout. Even though Boko Haram is fighting an actual war and routinely murdering civilians and kidnapping schoolgirls for rape purposes and has been doing so for 9 actual years, their members aren't killing someone every day or even every year.

There were 18 confirmed Boko Haram attacks in January of 2018 that killed 93 civilians and soldiers in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad. That's horrendous, and makes it one of the worst months of the insurgency. But even if they maintain that level of brutal violence all year it's still less than 1 killing per 18 Boko Haram militant for the year. The average number of killings per Boko Haram militant would still be less than 0.5 even if the entire uprising had been at the level of mayhem of January 2018 for the entire last 18 years. A majority of longterm members of Boko Haram haven't killed anybody and Boko Haram thinks its insurgency is old enough to get married.


Chaos and madness exists in the world.

There is room in the world for organized crime and murderers and horrific large-scale crimes. But there isn't really room for many continuous crimes. Murderers don't really murder many people on a day to day basis. Your vampires can't be very numerous at all if they murder with any frequency. If vampires had to kill people even once a week, it would take like 20 vampires to equal Boko Haram waging an open declared war. If they killed someone every day, just three vampires would be the entire Boko Haram uprising for January.

AncientH

Vampires and magic are surprisingly easier to work into a cyberpunk setting. That might sound weird, but a lot of the technology that underlies cyberpunk is essentially magical anyway, in the sense that none of the writers knew how it was supposed to work but they could describe it explicitly in mystical terms - and sometimes dressed it up in magical terms. In Neuromancer one of the dudes replaced a lung with a thought-controlled holoprojector that could create convincing three-dimensional illusions, and even burn somebody's eyes out. Riviera could basically be a Ravnos for all intents and purposes. AI were characterized as loa from Voudoun in its sequel, Count Zero.

So having magic + a cyberpunk setting isn't necessarily hard. It's a Mercedes Lackey-esque feel where you might have elves with cyberware, but in Vampire terms it probably feels like the only decent Blade movie.



But Vampire: the Masquerade + Cyberpunk 2020 requires...a bit more work. Both of those games have entrenched structures and organizations of power. You have megacorps like Arasaka, and you have vampire Clans like the Ventrue. One of the difficulties of the setting marriage is deciding how those two different power structures interact. I mean, you could throw Pentex in Cyberpunk 2020 and just assign them all the evil magical crap by default - it's lazy, but that's a legit option. And let's be honest, fewer people could rattle off the name of Cyberpunk 2020's megacorps than they could for Shadowrun - the megacorporate personalities were generally just not as well defined by R. Talsorian and co.

But it is also important, because a large part of Vampire is knowing how your character relates to the rest of the setting. Are you a Caitiff, or do you have a Clan or Bloodline? Are you an Anarch, or a member of the Camarilla, Sabbat, or Iconnu? What's your Path/Road? What's your generation? These are all various labels that define how you as a character interact with other characters, but they also fix your relation to the existing social and power structures within the setting.

Except in a cyberpunk setting, a lot of the drama is about how those social relationships have broken down. Characters tend to exist at the edges of defined spaces, outside the status quo. Edgerunners, shadowrunners, or whatever you want to call it are criminals and mercenaries that at best operate in legal grey areas outside of corporate and national control, evading the systems that seek to label and control people. Cyberpunk protagonist characters are often SINless, with few loyalties or personal connections, operating on their lonesome except when they are brought together for some bigger operation.

Which should be familiar to Vampire players...but there are problems. A Cainite is not, generally, a lonesome serial killer, and coteries are seldom brought together for some real purpose. Cainites have a lot of blood bonds and obligations, and their coterie or pack is a nominal requirement if you want more than a single player at the table. Vampire: the Masquerade tends to handwave this, and the difficulties involved in getting vampires of different clans/generation/Road together for any fucking reason within the limits of the setting. So how do you make that jive in a cyberpunk setting?

Ostensibly, the best idea is to dismantle Vampire: the Masquerade's premise and rebuild it, so vampires work more like edgerunners, grouping together for mutual need and loyalty.

Frank

The flip side to needing limits on how much crime is performed before the world becomes unrecognizable, there's the fact that you have a demographic need for there to be sufficient characters for the player characters to interact with. That's both socially and as antagonists. The player characters need to have characters to interact with. They need rising up in organizations to matter. They also need to not run out of opposition before the end of the game.


President of the anime club.

Consider the case of a TV show. Your protagonists are going to have an opponent that's a “monster of the week” in many episodes. And they are also going to face groups of antagonists and boss antagonists. And your monsters of the week are going to be varied stuff. It isn't going to be “Vampire Clown; Vampire Clown; Vampire Clown” it's going to be “Vampire Clown; Werewolf; Vampire Snake Priestess” and so on. And then beyond that you have minion level creatures like a pack of ghouls or a gang of goblins or something. And then you have antagonists who need to be established as being a cut above the Vampire Clown or the Werewolf, like an Elder Vampire or a Demon or something. And you could plausibly want antagonists that were specifically a cut above those like a Dragon or Demon Lord or whatever. And you need to have all these things on hand so that there are demographically accessible antagonists of the sort you need when you need them.



The two of those issues together lead to some pretty difficult needles to thread. You need enough enemies that you don't run out. But they also need to be low enough impact on the world that the world is still remotely recognizable. Now that's a place where Cyberpunk tropes are pretty useful. Enemies defaulting to “street level” for basic monster of the week enemies means there is a lot of space for higher tier enemies without getting to Czernobog raining devastation from a mountain.

A lot of pieces of fiction rely on the tropes of having the big bads sealed away or waking up or just living on another world at the start of the story. And while that does let you fight arbitrarily big monsters without worrying how they managed to not ruin all of Earth's history in the twenty thousand years before the five minutes ago that they showed up or woke up – it doesn't give the players other vampires and super criminals to talk to and politic around. Ultimately, the typical campaign sandbox for something like Vampire or Cyberpunk is going to need about 100 movers and shakers and persons of interest to interact with. Much less than that, and the sand box feels really constricting.

Now one dodge that is frequently invoked (indeed nearly universally adopted in actual Masquerade campaigns) is the Buffy solution: the area of the campaign is the Hellmouth (or whatever other justification tickles your fancy) and simply has a demographically surprising number of supernatural creatures and relevant super criminals. This is a perfectly acceptable answer for most individual campaigns, but it's horrible world building, keeps players from being able to move and still maintain any semblance of campaign continuation, and ruins the shared world experience of different campaigns. If Wichita is the Hellmouth in one group's campaign, how is Montgomery the Hellmouth in another's? And if those can't both be true, how do characters move between the two campaigns when players from other cities come over to visit? If you find yourself saying “This place has an unusually high number of vampires” for every single fucking place you ever talk about, maybe you just need to admit that your number of vampires was too low?

AncientH

It's easy to get lost talking about vampires or cyberpunk, but the real focus for the mashup should be on how the different ideas play off each other - the possibilities that open up when you have these two different elements and bring them into intimate contact.

You could have a megacorp that discovers vampires and decides to pull a Tremere or Giovanni, embracing or ghouling a large number of employees - which works fine as long as they have enough blood/vitae to supply them, using industrial techniques; but maybe that practice isn't sustainable...

Or maybe the "AI" running the super-advanced security system of the corporate building is really an elder vampire in torpor, their disembodied and circulatory system hooked up to a computer in a tank in the basement.

It doesn't even have to be Player Vampires - you could be Edgerunners in a world where Vampires are an occasional antagonist, their underworld machinations making them major employers for desperate mercs.

You might have a cybernetic Inquisition, chrome sheathed in blessed steel, hunting the infernal bloodsuckers.

Genetically engineered chupacabra might be released in the sewers to seek out and devour the Nosferatu, only able to sustain themselves on the blood of other vampires .

I could go on. There's a lot of possibilities, and plenty of media that actually touches on some of the fun elements. It can get as existential and weird and action-packed or morbid as you want. Part of it depends on the system, but more of it depends on players and gamemasters being open to exploring the weird mashup idea - of positing some big questions, then seeing how they work out in practice. Garlic grenades, sniper rifle bullets with splinters of the True Cross, ultraviolet lasers, ghouled cybernetic gorillas, elder vampires trying for true immortality by uploading their minds into the Matrix...and those are the big ideas. There's still plenty of room for small ideas. Feral vampires, living on the edges of civilization, in the rust-strewn barrens, preying on the SINless. A digital library of the Book of Nod maintained by a vampire hacker. A corporate mage trying to summon a demon through the Matrix and needing the hearts of five vampires to do it.

Things like that are, to me, the fun part of mashups. The things that get my blood pumping, excited by the possibilities...and they are, unfortunately, usually the last thing anyone thinks of.

Frank

Cyberpunk struggled with things for the Media and Rockers and Faces and and Gang Leaders, and such to do. Vampire presented a dream where different kinds of vampire had different powerbases, but presented no actual means by which most of the vampire types would actually acquire influence over anything at all.


While you were out, I took control over the neighborhood.

These issues are of course related, and probably represent a problem that *.punk games needed to get working on solving back in the early nineties. The fact is that just as an edition of D&D that doesn't meaningfully let you become duke is incomplete, a cyberpunk or urban fantasy game where you can't meaningfully “take over” a neighborhood is simply inadequate.

Now for the vampires specifically, it is pretty much mandatory that the vampires all have abilities that let them spread influence in some manner. The idea they floated was that the Ventrue control the financial district and the Nosferatu control the slums – and that's fine. But you have to actually back that shit up.

For cyberpunk you really need some sort of system by which you gain reputation and spread fame and influence and shit. You need to do shit like GTA: San Andreas or Mafia or whatever where you become a big cheese in the crime world. You need to be able to become a famous rocker. The whole fame thing was something that every cyberpunk game tried to do something about. But like Shadowrun's Shadowbeat, but it never went anywhere.

AncientH

I'm kind of glad that, Blood Types notwithstanding, GURPS never tried to do its own Vampirepunk book. Not just because they couldn't, after the licensing deal fell through, but because I fear that there is a real possibility that it would have ended up like GURPS Cthulhupunk.

The failure of Cthulhupunk was one of both vision and execution. It was a bare-bones, lackluster effort to port some ideas from Call of Cthulhu into a cyberpunk setting, but they really failed to hit any strong approach to the material. They should, arguably, have striven for the place where the two settings met - to present not just a fully-realized cyberpunk world where the Mythos was still a threat, but taken the opportunity to examine how those threats change and adapt to the syntax of a new setting. GURPS Cthulhupunk did not do that.

Would GURPS Vampirepunk? It is perhaps way too easy to see the same mistake happening. To try, as World of Future Darkness did, to keep as much of Vampire: The Masquerade and Cyberpunk 2020's respective settings intact when they mashed them together, to handwave the fact that the Masquerade hasn't yet fallen, to assume that Vampires have control of many Megacorps because of course they do.

Except...that's wrong, isn't it? Because too much of those settings don't work, not even separately, much less together. What kind of stories are you going to tell in Vampirepunk? Because if it's just vampire stories but the mooks have cyberware, that can fuck right off. What's the point of that? You can fake that in Vampire as it is.

Aside: Some people have brought up the fact that the World of Darkness does in fact have cyberware of sorts, though not in Vampire products directly - but the Technocracy definitely has cyberware available, and Strike Force X. The fact that these are usually expressly verboten to vampires can be overlooked, as much as the fact that these are all expressly magickal artifacts. You might as well set it during the Dark Ages and rule that your PCs can get silver arms crafted by the local members of the Craft. Part of the appeal of cyberpunk is man meet machine - the idea of the universality of augmentation, that it is a spread of technology that is available to everybody, encroaching on our very bodies and minds. A lot more daring before pacemakers became standard, I admit, but it mean that magic cyberware does not cut the mustard.

Frank

Cyberpunk's “character classes” weren't great. I mean, it was 1988 and it was just sort of assumed that characters were going to have character classes. But honestly, skill based “soft class” systems like Shadowrun do a better job of covering urban fantasy and cyberpunk as a genre. People want to play hybrid characters and corner case characters, but also you really want the game to support experts who are like really good at organic chemistry but aren't particularly good at like stealth or fighting with hammers or whatever. The character concepts referenced by Cyberpunk's character classes are all concepts that should be supported by a cyberpunk game, and it's a genuine tragedy that only a few of them actually were.

Masquerade of course went for a hybrid of hard and soft classes. And the pitch for that was very good. But the execution was of course terrible. The first thing is that none of the hard classes actually did what they were supposed to do. The second thing of course is that the soft classes – the archetypes – really weren't even concepted. I should be able to tell you what kinds of archetypes a Vampire Coterie “wants” but I honestly can't. That's a thing that needs to be rethunk from the ground up.


A short list of vampires you might be inspired by.

The problem with Masquerade's classifications starts with being insufficiently ambitious in covering vampire concepts that would draw people to play the game. Then it goes on with the issue that the vampire concepts being covered aren't actually covered very well – few of them can even feed themselves on a night by night basis. But perhaps the most unforgivable issue is that I don't know what a character is supposed to contribute to the coterie. Missions don't have clear divisions of labor and indeed there wasn't any effort made to define what a mission was even supposed to look like or what a typical character might be expected to contribute to one.

Clearly the vampires need to be overhauled on multiple axes. But also the player should be confronted with the question of what kind of Edge Runner their character is. In Underworld you got the “Death Dealer” and you got the high society lady, and those are both recognizably the same kind of vampire – but serve as different “roles” in an RPG context.

AncientH

You can go to far. VampirePunk should not be VampireTech. While rape is one of the sexual subtexts of vampires, rape camps are out. But this in itself is a question for VampirePunk consideration: how much can cyberpunk tropes be applied to vampires?

World of Future Darkness touched on this very lightly when it pointed out how certain bits of cyberware interacted (or failed to interact) with vampire anatomy - but take that a step further. What if you could get steel claws and fangs? Wouldn't that make you a more efficient predator? An internal clock so you never had to fear Daylight Savings Time again. Titanium plating around the heart to make you essentially stakeproof. A lot of this may sound silly, but the basic concept of vampires improving themselves has been a staple of the fiction for at least the last three or four decades. The first edition of Vampire: the Masquerade had booster artifacts you implanted in your body, the fucking Bloodrayne movie was built around stupid shitty vampire power-ups.

But when does a vampire...who is already not human...start to embody the alienation of technology?

I'm building up to the Cyberpsychosis/Humanity problem that plagues both Cyberpunk 2020 and Vampire: The Masquerade. It is a sort of fundamental flaw in both settings, trying to trade existential ennui at the disconnect with human existence that come from being a vampire/cyborg into some sort of measurable game mechanic. It's a bit of a hard sell individually, because cyberware is awesome and being a vampire comes with all kinds of cool powers; trying to layer those two approaches together is an instinctively easy but bad idea. Yes, you can do it: GURPS has rules for both. But you shouldn't.

And really, part of the problem is that when you're already posthuman - either cyborg or vampire - the next step is almost too easy. "What do you have to lose?" should be a theme of Vampirepunk, and one of the goals of the game is to show players exactly that. Maybe Robocop is less a technological breakthrough and actually just a fledgling vampire encased in a metal skin, coming to terms with their new unlife. But don't give that hit mechanics.

Frank

I harp on this a lot,but the power to drawback ratio of vampires in Masquerade was way too fucking harsh. Player characters need to be able to do things. I don't just mean that they need to be able to successfully drink blood and spread their influence – although obviously they do need to be able to do those things. I mean that they need to be able to interact with the plot at all. And instant death from seeing the sun really isn't compatible with that. It's not just that there are vital things like banks and courts and shit that are just 100% closed after sunset – it's that if you can't leave the house until dark you can't actually start your adventures 1 minute after sunset. You have to actually start your adventures after commuting to the location the adventures take place in. And then you have to Cinderella your ass back home with enough time to get back well before the sun rises again – you don't have 12 hours of activity per day, you have like eight. Or less. And of course there's still the minor issue of summer, where travel times might literally eat up the entire period of actual darkness from each day.


Turns out that it takes a significant amount of time to get to different parts of LA, even at night.

Even if you want vampires to do all their adventuring at night, they still have to be physically capable of moving around during daylight because otherwise there's just a significant portion of the night that is wholly off limits to the characters.

AncientH

Frank and I actually talked a lot about this on chat, and the problem is that a lot of the problems with Cyberpunk 2020 are not fundamental to the setting - because most people don't give a rat's ass about the setting. It is an 80s cyberpunk dystopia with a horribly compressed timeline, but that's about it unless you want to talk about the abject stupidity of individual products and design decisions. Vampire has much more heartbreaker potential, because it is fundamentally fucked six ways from Sunday. It is so wonderfully idiosyncratic about how it has approached every single aspect of the setting, that we can rant for hours about how fucked up each part of it is, and why.

For a VampirePunk setting though, the general design criteria ("how to fix Vampire") have to be married with a more specific setting criteria ("how to fix Vampire so it works in a cyberpunk setting") - and the answers are a little different than you might expect. Because when the world is big - when travel between places is long and difficult, you can't google everything, and individual cultures have time to develop - it i feasible to have a much greater variety in different vampire social systems. When the local Prince's orders have to travel at the speed of a horse or a bat, the vampires three town over may well tell him to go fuck himself, or pretend they never got the message. When he sends you an email with read receipt requested? That's a little more difficult...

And that really only clips the surface of the design issues to conceive of. The bottom line takeaway is, I hope, that Vampire: the Masquerade as it exists in 1992 should not recognizably survive into 2020. These may or may not be the Final Nights, but the astounding pace of social and technological change mean that Vampire either needs to evolve or die.

Frank

Next Up: Probably More Ranting.

[hyzmarca]

I'm pretty sure that it's Buffy canon that Cleavland Ohio also has a hellmouth. They're uncommon, but not unique. You can totally have a small but undefined number of undefined cities that are supernatural hotspots. And then when two campaign worlds bump into each other, they can both be hellmouths with equal validity.

[Longes]

If you were doing vampire today, Schrecknet would be part of the Dark Web and you'd have vampires trying to score blood and swapping Thaumaturgy rituals for bitcoins like assholes, and the Camarilla would have bots in place to keep idiot neonates from doing stupid shit with eBay...

In the actual Vampire of today, the Schrecknet is down and the CIA is hunting vampires and air bombing Vienna because some asshole forgot to log out.

No seriously, the Second Inquisition gets formed because a secret agent stumbles upon a terminal where some vampire logged into Schrecknet a decade ago and forgot to log out. This leads to the alphabet soup agencies pulling a vampire data dump from Schrecknet, forming the Second Inquisition, killing a bunch of vampires and literally air bombing the central Tremere chantry in Vienna taking out the entire Tremere leadership and causing the collapse of the Tremere Pyramid. Because apparently Austrian government is just okay with Americans dropping bombs on the historical building in the middle of the capital of Austria. Also, the public is not at all suspicious about this.

And they blame it all on ISIS.

A joint NSA/CIA Special Access Program called FIRSTLIGHT coordinates aware agents all over the Western world, liaises when possible with the Brujah-hunting Eighth Direction of the GRU, and funnels arms and support to the Entity, the secret service of the Vatican. The traffic in intelligence does not go only one way: the Entity now incorporates the newly re-canonized Society of St. Leopold, which provides FIRSTLIGHT and others with records from the last Inquisition and important perspective on the “ blankbody” threat. The Entity also provided cadre and vital support for Brazil’s BOES anti-vampire urban death squads, bringing them into the global picture.

In 2008, FIRSTLIGHT analysts identified the Tremere Prime Chantry in Vienna as “Vampire Central” and directed their largest operation to date. A coordinated USSOCOM and Vatican ESOG force augmented with experienced Brazilian hunter-killer teams annihilated the Chantry, destroying it with drone strikes and relic-reinforced ground operations. The official cover story blamed the explosions on ISISaligned terrorists, just as FIRSTLIGHT has concealed dozens of other strikes under the blanket of “counterterror operations.”

[Username17]

The bombing of Vienna thing is a good example of how basically fucked up World of Darkness was and how thoroughly it needs to be rebooted. It's also a good example of how fucking easy it is to tip things over the edge of peoples' willing suspension of disbelief in Low Fantasy.

So the first issue is that obviously the Tremere inner circle are all 4th generation fuckers, which means that they have "Precognition" - and ability that makes it literally impossible for mundane people to meaningfully damage the Tremere with a planned airstrike on the main chantry. The Tremere simply know when that attack is going to happen in time to evacuate. That's just a thing they automatically get to do, because the upper ends of Vampire Disciplines are extremely difficult to work around when writing progressions of the plot. Like our 5th generation Ravnos who simply has the ability to put anyone anywhere into a deadly nightmare world at any time - just as the actual PC vampires simply do not have good or numerous enough powers to do a good impersonation of any kind of vampire you care about - the high end of the Elder vampires have the powers of actual gods. Any action that involves any of these fuckers is very hard to write.

But aside from the difficulty in fitting inside my willing suspension of disbelief by having a bunch of precogs caught with their pants down by a premeditated sneak attack, there's the issue that the entire concept of transnational strike teams that have the power to unilaterally perform drone strikes blowing up city blocks in capital cities of European countries and then cover it up is a level of paranoid cyberpunk rantings that seems wholly incompatible with the idea of having Earth be particularly recognizable as "today".

-Username17

[Mask_De_H]

V5 sounds like the endgame for Hunter, which would be cool if you were playing Hunters and not Vampires. The Second Inquisition seems like Kenneth Hite convinced the other writers to make him a Nights Black Agents expansion with a name brand behind it.

[hyzmarca]

But aside from the difficulty in fitting inside my willing suspension of disbelief by having a bunch of precogs caught with their pants down by a premeditated sneak attack, there's the issue that the entire concept of transnational strike teams that have the power to unilaterally perform drone strikes blowing up city blocks in capital cities of European countries and then cover it up is a level of paranoid cyberpunk rantings that seems wholly incompatible with the idea of having Earth be particularly recognizable as "today".

-Username17

It isn't like the USA doesn't already perform unilateral drone strike in allied countries. And it isn't like European governments haven't helped the CIA kidnap and torture their own citizens.

Blowing up several city blocks in Vienna isn't that much of an escalation over things that the USA has actually done during the War on Terror.

That still doesn't explain how the vampire conspiracy controlling various world government let this fly. Unless the whole thing is really a power play by the Prince of DC

[Whipstitch]

Blowing up several city blocks in Vienna isn't that much of an escalation over things that the USA has actually done during the War on Terror.

It is in terms of public perception stateside.

I won't dispute the idea that the US kills a lot of people. I am a citizen of a country that kills people with guided bombs dropped from a UAV unironically named the General Atomics MQ-9A Reaper. That's some heavy shit. But many Americans are sufficiently ignorant that if you called a drone that in Fallout some non-zero number of people would assume it was fictional and criticize the name as being a bit on the nose. People are ambivalent about this shit in large part because our popular perception of the Middle East is weird hornet's nest of intractable sectarian violence and a lot of us explain this with blatant racism. Throw in that the majority of drone strikes are purposely performed in remote areas that make it difficult to obtain live footage and I expect the USA to keep slouching along bombing Muslims for the foreseeable future. Vampire, however, is seriously talking about bombing Austria because magic is real. It's a bit facile to say the difference is that we'd be bombing white people, but it's frankly not far off and the rest of it explains itself.

[Ancient History]

CyberFang!

More Rantings!

AncientH

Wrapping things up with out ranting this post, but before we draw the curtain on the World of Future Darkness I would like to say that while the execution was predictable shite, and the basic concept difficult because of the different flavors being combined - like raw grain and Coca Cola - the basic underlying idea is neither unfeasible or without merit. Having vampires in a cyberpunk game isn't such a bizarre concept that it is fundamentally unworkable, it is only the specific mix of Cyberpunk 2020 settings and mechanics with Vampire: the Masquerade settings and mechanics which is trying to combine four different flavors of suck into one almighty bland vortex.

Frank

If you had to pick one flaw that was most emblematic of how Cyberpunk shits the bed it would probably be that it uses D&D tropes where they don't belong. Hard character classes, a default assumption of breaking into dungeons and fighting guards and traps for loot, and so on. If you had to pick a single problem of Masquerade, it would be jettisoning too much Dungeons & Dragons baggage. The simple fact that there wasn't a mission or defined roles for the characters or classifiable opposition meant the game was very hard to play.

Moving forward with a Futuristic Vampire reboot, you're going to have to come to grips with the fact that characters will have multiple facets of their identity, and that those facets are necessarily going to inform how the character fits into the the world, fits into the campaign, and fits into the team of player characters. In short, you have to decide which parts of a character's identity are cosmetic, which are factionally dispotive, which are game mechanically relevant, and which are vital pieces of information other players are going to want to have when deciding what kind of characters they want to play.


But what kind of Elf are you playing?

D&D has reasonably clear distinctions about character identity questions that do and do not affect how you fit into the party. So your character might be a female Lawful Evil Halfling Assassin with purple eyes who is from the blightshire, but only the upper case words in that carry meaning about how a character might fit into the team. And further, only one of those words is something that a player has reason to feel protective about. The other players could be the same or different alignments and races and shit, but players do have the expectation that if they play an Assassin, that other players will allow them to have that corner of the sandbox to themselves. The other players can play Halflings or Dwarves or Orcs or whatever whether you're playing one or not. If I play an Elf, you could play an Elf as well if you wanted. Or you could play a Dwarf or an Orc, because me being an Elf doesn't have any proscriptive force either. On the flip side, what adjectives about a Vampire character matter for purposes of fitting into a coterie? What roles are protectable? Is it reasonable to say “I'm playing a Malkavian, you should play something else?” I don't know! No one knows!

Cyberpunk games have struggled with this concept slightly, but I can't think of any that have it as bad as Vampire. The usual issue is that there are some roles that are not easily replicated by other player characters and some roles that don't actually have mechanical support. So the Netrunner works pretty much the way a character class is supposed to in a D&D context – your team needs one but it doesn't need two so it's reasonable to say both “Our team doesn't have a Netrunner, you should play one.” and “Our team already has a Netrunner, you should play something else.” Those are useful and important things to be able to say when players are stuck for ideas on what to play or want to have a protected play area that allows them to feel useful. But most of the players ended up playing Solos because the Media and Corporate and Nomad character classes weren't supported by anything and didn't have any obvious axis to contribute to the team. The classic Cyberpunk 2020 team is Netrunner, Techie, MedTechie, and as many Solos as you have additional players. That's a problem, because of course it means that a bunch of roles that are supposed to have support in the game system actually don't. But it's not even in the same plane of existence as Masquerade's problem where I have no idea what the roles in the coterie are even supposed to be.

Essentially our hypothetical CyberFang (or any Vampire Reboot) needs to go back to the Game Design Flow Chart and decide what kinds of teams of player characters it's actually supposed to be supporting. A table top role playing game is at its core an ensemble cooperative storytelling game. There has to be a shared set of assumptions for what the protagonists “are.” Otherwise there's no story, no game, no anything.

AncientH

If this sounds a little back-to-fundamentals...it is. The problems with Cyberpunk 2020 and Vampire: the Masquerade are both fundamental, to the settings and to the systems. Playing Cyberpunk 2020 with the Shadowrun rules, just leaving the magic out, does not resolve the setting problems with Cyberpunk. The fact is that Shadowrun just invested a lot more in different potential roles: street samurai, mage/shaman, decker, rigger, and face are the basics, but players could also give their characters additional specialties, skills, contacts, and equipment that evidenced a much broader range of backgrounds and interests than in Cyberpunk. You could play a detective or occult detective or bladerunner in Shadowrun a lot easier than you could in Cyberpunk.

It's not that you couldn't call yourself a Street Lawyer in Cyberpunk 2020, but it definitely wasn't on the list of Approved Character Roles and the system really didn't have a solid way to work that in. But in Shadowrun you could throw points into Knowledge: Law, specialize your Etiquette and Negotiation skills, and get a bunch of legal system contacts and make a go of it. It's not that creativity isn't possible in Cyberpunk 2020, it's just that the system is a lot less forgiving for being creative within the confines of the mechanics and the setting - there's less flex to be a slightly weird type of character without inventing entirely new rules or mechanics.

This is an issue, to a much greater extant, in Vampire: the Masquerade. The clan/bloodlines are so rigid in their definitions that short of exploiting weird loopholes (which became a minigame in itself), that it became very difficult to assume any substantive role. White Wolf would occasionally try to get you to play an "out of the box" character, and it was always some stupid shit like a Giovanni that didn't take any points in Necromancy and through all their freebie points into being rich, or a Tremere that decided to default to Lure of Flames instead of the Path of Blood or something. It was never about occupying any particular role in the group or having any particular background - because by and large your mortal life meant nothing next to which clan you went into and which Disciplines you had taken.

Frank

The nWoD attempt at a reboot of Vampire came up with the “Five by Five” model.


Originally “five clans” by “five covenants” but you could fill in the madlibs blanks with fucking watever.

The idea was that each facet of a character's identity is a wholly independent choice from a list of 5. So each character is literally “one from column A, one from column B.” This is appealing for a lot of reasons. By breaking the character options into chunks they become memorable. It's also less design work, because you get 25 combinations from five and five but you still only had to actually design 10 things. This addresses a very real problem that the World of Darkness had where the various types and player choices were in big unordered lists that were hard to keep track of and remember. There were seventeen Werewolf tribes and I have literally never met or talked to a single person who could remember all seventeen – even including Werewolf fans who assured me that they could do it ahead of time. The nWoD five by five model by contrast delivers 25 options but most people even passively familiar with the game can tell you what they all are. A five member list is simply not that hard to remember and there's psychological research that confirms this. It's also important to note when talking about role protection that while there are 25 different character types in Five by Five, you can cover all the bases with five player characters. There are 120 different five-fanger teams that have exactly one of each Clan and one of each Covenant. There are legit reasons why the Five by Five model was chosen for nWoD and it's one of the few “endorsed by scientists” choices that were made when making that fucking terrible edition.

Now there are a couple of reasons that the Five by Five model didn't work. The first is that the different intersections didn't have identity. Carthian Nosferatus didn't really do anything that would mark them as a distinct entity and the Daeva of the Lancea Sanctum didn't either. Contrast this to Magic: the Gathering, where you have Five Allied Guilds, Five Enemy Guilds, Five Clans, Five Shards, and Five Factions. It's literally a Five by Five model, but the different combinations have their own identity distinct from their constituent elements. NWoD never provided something like that, so it never really felt like there were 25 real options.


The Red + White + Black clan is Mardu and has its own identity distinct from the Red + White opposed guild of Boros or the Red + Green + Black shard of Jund.

The next issue is that the Five by Five model's decoder ring method of getting five players to play different stuff from a 25 unit list and still cover all the roles didn't have value because the roles weren't meaningful. You could determine after four players had chosen their character that your Coterie could have all the clans and covenants covered if the last player was an Invictus Gangrel, but so what? What did it matter if you had an Invictus or a Gangrel on your team? Neither of those did anything special and never went anywhere. The concepts of Gangrel or Invictus didn't guaranty any particular skill set or provide any role protected ability that would allow the team to advance any particular mission. It's like declaring that one of the team members has to be Portuguese or one of the team members has to be named Caroline. You can declare that, but if there isn't any provided mission critical justification for that shit, you aren't going to get a lot of buy-in.

And let's not forget, the Five by Five model's approach to role protection only works out by giving one of the players an extremely narrow choice. It's bad enough in Cyberpunk where the team tells one of the players “we want you to play a Netrunner” or in AD&D where the players say “we want you to play a Cleric.” But in nWoD that was supposed to be “we want you to play a Ventrue who is also a member of the Ordo Dracul.” And that's pretty fucking narrow real estate.

But the main issue is really that a modern game shouldn't have complete possible role coverage. The village people don't cover every possible homoerotic fantasy costume because it's the modern world and you have more career choices than cowboy, construction worker, police officer, Native American, biker, and sailor. Cyberpunk instinctively knew this, and though the ten role list is slightly too long for me to remember all the terms (without looking it up, I can't recall if one of the classes is called “Face” or “Fixer” and I can't recall if one of the other classes is called “Security” or “Cop”), it does . Shadowrun presented sixteen archetypes, and while lots of archetypes were redundant (decker and elvish decker, or street mage and former corp mage) there were still obviously more provided character roles than you'd expect there to be players. And that is how a cyberpunk game or a vampire game should look. And obviously if you want to make a game that is both cyberpunk and vampire, that is also how it should work.

AncientH

It doesn't have to be painfully difficult. The idea of having different types of vampires is actually a laudable goal for a vampire game, but you have to marry that to some specific function. It's like in Underworld, Selina has a vampire clan she belongs to but her main job is she's a Deathdealer. Other vampires in her clan are archivists, security goons, virginpoppers or whatever.

And the thing is, if you take the idea that vampires are basically Edgerunners...those are your roles right there. So you could be a Tremere Netrunner or a Giovanni Face or a Brujah Solo and that's all fine and legit. I can see why World of Future Darkness didn't go that route explicitly, since it would require a lot more rework than anyone wanted, but it's a natural design path. You'd want to rework it a little because Cyberpunk roles are too few and limited and Vampire Clans need reworking anyway, but the idea that you can mix-and-match powers and skillsets to have different approaches is both feasible and interesting. If you have a Tremere Solo that uses Movement of the Mind to multi-wield six guns at once, for example, that's a lot different from the Assamite Solo that focuses on stealth kills using melee. Hell, you could have both the latter characters in a group and they could both still carry their own weight, because they do things differently.

Frank

What you're looking for is classes of roles. That is, to provide sufficient roles that the fifth player has choice about what to play and also to give role protection to players who want it. If you were to institute a Five by Five model correctly, you'd have five broad roles that fed into five specific roles. Perhaps you'd have a Death Dealer archetype that might include characters who hulk out and rip things up with their claws but also include characters who have remote control killer drones or who are just personally really good with guns. Shadowrun posited the Rigger, the Street Samurai, and the Mercenary – all of whom were archetypes that were good at shooting enemies in the face and could be substituted for one another.


If you aren't good enough at killing people, you have to go to Death Dealer summer camp.

The issue of what a protectable role is and what a mandatory role might be is quite fundamental to the game. You need to hack this shit out before you decide what kinds of stats your system uses and whether you want to be level based or skill based. In short, you have to decide what you're trying to emulate before you get into the nitty gritty of deciding what numbers to assign to things. Cyberpunk understood what it was trying to emulate and the provided roles are a reasonable spittballing of the character concepts intended to become Edge Runners: Cop, Corp, Fixer, Media, MedTechie, NetRunner, Nomad, Rocker, Solo, and Techie. That's a decent list. Obviously it goes crashing down in flames when trying to realize game mechanical realizations of what the “Reporter” or “Guitarist” characters are supposed to be actually doing in the actual game, but it's definitely a decent first draft with reasonable genre coverage. Even cyberpunk works that came later can be defined into those archetypes reasonably well. The main characters of Zodiac and Transmetropolitan are Media characters, for example.

Which brings us back to what is probably the biggest hurdle for Vampire the Masquerade was – and ultimately why the Requiem Reboot was never going to work. There are no role lists for Vampire. There aren't broad lists, there aren't narrow lists. It isn't that the roles aren't well defined or that the mechanical support for one or more roles is crucially missing – it's that there aren't any fucking roles at all. That very first question of “what are the ensemble protagonists doing?” is unanswered. And until you commit to something, you really don't have anything.

AncientH

We like to joke that in D&D the adventurers go on adventures, and in Shadowrun the shadowrunners go on shadowruns, and in Vampire the vampires...vampire. But it's the crux of the matter. What the fuck do vampires do with their unlife?

A substantial part of Vampire: the Masquerade is based on survival, but survival horror is a limited demographic at best, especially for any kind of ongoing roleplaying experience, and most vampire sessions don't want to spend all or even most of the night worried about how the vampires are going to get enough blood points to rise the next night. So that's a lot of conceptual game space which is kind of unworkable, or at least repetitive as fuck. When wizards in D&D memorize their spells each morning, that's about the limit of upkeep phase you want to deal with for player characters. You want to start the session ready to play, not with your Shadowrunners getting up to fix a well-balanced breakfast which they have to first hunt and kill.

Secondary experience of "being a vampire" is...intrigue? All the clans are plotting against one another, but the general motivations of plotting are either the province of big-dick vampires in positions of authority (i.e. not the player characters). Being the tip of the spear in such conflicts might be a valid goal for vampiric unlike - collecting prestige, honor, and riches from successfully fulfilling challenging missions handed down from your elders - but that requires that all the PCs be more or less on the same team. And in Vampire: the Masquerade, that is almost certainly never the case.

Or you could be proactive, do your own thing...but Vampire never really gave you enough data to be proactive. The PCs were never meant to be movers and shakers, they were pawns in the Jihad. The game wasn't nominally about coteries of younger vampires that banded together, using Vauderie to break the bonds with their elders, and seek out means of achieving common goals like pushing the werewolves out of the city or diablerizing the sleeping elders or collecting artifacts of power or...robbing a blood bank or something. These were options that Vampire would occasionally dangle in front of PCs, usually with the idea that they were being set up to do X by shadowy figure Y, but on a night-to-night basis Vampire never really figured out what the player vampires were supposed to do.

Frank

As we've noted a few times, the central reality of Vampire demographics meant that you could very plausibly just ignore the Camarilla altogether. The world was big and the Camarilla were few, and you could just leave. Go found your own city in Fresno, California or Tucson, Arizona, or any of the other fifty million soul cities of America that aren't in the top ten and don't have a ruling council of ancient evils running the show. Requiem was even worse, where slaving away for the Invictus just put a couple of parties on your social calendar and allowed you to drive the company car on nights you were working from home.


Only if you've established emotional buy-in.

Without a motivation for engagement, there isn't much reason to interact with vampire society. And without interacting with vampire society, there's pretty much no game at all. See Vampire: the Requiem for details. And “The Camarilla will fight you if you don't join” pretty much isn't a real reason unless you feel committed to living in a Camarilla city. As noted earlier, you can just leave. Like, North Korea would kill me for not joining, but I'm still not joining because they are far away and not able to project force to where I am now. You need the players to interact with the society that you've created or there's no point in even trying to do cooperative storytelling in that world.

But engagement with the society doesn't necessarily mean acceptance of the society. Cyberpunk typically involves rejecting the status quo. The society has various fundamental failings and rather than excuse or gloss over them, these failings cause the main characters to fall through the cracks. Whether they get pushed through the cracks or jump through them on purpose – the characters are on the outside looking in. That's where the Edge Runners come in. Where most cyberpunk protagonists fit into the picture is that they don't. They are or have become outsiders that are either trying to claw their way up or tear everything down.


Tearing it down is always popular.

Vampire pretty much assumed that you were going to paint inside the lines. But why? Why not stick it to The Man? And once sticking it to The Man is an option, wouldn't that make a better game? Consider Blade. You don't care about the various random vampires who stand behind and next to the various elders. You care about Blade, and you care about Frost. And both of those guys are Sticking it to The Man and Tearing Shit Down. Without a revolutionary goal (whether it be “change the Camarilla” like Frost or “destroy the Camarilla” like Blade) it's hard to imagine caring over much about any of this shit.


This is the meeting of the House of Erebus in Blade. Masquerade wanted you to aspire to being the secretary of the vice president of the third guy from the left. No one wants that.

Now that doesn't mean that all RPGs or even all science fiction RPGs need to be about tearing shit down and sticking it to The Man. I would expect most Star Trek RPGs to take the player characters' acceptance of the ideals and structures of Star Fleet as something that could be assumed. But even if the assumed campaign is about defending and upholding the position and ideals of the society in question, you still need a central conflict. Because without conflict, there is no story. Requiem asked if we could make the conflict central and personal without reference to the overall society at all, and of course the answer was a resounding “No.”

If you want your vampire society to be a thing that the players aren't burning to the ground like Frost or Blade, you have to make it be something that the players want persisting. It's OK to have the players be Death Dealers who defend the Vampire Covens, but you need buy-in from the players. If vampire society is all rotten to the core and based on lies and the players know this, they aren't going to do it. While you definitely want the option to tell the “Elder vampire betrays you and leaves you holding the bag” story, that has to be one elder, not the entire ruling council. If the players want all the core leadership staked and burned, they are just going to go the Frost or Blade route immediately.

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[/img]
If the players want to be either of these characters, your vampire society is unstable because it is the antagonist of the first series.

AncientH

A big part of it is that society, even vampiric society, has to have something you want. For a lot of vampires, they might want status among their peers, blood slaves, a steady income from a stable portfolio, etc. ...basically, a world in which they are already top dogs and they want to stay that way, which means shitting on all the younger vampires underneath. The thing is, part of being a hot-shit elder vampire is having minions, and vampires reproduce asexually so eventually the not-so-elder vampire makes their minions, who makes their minions, and...eventually, you end up with a lower class of young, very shit-upon vampires who will never, ever be like Lestat or Dracula.

So why not eat the rich?

Or, to put it another way, why not opt out of the rat race and seek alternate means of getting what you want? Be that blood, cash, information, influence, or power - some or all of which might be equivalent in a CyberFang game - the top-level vampires have it and the outsiders want it. So there's room for an exchange. A coterie of younger vampires is eminently disposable, deniable, and when skilled or experienced useful for all the kind of jobs that Edgerunners do...and all you have to do is pay them. Maybe a grimoire. Maybe with access to a blood supply. Maybe just with money. There are a lot of ways to compensate people for what they want to do, and compensation is motivation. Establish what your player vampires want, and the rest is easy.

So the Game of Ages definitely has a place for "mercenary pawns" - provided you actually promise them things they want, rather than just try to dick them around with vague threats. It doesn't even require that the player vampires be completely outside vampire society, but they need to be outside the general clan-vs-clan fuckery that means an Assamite, Setite, and a Toreador can't be on the same team.

Frank

The assumed relationship between the player characters and the vampire society is very important to determining what kinds of stories you are going to tell and thus what kinds of tasks a mission has to divide amongst its ensemble protagonists. It is entirely possible to imagine a society where there are multiple factions the players could align themselves with who have different relationships with the society and thus interact in different ways. You could be on Team Blade or Team Frost, for example. Deacon Frost wants to kill the leadership of the vampires because he wants radical reform and hates the tyranny of the elders. Blade of course wants to kill the leadership of the vampires because he's out to kill all the vampires and bring vampire society crashing down. Those are two reasonable reactions to have towards the ancient tyrannical vampire elders being a bunch of assholes. You could want to` radically reform things or you could want to burn it all down and walk away in the morning light. And you could make a game where Frost's Reformers faction and Blade's Slayers faction were both presented as reasonable unlife choices for the player characters.

But when you present multiple factions with different points of view and relationships with the game's society, you still have to give them all the same facts. If there are alternative facts, you can't tell cooperative stories in any meaningful way. And this means that if the vampire leadership are sufficiently sympathetic that the players could plausibly want to work for them, the radical factions trying to murder stab them will seem unsympathetic to the point that the players won't want to work with or for them. Conversely, if the rebels are considered sympathetic enough for players to gravitate towards them, then agents of The Man who shoot the rebels on sight are automatically the bad guys. That's just how it works.

What I'm talking about is the Camarilla and the Sabbat. You can't have two player character factions that are kill on sight with each other. You just obviously cannot do that. At least, not if you want to maintain anything remotely similar to a serious tone. The Alliance versus Horde battles in World of Warcraft are explicitly pointless struggles between player character factions, but they are also literally violence reduced to a spectator sport, where the stakes of the conflict have been lowered to counting points and awarding trophies. If you wanted any of your fans to ever talk about serious issues within the game and not have a conga line of drunk soccer hooligans barge through with a rude poem you have to actually commit to which teams are sympathetic enough that players might potentially be on board with joining. And all of those factions need to be willing to see members of all the other factions and not shoot them in the face. Not so that you leave open the door for team-ups (though that might be important as well), but because it's just not reasonable to expect players to identify with characters who callously murder characters they identify with. Which isn't to say there can't be conflict between factions players might join, just that like Blade and Frost you need to be able to draw a venn diagram of overlapping and conflicting goals – even though the movie ends with a sword fight between them, Frost repeatedly attempts to join forces with Blade because much of their agenda is compatible.


This kind of conflict can never be taken more seriously than Warriors versus Cavaliers or Capitals versus Golden Knights.

The Camarilla and Sabbat were just not a good way of attempting to set things up, and honestly can't be fixed. White Wolf even appears to have realized this with the production of the Invictus, Carthians, Ordo Dracul, Lancea Sanctum, and Circle. These factions were able to co-exist, but only by dint of being essentially empty. I can't tell you what the Circle of the Crone wants or why you'd want to join or oppose it (other than to learn the sorcery that is taught in their club house, obviously. That isn't acceptable either. But you can't even really design or imagine appropriately motivated groups until you make the core decision about whether your proposed supernatural society was something you should be preserving or fighting within the context of the stories. If you're trying to hold all this shit together, it's reasonable for the various playable factions to be various organs of the state or members of the junta – like the Great Houses in Dune. If you're trying to tear it all down, the various playable factions can be various rebel factions like the Judean People's Front or the People's Front of Judea.

AncientH

Being committed to a fictional belief system is a bit hard for a lot of players. There's a reason why the Factions in Planescape are bullshit. Abstract philosophies don't generally map out well to real-life. You get a Roman Catholic Church that preaches love and understanding and yet historically sanctioned crusades and still covers up for pedophile priests. You get a Confederate States of America that tries to tout itself as the Second American Revolution and freedom from tyranny but is really just concerned with maintaining slavery within its borders. Real life groups are messy and ugly and compromised...but for people to join them, they have to have some views that are amenable. The key to making interesting conflicts between groups is not to make one side perfect, but to be able to justify joining either.

For the Camarilla, the excuse was the Masquerade. The Camarilla should have touted itself as there to provide the best unlife for vampires. It's conservative, hidebound, and driven by the fact that vampires need to rule from the shadows, but it also needs to be effective at maintaining that secrecy, dealing with the inevitable breaches, and keeping vampires from killing each other. To align yourself with the Camarilla means that you at least implicitly think that it is best if vampires have some sort of government that keeps the peace night-to-night and lets vampire continue to vampire as long as they don't rock the boat too much.

For the Sabbat, the excuse is that the Antediluvians are going to rise up and eat us all, and fucking this secrecy shit we're lords of the night. In the early fluff they started out as a medieval death cult and based on what Christianity was like back then, coming back as an immortal vampire with bitchin' magical powers was a pretty sweet deal. Plus, you sidestepped all the bullshit societal limitations on who you were and what you could do. Born a peasant? Jewish? A woman? Become a vampire. All that other shit zeroes out. And if you align with the Sabbat, you're basically giving the finger to big government vampires as sellouts, sheep waiting to be culled by the elders when they wake up thirsty.

The Iconnu and the Anarchs had no excuse, except that they wanted out of vampire politics. By default, they just fuck off and pretend not to care. And you know what? There are people to whom that is an attractive option, and they're going to run into conflict anyway, because other vampires are going to try and run their lives by their own rules anyway. They're not part of a crazy cult, they don't want to follow somebody else's arbitrary rules. But these are the guys that try and set up somewhere else and do whatever they want to do.

And for most of Vampire's existence, those were your options. The Independents generally had much tighter clan politics - if you were Giovanni, you were family, and you were in the family business, reaping souls and making money. If you were Assamites, you're in a religious cult of assassins, and your unlife is mapped out for you. Vampire society never really had the space for independent groups that operated outside of mainstream control but could still be used by powerful individuals or groups to further their own interests.

For CyberFang to work, the basic status quo needs to be tighter. If the Masquerade is at all intact, The Camarilla basically needs to have won. They are the surveillance state, they are the shadowy vampire government that rules unlife for all vampires...or at least, almost all of them. And the Camarilla needs to be sufficiently factional that individual within it could find a use for a coterie of younger vampires to operate as disposable assets. The Sabbat, if it still exists, are reduced to a guerrilla-cell resistance movement, ideological fanatics. You might accept jobs from them, but you aren't one of them. The Anarchs, if they exist, exist on the fringes where the Camarilla's control is weak. There are no Iconnu, no independents. This is a dystopia.

That is a possibility, if you want to keep as much V:TM lore as that. But there are good reasons you should scrap more than that. And it is notable that the setup is that the PCs aren't members of any of them.

Frank

Cyberpunk and Shadowrun mostly declined to have the players be members of factions at all. And that's a reasonable life choice. If the ethos is supposed to be mercenary trouble shooters, it's totally OK for the player characters to be factionless loners who take various missions from and against various factions. It can be like Lost Girl or Supernatural, where the protagonists explicitly refuse to join the available factions and wander around solving mysteries and sticking their noses into things. That's a very popular setup for obvious reasons. For one thing, it means that you don't have to front load a lot of information about what the factions want or what they really want or whatever.


Urban Fantasy involving factionless mercenary supernatural troubleshooters is practically a subgenre of its own.

Now if you want the players to be Edgerunners navigating the shadows and getting hired by one faction against another and so on and so forth, you are still constrained by having the various factions you might work for be overall not bad enough that you wouldn't consider working for them. It's a subtle point, but making the mercenary thing work requires that all the factions be bad enough that you'd be willing to work against them but not so bad that you'd be willing to work for them. Crass power grabs and callous money accumulation are good goals for such organizations to have, but “blotting out the sun” or whatever is absolutely not.

This was a problem that Shadowrun ran into. Where Aztechnology was actually so bad that it made players unwilling to work for them. The bad guys of the moment have to be bad guys of the moment, where they aren't so evil that the players end up wanting to continue their vendetta from adventure to adventure.


Surprisingly, few players are willing to talk cynically about shades of gray around Super Evil Megacorp.

AncientH

It's a fine point, and one which V:tM always struggled with too. The Sabbat's main goal of "fuck the Camarilla" is not massively appealing. Their terrorist tactics are a turn-off. Their dabbling in diablerie and diabolism are unattractive.

Which is of course the point. The Sabbat were originally the bad guys. But the Camarilla are fuckmothering vampires. How bad do the bad guys have to be to be worse?

I mean, without just coming out and doing a reducto ad hitlerum

But the thing is...people got into Vampire: the Masquerade to be the bad guy. The dark angel of the night, eating virgins and deflowering bad boys, doing all the hit that would piss off their Southern Baptist parents. And the whole thing about getting off on wanting to play someone "evil"...it's not very cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk protagonists are not always very relateable, but that's because they're usually having a hard time relating to humanity in general, not because they literally eat people. There's some common ground with vampires in that you're still dealing with the consequences of becoming posthuman, and that feels very identifiable when you're a teenager and still coming to grips with becoming an adult human. Lots of people want to be part of the accepted group but don't know how to get there from being who and what they are.

So...that's another stack of options we haven't really discussed in relation to CyberFang. The idea that somebody found out about vampires and decided to make them...better. And how much absolutely darker the setting can get, because of that. Because you could have Daybreakers-style blood farms and a vampire police state; that's a very cyberpunk kind of dystopia. You can have anemic wageslaves that tithe a bit of blood on a regular basis to fuel the immortal cadre of upper management, and Edgerunner teams are hired by rivals to stake and destroy corporate officers that have held their positions for centuries so as to make room for those underneath them. Vampire cyberware could be demonic engines powered by the souls they devour, or the megacorp might use blood bonds to enforce employment, ghouling entire sectors...

And that's the simple shit. It can always get darker.

Frank

So naturally the question arises: What would you do?

It's a complex question and it does deserve an answer. I readily admit that After Sundown was mostly an attempt to tackle World of Darkness from a mechanical perspective and it doesn't go nearly far enough in addressing the structural issues. Many people have asked me what exactly their characters are supposed to do in After Sundown. And well, fair point. There are a lot of ways you could iron this all out, as alluded to above – but it does require some tough decisions being made and here's my thoughts on the matter:

• The characters are collectively a Band, and it is assumed that they are members in good standing of the Cauchemar and intend for that to continue being the case.
• The default Band is either a group of Vanguards – troubleshooters who deal with a series of threats, problems, and crimes within a Cauchemar dominion, or Pioneers – a group of supernatural creatures who go to a region with little or no organized supernatural activity in order to establish Cauchemar dominion and to establish themselves as the ruling Council.
• Each Band is in character supposed to have at least one member who performs the role of Warrior, Spy, Mystic, and Face. The Cauchemar actively attempts to recruit members into its Vanguard and Pioneer bands that can fit into those broad slots. The game is still skill-based rather than class-based, so there'd be several examples of characters fitting into the different roles who are different kinds of Kin.
• The dominion is assumed to have diplomatic relations with other dominions, some of which are from other Syndicates, and some of which are off-world. In addition, there are things like Zombies and Hellbeasts that cause problems for the dominion and require bughunt missions to get rid of.

That probably doesn't sound super radical, and it probably doesn't even sound especially ambitious. But the key is that it's a radical departure from World of Darkness in presentation and structure. There are of course an infinite number of means of reworking these things. But they do have to be reworked.

AncientH

And that, I think is...all we have the juice for. As an intellectual and creative exercise, Cyberpunk/Vampire is a very interesting proposition. As a product, World of Future Darkness is a mess that highlights the flaws in both games.

[Thaluikhain]

The nWoD attempt at a reboot of Vampire came up with the “Five by Five” model.

That sounds not a million miles away from taking a race and taking a class. How similar was that in practice (and in theory, for that matter)?

[Longes]

White Wolf would occasionally try to get you to play an "out of the box" character, and it was always some stupid shit like a Giovanni that didn't take any points in Necromancy and through all their freebie points into being rich

To be fair - that's not a stupid Giovanni. That's a smart Giovanni who won the game. Resources are the secret ultimate Sphere of Magic, and wielding it is way better than raising up a couple zombies. With the exception of Dominate and Presence, vampire powers usually don't help you live a happy comfortable life. Turning into mist is great and helps you in fighting other vampires, but it doesn't really help you pay the electricity bill.

[Mord]

That sounds not a million miles away from taking a race and taking a class. How similar was that in practice (and in theory, for that matter)?

Not remotely. Covenants were the conceptual replacement for VTM Sects, and as such they were political organizations, but there were a few tweaks from the VTM template of the Camarilla and Sabbat. First, each Covenant nominally had its own flavor of proprietary blood magic (note that joining a Covenant does not automatically give you access to said magic). Second, because Justin Achilli is a shitty designer, the Sects went from having world-spanning power and influence, to having bullshit tiny small advantages and low stakes. There was still no reason to join any sects because none of them had a clear agenda that you as a person could possibly care about.

If I were making an analogy, I'd say Clan is to Race as Covenant is to After-School Club.