The Gaming Den

Notably, people from New Jersey do not claim to live in New York City. Now with New Orleans you're not going to have another major domain abutting, so go crazy. In Los Angeles or New York, where it is densely packed and domains are geographically small, you need a focus that is much tighter. I live...

Me!

Their is no reason to make them all the same size, but they have to make sense. If a small city is close to a large city it's going to be natural that, over time, the large city ends up in charge. There doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to assume that state or international boundaries matter ...

That sounds fine. To make this work essentially you need everywhere where supernaturals exist to be claimed by someone, and you need someone more powerful above them to keep them from deciding "screw the masquerade, lets..." and getting away with it. So this implies that there is an overla...

Sana Cruz is probably going to end up belonging to the Bay Area, or SF or San Jose domain, depending on how you want to slice it up. As long as you send your tribute to the boss and don't get caught plotting against him or try to pop the masquerade the vampires of Santa Cruz can manage it however th...

Well, you could have some massively profitable hugely valuable company that poses as the advocate off freedom and free speech with a motto like "Don't be evil" that secretly has a project to make enormous money by reporting citizens engaging in WrongThink to their government; said governme...

Being the vampire who runs a rural county or large town could be a good racket. But not for a cooperative game.

Prak's first two examples of classes he thought were appropriate to a game about sneaking around and uncovering webs of intrigue were Bard , a class whose every class feature revolves around shouting, and Cleric , a class who is required by law to prominently display their allegiance every time the...

These days, in modern Western countries, murdering people for minor insults is considered socially unacceptable. This is an extremely recent phenomenon, and at all universal. Indeed, there are still cultures today where not murdering people over minor insults, even people who you nominally have a d...

If you are trying to play a game where your adventures charge tanks counting on their +5 plate armor and 300 hit points to protect them from machine gun fire and flamethowers, then sure.

Well, you could steal 'A Colder War'.
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Wouldn't you still get old vampires (or need a reason not to), just not European ones? It's an inventive idea, but one I could see being handled really, really badly. I shudder to think what White Wolf would have done with that idea 20 years ago. If you assume that vampires are alive, then the old ...

It's of course possible that, while it is widely believed that crosses repel vampires, crosses don't actually do that in the game. If you assume they are not some sort of evil demon-thing then religious ritual-type defenses of any flavor should be as effective as they would be against a tiger. Same ...

I did mention that there was no there there in Laurel K. Hamilton's books. It's all plot, there are no underlying rules about how it works. And there was no exploration of 'OK, so x is true, what does that imply?' It's all "what is the most convenient way for this to work today?". However ...

There is a highly successful vampire book series in which the general public knows that religious symbols are capable of destroying vampires (whose existence is universally known) if used by someone who believes. Whether or not the vampire knows that it is there. Which is not exactly identical to pr...

The assumption that that Bram Stoker accurately told what happened is easy to undermine. The people involved were not exactly well-balanced dispassionate observers making careful notes. "The Dracula Tape" is an example. So beyond the existence of a vampire who people call Dracula there are...

Saberhagan's version was basically that Vlad was really angry when he got himself murdered and awoke as a vampire some time later to take his revenge.

No devil, etc.

Well, there is a highly successful urban fantasy series that features an accountant. But I'll admit it does starts with him throwing his boss the werewolf out a 14th story window, not with him completing the year-end closing.

If you have 2 factions, one of whom opposes the ruler of the city, there is an obvious solution available to the ruler, who presumably is an old, powerful and pretty damn ruthless person. So I'd probably not have one side running around claiming they are the "resistance" when the guy they ...

Or the PCs arrive on a 787 from Chicago at LAX and get met by the young woman who hands them their new CHP detective credentials, a target folder and the keys to the armored black SUVs full of guns.

It seems like you're thinking about the expansion model of Shadowrun. You have the BBB that contains basic rules for character generation and chapters that cover combat, magic, matrix, and equipment. Then you have expansion books that are things like the Magic book and the Matrix book and the Cyber...

So an example of lucky vs smart? I can kind of buy that given how awful the game is if you try to play the rules as written, but there are a LOT of urban fantasy books sold and there was obviously a lot of Vampire books sold, so there is obviously setting appeal. How many readers have any interests ...

You may want to tell the stories about lone vampire or vampire gangs going on blood orgies night after night. But those are the stories of vampires who get caught (usually by a remotely competent cop or a some random teenagers). I suspect they get caught by the hit teams sent by masquerade central,...

As Franks has pointed out, you can maintain belivability for that sort of approach with a tiny number of vampires. You can't have many thousands of vampires in a developed country killing lots of people in each year and have a game world where Wikipedia is a useful resource for the players. For exam...

I always assumed that vampires group together for access to an active nightlife/drug scene. You get to know pretty quickly who can be picked off easily in that scene because everyone will just assume they got into their van and moved on to the next town or they ODed in a ditch somewhere. I live in ...