Vampire Adventure

It was my birthday. Then I got sick. Feeling old and wretched, I was in the perfect mindset to revisit the excellent Thousand Year Old Vampire solo RPG.

It had been a while and I stalled a bit at Character Creation. "Imagine a character from the distant past" is such an open prompt, I ended up rolling some dice to generate a year*, then googling what happened that year.  Apparently in 1498, The English Merchant Adventurers Guild were granted a trade monopoly with the Netherlands.  Merchant Adventurers Guild?  Sign me up!

That sort of discovery is a huge strength of the game. I'd found a corner of history that captured my interest and imagination and I had fun reading around, finding out about these Merchant Adventurers. 

After a couple of hours I had a newly sired vampire, skulking around Amsterdam having just murdered his best friend, with a beloved child sister back home in London whose prospects were suddenly looking very bleak indeed.  She actually became a vampire too, I don't know what became of her after that.

I had a fun afternoon bouncing around the prompts in the book making friends, drinking blood, getting buried for 100 years. Wikipedia was a helpful co-pilot for the gamebook, though I definitely found there was a balance to be struck with how faithfully to stick to history. I settled on a relaxed approach, using it mainly as a jumping off point (similar to the prompts in the book). This is pretty much the same approach I use for running D&D in a published setting like the Forgotten Realms.  Try to relax, and let your own version emerge organically.

I should have adopted another good practice from running D&D actually and had a 'go-to' resource or method for generating character names.  You need a lot of names for TYOV!  Next time I play I'll maybe try it with this random name generator from Behind The Name.

There's also a balance to be struck with how 'close' you position yourself to your vampire. You want to get into their head to be able to make decisions that are true to the character, but the game is at its best (I think) when revelling in the gloom, embracing the darkness as things just get worse for your vampire. So you don't want to be too close.

I did notice though that I'd created a vampire that was mostly just trying to find a quiet, safe space to Get Stuff Done.  The most heart-breaking moment for him was having to flee his research laboratory in Florence. By the time he'd re-established himself in the University of Altdorf, he'd forgotten what drove him to seek knowledge in the first place.

As with the last time I played it, real life started happening before my game finished, and I'm not sure when or if I'll get a chance to find out what happened to my vampire. But I left him in a good spot, somewhere in the 18th Century, schmoozing around the aristocracy offering private night-time tuition.  What could go wrong?

* I used 3d10 for a d1000, then added 1000 to the result to give me a year between 1000 and 2000 AD.