Why This Game

Who Am I?

This is an anonymous blog to keep it separate from my public identity.

I am a tier-1 autistic / ADHD individual in his mid 40s. I have suffered with chronic depression and complex post-traumatic stress disorder for most of my life. Throughout all of this, tabletop role-playing games have been there for me, especially (but not limited to) White Wolf’s World of Darkness games. I love this retarded hobby. When I’m sad, they allow me to go to another universe in my mind, no matter where I am—I simply begin imagining these other worlds in all their complexity and joy. Autism has often made normal socializing so immensely difficult and painful for me that actually playing these games with other people has often been a challenge for me, and so I absolutely treasure the times I am able to, in person or online.

For an autistic brain, having an agreed upon set of rules and activities for social activity—particularly rules on who speaks when—is unbelievably helpful in structuring and allowing socializing to occur much more fluidly and naturally. For autistics, structure = comfort, nowhere less than when socializing. This is an aspect of TTRPGs that can be immensely helpful for both adults and children with autism. (Were it not for Gary Gygax, we may have lost the entire generation that built personal computers and the Internet—consider the sad story of James Dallas Egbert.)

I am putting this up (again, anonymously) because I suspect that a sizable proportion of adults who play these games likely have similar stories.

I work with AI constantly, and have recently discovered the Mythic Game Master Emulator system. I am fascinated with combining these technologies, along with image, video and even music LLMs, and who knows what else, to create alternate fictional worlds. Even in an era with AAA video games that can effectively transport you to “worlds that never were,” there is something about the interactive/shared/social fiction of tabletop role-playing games that can never be matched. In fact, I believe that TTRPGs are likely one of the most important and powerful tools human beings have ever created, something few if any—including the people who invented these games!—is yet to realize. This is a subject I will likely also be musing about in this blog.

What is This Game?

This will be a solo run of the classic Vampire: The Masquerade (1st Edition!) Chicago by Night chronicle, beginning in Gary, using Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition rules.

In the 35 years (!) this game has existed, the original setting and overall game design has yet to be topped—everything that came after veered away from the original game and added cruft for the sake of selling books, often obscuring the basic mechanics of the game (7 clans fighting over turf in 1 city). Later versions of the game, particularly the excellent Vampire: The Requiem and the not-so-excellent Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition have attempted to re-capture the initial magic, but when it comes to Vampire, nothing quite gets it right like the original setting—as created by Mark Rein•Hagen, Stewart Wieck and, for Chicago specifically, the eminent Andrew Greenberg.

The campaign may take many detours, but it starts with Act I, Forged in Steel, and then holds to the published supplements in this order:

• Forged in Steel (Gary, Indiana ‘starter town’ - from VTM 1st Edition)
• Forged in Steel: Blood at Dawn (Gary-based one-shot from the original VTM storyteller screen)
• Baptism in Fire/Ashes to Ashes (Excellent transitional adventure that bridges the PCs from Gary to Chicago)
• Chicago by Night, 1st Edition (The main sandbox for the setting. Full of great random adventure/encounter tables that will likely play very well with Mythic GME.)
• Succubus Club (collection of Chicago-based adventures)
• Blood Bond (a follow-up adventure to Ashes to Ashes, focused on Lodin’s erstwhile childe Edward Neally)
• Psychomachia (From Milwaukee by Night)
• Under a Blood Red Moon (the epic battle for Chicago between the Camarilla, Sabbat, and Lupines—you know, the one the Underworld series ripped off)

If the early sessions go well, I may add a couple of side games with different characters for the Sabbat and Lupine factions—these would also lead up to Under a Blood Red Moon, with all of my characters starring in that epic war.

The Sabbat game would center around Sword of Caine shock troops slowly amassing in Detroit for a strike on Chicago, and consist of the published adventures in:

• Storyteller’s Guide to the Sabbat
• Awakening: Diablerie Mexico
• Montreal by Night

The Lupine/Garou/Werewolf game would center around a new pack from the Sept of the Green in New York making its bones, and consist of some combination of:

• Rite of Passage
• Rage Across New York / Sept of the Green starter ideas in Werewolf 1st Edition
• Valkenburg Foundation
• Rage Across the Amazon
• Rage Across Russia

With all factions converging for the great War for Chicago in 1993, which should be the climax of the game.

If I get really crazy, I might just throw in Hell’s Highway, the one-off from Mummy 1st Edition.

(Obviously, I will not be putting up the original supplements themselves or copyrighted material. If you’re interested, I recommend getting them on eBay or DriveThruRPG—they’re all well worth it.)

Why Vampire?

Of all of the world’s TTRPGs, I believe that Vampire has the most to teach us about the human condition. When this game was originally published, the idea of shadowy cabals controlling the world while feeding on human beings was the stuff of horror literature and conspiracy theory. Now, it is the nightly news. In a post-Epstein world, in which we see the value of human life devalued more and more with each passing day, in which we learn daily about human trafficking and child sex trafficking networks, and in which evil operates not behind closed doors but in the open, with a smile, Vampire becomes not fantasy but useful metaphor—a tool not for escaping reality, but understanding it.

Some days it seems that nothing the writers of the game could come up with (not even in Black Dog mode!) could possibly compete with the cruelty and callousness of the real world.

In fact, I can be far more cynical. Were I to rewrite this game today, I would dispense completely with the idea of the Masquerade. The game’s original designers assumed that vampires had to hide from humanity, for if their crimes were to be revealed, they would be annihilated.

Now we know better. Monsters like Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk operate in plain sight, all around us, and nobody cares. In fact, if the price is right, they all but fall over themselves to participate. The disturbing reality of evil in the real world is that it flaunts its nature openly, relying not just on the cowardice of those who witness it, but their active disbelief and denial (Oh, the neighbor couldn’t possibly be doing that… She must be making it up…).

Vampires need not enforce their own Masquerade—their victims do it for them. This and many other themes will likely be explored in this game.

How Long Will This Go On?

As long as I feel like it.

Can I join/contribute?

Maybe. If I see a mechanical way to add that later, I may open this up for additional players. However, play-by-post games, while great, are SLOW, VERY SLOW. So that makes it a lot harder to get through all this material.