Smell that? You smell that? Pumpkins, spice, and the smell of fall in the morning. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of fall in the morning!
Working in the yard while smelling Fall in the air brings me back to the days of yore. Back when I played my first Dungeons and Dragons game. Back then, just about the whole party (all but the girl character I was playing) was killed by some oversized rats! Damn those monsters! Giant rats can be crazy scary…Being the only survivor of this epic endeavor gave my character enough experience points to level up. Jennifer became a level 2 magic-user. Woohoo! I came back home so excited! So excited about this new wonderful experience called roleplaying. And like the ignorant kid I was, I blabbed to my fundamentalists Christian parents about the wonderful time I had. Yeah. You can probably imagine how that went down, but magnify it with a “Natural 20!” Nevertheless, I digress. This article isn’t about my persecutions as a child. I’ll save that for another day.
No, we are harking back to the days of yore. Remember all the monsters you slayed or that slayed you throughout the years? Yeah good times…Well it’s October and the day of monsters is coming! I remember the first monster manual I ever picked up, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. That blue monster book was psychedelic. The blue cover had some goofy red dragon flying over a unicorn and centaur. I opened the book and several of the illustrations had been colored in, in ink. I was impressed. The book was chock full of monsters. There was the floating eye, eye of the deep, ochre jelly, nightmare, and even the taboo ones, such as devils and demons. On page 81 there it was: the giant rat. Oh and the monster’s weakness. Yesss! They are fearful of fire! This gem of a book would grow to be my guide in surviving the dungeons.
Over the years, more and more roleplaying games came to the market. And of course just about every game had monsters. But one book that came out in 1991 shifted my mentality in roleplaying.
Vampire: The Masquerade was released by White Wolf Publishing in 1991. To me this book was so cool. But also very strange…Instead of slaying monsters in this game, they proposed becoming one. What!?! I thought. How do you game master a bunch of vampires? That’s just plain nuts! So what did I do? I had my players make mortal humans that were paranormal investigators. It took me a few times GMing the game before I worked up the nerve to GM them as vampires. My friends loved the game.
About nine months later or so, my friend Rick got me Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Yeah, monster gaming was on! Like Donkey Kong! But game mastering the game for me was a bit awkward at times. I was used to D&D, Marvel Superheroes, TMNT, Star Wars, and DC Heroes. We were usually fighting the darkness, not being the darkness.
It wasn’t until my friend Alex started game mastering it did I really see Vampire: The Masquerade’s potential. The mastermind (Alex) threw in soap opera type elements into the game. What!?! This is a roleplaying game not a soap dude–we hunt, beat up, kill, and save the girl! Be that as it may, it was ingenious. We were roleplaying monsters that were trying to be human. It was great!
This brings us back to where we are now. The wind is blowing and we smell that fall is in the air. Halloween is on the way. So what monster are you planning on roleplaying that day?
Adam Lee
Latest posts by Adam Lee (see all)
- One Game to Rule Them All! - July 18, 2019
I think you nailed it Darth Pseudonym. 😉 So why do you think there are so many groups that ignore the humanity of a vampire?
Y’know, I’ve always felt like a lot of groups run Vampire wrong. So many groups play Vampire as a super-hero (well, super-villain) power fantasy — use your weird magic powers to bend mortals to your will and do anything you like in a consequence free world!
And yeah, that’s part of it, but I think Vampire is really designed to be played with characters who are basically in denial. Keeping up with your Humanity is a big deal in the rules, and what that really boils down to is that you’re playing a monster who is pretending really hard not to be a monster. He’s pretending so hard that he has started to convince himself that he really isn’t a monster (or at least, not THAT bad) while simultaneously consuming mortals for food.
Soap opera is part of it, and power fantasy is part of it, but a lot of groups seem to skip over what, to me, is the core of any vampire character.