Vampire: The Requiem First Edition and the New World of Darkness

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Doc Sammy

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Anyone here a fan of Vampire: The Requiem? Specifically the First Edition from 2004? It seems that after the Second Edition came out in 2014, everyone forgot about the original iteration of Requiem, even though I always considered the First Edition of Requiem (and New World of Darkness in general) to be much better than the Second Edition and the related Chronicles of Darkness games.

Anyone here have memories of playing or running Requiem? Feel free to discuss Requiem and the New World of Darkness games in general. Please keep it limited to the First Edition materials which ran from 2004-2010, as I'm kind of sick of everyone shilling the new 2e Chronicles of Darkness material, especially on Onyx Path's forums.
 
I never made the jump to "new" WOD, my interest in WoD having long since waned by that point. The only one I read was Changeling The Lost. It was okay, as a sort of modern day Dark Ages Fae, but my gaming was in a different direction by that point, so it sat on my shelf until one of the ebay purges.

I'm sort of weird in that I started with Requiem and the New WoD first and then worked my way back into Masquerade and the Old WoD because everyone in the Roanoke WoD scene hated Requiem except me. So I had to make the switch to Masquerade. I'd love to get a Requiem play-by-post game going one day.
 
I had fond memories of designing a Requiem setting, but never got the campaign off the ground. People were too attached to what had come before.

I know some people saw it as rather artificial, but I loved the "five clans + five ideologies" set up. It managed to be back-to-basics (something vampire sorely needed), flavorful, quick for newbies to graps, and above all super conducive to complex webs of loyalty and intrigue. I didn't mind it when that principle showed up in the rest of the line either, though it wasn't as elegant in WTF and MTAW.
 
I had fond memories of designing a Requiem setting, but never got the campaign off the ground. People were too attached to what had come before.

I know some people saw it as rather artificial, but I loved the "five clans + five ideologies" set up. It managed to be back-to-basics (something vampire sorely needed), flavorful, quick for newbies to graps, and above all super conducive to complex webs of loyalty and intrigue. I didn't mind it when that principle showed up in the rest of the line either, though it wasn't as elegant in WTF and MTAW.

Agreed. I usually did some minor homebrewing to my Requiem games, most notably chopping out the "emotional deadness" angle that was held over from Revised Masquerade, as well as removing Predator's Taint. My games were less "personal horror" and more "Grand Theft Auto and The Sopranos with fangs".
 
Agreed. I usually did some minor homebrewing to my Requiem games, most notably chopping out the "emotional deadness" angle that was held over from Revised Masquerade, as well as removing Predator's Taint. My games were less "personal horror" and more "Grand Theft Auto and The Sopranos with fangs".

Yeah, taking the "fun" out of being a monster may be the right move for fiction, but for most tabletop groups I feel it's seriously missing the point. Sure, if you lay on the depressing flavor text thick enough many players will nominally go along with the 'personal horror' pretense because they feel they are 'supposed to', but deep down what most of them really want is...



And there's nothing wrong with that in the world of make-believe games.

For similar reasons, I've toyed with removing one of the things that has dissuaded me from running Promethean: the fact that the end goal is to become an ordinary chump (possibly with amnesia) and celebrate that fact. I don't think the journey would be all that cheapened if you turned from a hated monster-man with bitchin' alchemical powers into a regular man with bitchin' alchemical powers.
 
Yeah, personal horror is a crock of shit in my opinion. So in my Requiem games I chop out emotional deadness, Predator's Taint, and Humanity.
 
Have you ever considered running Vampires using a supers game? None of the gothic or angst, just superpowered immortals and their secret wars
 
Have you ever considered running Vampires using a supers game? None of the gothic or angst, just superpowered immortals and their secret wars

I have considered converting Vampire to Big Eyes Small Mouth before. Even wrote some conversion notes, but I never got to test them out.
 
Have you ever considered running Vampires using a supers game? None of the gothic or angst, just superpowered immortals and their secret wars

There is the 'Network Effect' to consider. It's usually easier to recruit players for "WoD Vampire but less angsty" than for "Some RPG system you don't know that has been molded into a simulacrum of Vampire but less angsty."

It's just like how a proposed fantasy campaign needs a really strong and distinctive hook to justify the use of any system other than D&D.
 
There is the 'Network Effect' to consider. It's usually easier to recruit players for "WoD Vampire but less angsty" than for "Some RPG system you don't know that has been molded into a simulacrum of Vampire but less angsty."

It's just like how a proposed fantasy campaign needs a really strong and distinctive hook to justify the use of any system other than D&D.

True, but if you do use the WoD System, you'll have thematic purists condemning you for not doing personal horror. So it's a gamble either way.
 
True, but if you do use the WoD System, you'll have thematic purists condemning you for not doing personal horror.

But like I said, most players don't really, in their gamer hearts, care about that personal horror stuff anyway.

However, if you really do run into a supposed 'thematic purist', just let them make whatever character they want and start running the game, but don't bother to provide any circumstances for angst. Don't place any depressing NPCs, don't set up any moral quandaries, focus on stylish and upbeat locations rather than dreary ones, have lots of ambiguity-free fights, etc.

If they want to monologue or mope in character once in a while just let them do it, respond as little as politely possible, and move on, but I'll bet they'll soon forget the pretentious drivel when all the stuff around their character is subtly steering them toward something more fun.
 
But like I said, most players don't really, in their gamer hearts, care about that personal horror stuff anyway.

However, if you really do run into a supposed 'thematic purist', just let them make whatever character they want and start running the game, but don't bother to provide any circumstances for angst. Don't place any depressing NPCs, don't set up any moral quandaries, focus on stylish and upbeat locations rather than dreary ones, have lots of ambiguity-free fights, etc.

If they want to monologue or mope in character once in a while just let them do it, respond as little as politely possible, and move on, but I'll bet they'll soon forget the pretentious drivel when all the stuff around their character is subtly steering them toward something more fun.

Sounds about right to me. I'll get a game going as soon as I can, then. Maybe if there's enough interest here, I can run it as a play-by-post game on here.
 
Roanoke seems more like a Werewolf location to me. Skipping over the fact that it is specifically mentioned a few times in Werewolf sourcebooks, just look at it:

http://res.cloudinary.com/simplevie...line_57425d0b-b199-4cfe-86f8-001d4ee11ef3.jpg

That's really the archetypal venue for tossing giant hairy dog dudes off of parking lot roofs and into oncoming highway traffic before loping off into a second-growth forest to finish the battle around a decaying native American museum.
 
please say Roanoke...

Roanoke, Virginia it is. Should be easy since I'm fairly familiar with the area. After all, I live there. Also, Roanoke is not to be confused with the lost Roanoke Colony, which is in North Carolina.

For more information....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke,_Virginia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_metropolitan_area
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_County,_Virginia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem,_Virginia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinton,_Virginia
 
Also, Roanoke is not to be confused with the lost Roanoke Colony, which is in North Carolina.

Shoot, that's embarrassing.

In any case, I notice the population: 308,707

That's a small, really tight pond in Vampire rules:

Vampire: The Masquerade (2nd edition) said:
As a rule of thumb, assume that there is one vampire for every 100,000 mortals. (...) The cities could certainly hold more Kindred, but there are legitimate fears of discovery. (...) Despite this, however, there are currently far too many Kindred for the mortal population to support; the ranks of the anarchs have swelled to unprecedented proportions.

So you're looking at a tiny handful of vampires, which can actually be cool. It would make the players feel special. Their opposition could mainly be regular humans (dangerous in numbers) and vampire hunters.
 
Shoot, that's embarrassing.

In any case, I notice the population: 308,707

That's a small, really tight pond in Vampire rules:



So you're looking at a tiny handful of vampires, which can actually be cool. It would make the players feel special. Their opposition could mainly be regular humans (dangerous in numbers) and vampire hunters.

I never really followed the whole "1 Vampire for every 100.000 Mortals" rule. I prefer "1 Vampire for every 50,000 Mortals", though it is still a small pool. I'm thinking of making the coterie a biker gang, a vampire chapter of the Heathens MC, based on the real-life Pagans MC (the largest motorcycle gang in Virginia, with a chapter in nearby Bedford in real life). Not sure what covenant that this coterie will pledge loyalty to though.
 
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What is it about VtR1 that you like better than VtR2?

I played a really good VtR1 game for a couple of years but found VtR2 to be a better game overall. Though TBH I kind of dig the VtR1 bloodline glut.
 
I played a really good VtR1 game for a couple of years but found VtR2 to be a better game overall.

What is your opinion of VtR2's heavy use of "conditions" and "tilts" in its game design? Whenever I dig into the topic, that's among the first things the detractors bring up, but I haven't acquired any CoD books yet to see for myself.
 
What is it about VtR1 that you like better than VtR2?

I played a really good VtR1 game for a couple of years but found VtR2 to be a better game overall. Though TBH I kind of dig the VtR1 bloodline glut.

VtR2 has a lot of mechanical and setting changes I do not like. I hate Conditions, Tilts, and Touchstones (as if VtR1's Humanity system wasn't bad enough, they managed to make it shittier), replacing Virtues and Vices with Masks and Dirges, the reworked Disciplines, and most of all, the over-emphasis of the Strix.
 
What is your opinion of VtR2's heavy use of "conditions" and "tilts" in its game design? Whenever I dig into the topic, that's among the first things the detractors bring up, but I haven't acquired any CoD books yet to see for myself.

Conditions, like D&D4 Conditions, are standardized modifiers to character actions, associated with specific handicaps or events. These can be as prosaic as Shaken or Blind, as intangible as Guilty or Embarassing Secret, or as esoteric as Claimed (by a spirit) or Shadow Gate (applied to a location where the Gauntlet has been torn open). PC action that successfully resolves a Condition is one of a few things that earns the PC a Beat, and five Beats = 1XP.

Tilts are temporary, mostly combat-specific Conditions, whose resolution does not earn Beats. Examples include Arm Wrack, Knocked Down and Sick.

I find them genre-appropriate, especially in CoD (picture the typical horror movie protagonist, beset by a curse, fighting off possession, getting seriously wounded while pursued by an undead serial killer, etc.) and not too much of a hassle. Okay, maybe a bit, as they do scale up complexity; but they do sort of make up for the loss of the oWoD death spiral and bring back some much needed tension to combats, chases and supernatural fuckery.

VtR2 has a lot of mechanical and setting changes I do not like. I hate Conditions, Tilts, and Touchstones (as if VtR1's Humanity system wasn't bad enough, they managed to make it shittier), replacing Virtues and Vices with Masks and Dirges, the reworked Disciplines, and most of all, the over-emphasis of the Strix.

I see. Conditions and Tilts do increase mechanical complexity; Masks and Dirges are really oWoD Demeanor and Nature, and I am okay with this (though I myself have wondered whether to substitute them for ye olde Virtue and Vice, which seems simple enough to do); and Touchstones I love (for providing a mechanical reason for the average leech to remain in touch with his or her old life), but they are definitely game changers. I am also okay with the Discipline updates. But I think I understand your gripes.
 
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Well I ran Paris by Night with Masquerade for eight years, then rebooted the setting with Requiem for three years or so. It's now part of my overarching multiverse, of which all the games I run are part of, under the Enrill umbrella. Requiem had some really strong points, like the streamlining of rules between "magic" types like vampires, werewolves etc, nuking origin stories and metaplot so you could build your own (I actually reintroduced Caine and Antediluvians in my Requiem reboot, but with a much more legendary/religious slant, if you will), and a whole bunch of other things besides that made the games starting with Requiem worthwhile.

Now these don't replace classic Old World of Darkness. If that's what you like, metaplot and all, then this is what it is, and there are strong reasons to like it all too, or instead of, or in addition to, no question about it.
 
Doc Sammy said:
... and most of all, the over-emphasis of the Strix...

... nuking origin stories and metaplot so you could build your own...

Just how inescapably meta-plotty are these Strix in the 2nd edition? I thought they were just a new 1-2 page antagonist option, but Doc makes them sound like something more.
 
Just how inescapably meta-plotty are these Strix in the 2nd edition? I thought they were just a new 1-2 page antagonist option, but Doc makes them sound like something more.

They get a considerably bigger page count — they're as varied as vampires themselves and pretty much serve as the ultimate foil or bogeyman to the Kindred — but there is zero metaplot involved. Take it, leave it, hack the hell out of it.

When I get to run VtR I intend to use them sparingly.
 
Just how inescapably meta-plotty are these Strix in the 2nd edition? I thought they were just a new 1-2 page antagonist option, but Doc makes them sound like something more.
I'm not sure. I stuck with the first editions, and don't care about the 2nd. I happen to own the Requiem for Rome books, and this is where the Strix appeared the first time, if I am not mistaken. They are pretty integral to the Fall of the Camarilla campaign, but if you're running RoR for other things and discard that campaign you could replace the threat they represent with something else.
 
I planned on using it as a framework for a variant campaign set up that emphasises the concepts of long life and isolation. Not necessarily because of angsty personal horror, but because vampires are super rare: there are no clans at all, no secret societies or anything like that. 1 out of a million, at least.

Also to play with the idea of outliving one's family and friends; seeing the world you know changing dramatically could be a great motivation for a party of immortals to stick together even if they don't really like one another.

The set up would work like this: each connected series of game sessions (a chapter or single module) is separated by at least a decade. Or more: you'd start at a certain time period and each "module" is an important event many years later. Start off as Victorian, eventually reach the 1980s.

Also, disciplines would only strengthen by age (time passed). Why? Because I think it's cool and emulates some Vampire media that I like.

I'd make vampire hunters more dangerous: enough so that a feasible tactic for blood drinkers would be to flee, hide and outlive your pursuers.

Some day I'll put this together...
 
I'd make vampire hunters more dangerous: enough so that a feasible tactic for blood drinkers would be to flee, hide and outlive your pursuers.

PC monsters versus smart, effective, numerically superior hunters is, from my observation, a terribly underused hook in horror RPGs.
 
There's a lot of potential with an obsessive, highly intelligent "Inspector Javert"-like villain who pursues the PCs over a few decades. Starts as an ideological young man and ends up a bitter, crazed ol coot with a personal vendetta.

Edit: instead of a "Masquerade" mechanic to keep player characters in check, you'd essentially have an "Evidence" or "tearing down the veil" system for tracking how reckless the PCs can get. Each time they are too obvious or vulgar (ie, too many witnesses and/or clues), their nemesis gets closer to catching them.
 
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