Experiments in Setting Design: Districts, Families and Sandboxes

I’m not a fan of sandbox game design. In my experience, most people who do this either create nothing and sort of hope the players will come up with something, or design gobs and gobs of stuff that quickly overwhelms the players. I vastly prefer “quest” directed gameplay, where I give you, you know, something to do, and you get to figure out what the world is like by having it run up and hit you in the face.

But after playing things like Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto, I kinda wonder if I can’t do it another way. They create huge worlds, and then point you in a direction. Wherever you go, there are interesting possibilities, and even if you go flying off the rails, the world remains fascinating. Vampire seems ideally suited to this style of play, as does any urban fantasy game. You create the city and players just… play in it. I give a strong, starting “quest,” and then let players sort of get involved from there. My typical story involves bringing players to an interesting spot, letting them do what they want, and then wrapping up and moving on when they’ve “played enough.” This could work the same way, only on a much larger scale.

It’s not like I lack material. Weapons of the Gods had more than 50 NPCs (at least 50 fully statted holy cow). In a horror game where characters can die (and even have the players killing them off), it makes sense to try to have even more. So I’m trying an interesting experiment: Families.

Damnation City suggests designing a city in terms of Districts and Sites. You create an over-reaching district (say, Chinatown) and then design sites within it (Say, a dojo, a brothel, an occult book store). This makes it easier to figure out how to come up with an entire city worth of sites, because they’re broken down into districts.

So, why not do the same for NPCs? You come up with families of NPCs. Perhaps there’s a group of NPCs from Chinatown, chinese who descend from some immigrants back in the 1860s when people were building the rails, and now are quite Americanized. Come up with 5 specific NPCs per family, design 10 or so families. Now, it’s easier to design 50 NPCs and each NPC comes with prewritten attachements. Got a thing for the cute asian girl who keeps showing up at the night clubs? Did you know her younger sister is in school? Or her aunt is a hardcore detective? Or that a boy from the other chinatown family has opinions about the daughters of this family and who they should be with? Suddenly, there’s a whole web of relationships for your character to explore and, should he choose, screw up.

I’ll try it. We’ll see how well it works.

Wierd Wikipedia

Finally, after months of collecting, I wanted to offer my “weird wikipedia.” Try not to read it in the dark (Because, you know, it’s hard to read stuff without a light on)

WoD: Enemies

“Foes: the Redshirts” is up, over at my website.

ED: Link fixed now

Vampire: Reading List

There are more books in the WoD line than you can use, intentionally, as it’s become rather GURPS-like in its modularity. Thus, you have to pick and choose the books you want to include. Mine:

Vampire: the Requiem: For obvious reasons
World of Darkness: Ditto

The Book of Spirits
The Book of the Dead
WoD: Inferno: Demons
WoD: Slashers: Not all monsters are inhuman
Damnation City: City workbook, don’t leave home without it
Belial’s Brood: Just because you’re a vampire doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy killing bad vampires, amirite?
Mythologies: A big book of mysteries
Ghouls: Because, damn, it’s a great book.

More Vampire

The real reason I create games, beyond the fact that they’re fun and I like to entertain my friends with them, is that I can’t get them out of my head. I have three bouncing around right now, WotG, GURPS Space Opera (So much so that my next session is practically planned out already), and now Vampire.

I’m catching expected crap from unexpected sources, which leads to explanations and ideas floating around in my head all the damn time. Well, blog, that’s what you’re for, giving me a chance to let these things out (and, apparantly, to wake Bee in the middle of the night with the sound of my tapping keys).

So here’s why I want to run it, restated in slightly less dramatic terms of my last post:

Survival Horror

The core of a good horror game is the challenge to survive. On this challenge, Roomie, Shawn and Walter thrive. This is why they want to play Horror. Any horror game will do this, and all of the WoD lines touch on this at some level, but none of them underscore it quite like Vampire does. A vampire is a perfectly normal human whose life has been turned upside down by a dreadful curse. How would you survive such a thing? After we discard the common “I’d kill myself!” serious questions arise. How do you keep the sun from burning you alive? How do you get a meal without violating your own personal code (you can chase after animals for about a century, but after that, what? Do you kill criminals? Do you find someone willing to donate their blood and try to be sparing?)? How do you do all this without rousing suspicion from others? And how do you maintain social ties, talking to humans you want to eat and vampires who want to eat you, to keep yourself from going mad? And how do you tame the yammering beast inside your head?

It’s a challenge. Vampires have great power, but great weaknesses, forcing a player to struggle to figure out how they will live. It’s just as challenging as playing a human with a shotgun hunting down werewolves, except here, the challenge is as much internal as external.

Occult Mystery

The World of Darkness is filled with mysteries, which is one of the reasons I like it so much. Each line has their own things to explore: Mage has its inner sanctums and worlds of the mind, Werewolf has its Shadow and the convoluted nature of spirits, and vampire has its tangled social interactions and long and messed-up histories. All of them have their occult elements, their worlds within worlds filled with strange dreams, dark ruins and unexpected twists, so any of them would work. Someone might ask “Well, then, why not run one of them?” To which I say “The rest of the reasons given in this entry.” They might further reply “But… it’s vampire,” to which I reply “Bias much?”

The one thing I want to add: The Underworld. Ever since I figured out how Wraith really works, I’ve wanted to touch on the dark, strange and creepy world of the Dead in WoD. I’ve wanted to give Cass and others the chance to explore a world of broken memories and hurt emotions. You can do that in the other games (though I’m not sure why you’d bother in Werewolf), but Vampires have a special tie to the Dead, and the Book of the Spirits even grants them a new Discipline called the Blood Tenebrous which allows access to the Shadow. Hopefully, the upcoming Book of the Dead will offer more insight into this.

Violence

You can’t run a personal horror story without allowing Dave and Roomie to engage in some serious carnage. That’s why they love Werewolf, and that’s honestly why I think they would love Vampire. In the nWoD, a werewolf and a vampire are closely matched, which suits them, in my opinion. A vampire can regenerate, can fuel his physical prowess with blood, and every last vampire clan has access to their own physical discipline. While it’s true that vampires tend to be beautiful and social, I think the combat-fans forget that vampires are monsters first. They have sharp fangs, unnatural hungers, alien eyes and strange complexions. In their disdain of Twilight, they forget Van Helsing and Legacy of Kain. Vampire: the Requiem makes a point of highlighting how strange elders become, such as Unholy, the signature gangrel, whose hands have permanently become bird talons and who constantly hungers after the blood of vampires, no longer able to sate herself on human blood. She is a whispered legend among vampires, a boogey-man to boogey-men. There’s no reason players can’t be the same, eventually.

Social Intrigue

Vampire is a very social game, the most social of the three core lines, which is why I imagine several players object. Yet I point out that gaming is built on compromises, and the above three should be reason enough to, say, Roomie to allow, say, Cass to have her fun. Like 7th Sea or WotG, much of the action of driven by social interplay, though Vampire’s social play tends towards the vicious.

Social interaction has two major sources. First and foremost, like in WotG where every character has his master, every Vampire has his sire, who directs his childe, instructs him, and bestows his allies and enemies on his inheritor. Second, vampire is custom designed to let you play with your food. Like with Changeling, you are driven to interact with people, because they form the basis of your supernatural food-chain. You must either find wicked men to kill, find good people who will let you sip, starve, or lose your humanity as you slaughter the innocent. Given the benefits of the first two, it pays to get to know the wide cast of NPCs a vampire game inevitably brings.

These two interactions coalesce to create 90% of the social intrigue of a game, as the elder’s enemies and allies will swirl around you in a dance that has gone on for longer than you have existed, trying to steal your mortal assets from you as you try to steal theirs. But with my addition of the Underworld, I hope to add an interaction with the Dead too, both out of guilt (“You killed me”) and redemption (“and you have laid me to rest, so I will no longer haunt this world.”)

—

That’s it. Four solid reasons to play, I think, ones that hit every point on most of my players’ lists of wants and needs. Walter wants and needs a survival mystery game. This will provide it. Roomie and Dave need violent survival games. This provides. Cass and Byler need violent, mysterious social-intrigue games, and this is perfect.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Vampire is its flexibility. Between clan and covenant, you can customize your character far more than you could with the other lines. All werewolves are violent, and all mages are good at solving mysteries, but vampires are pretty good at both of the above. The Lancea Sanctum and the Circle of the Crone grant access to Blood Magic. The Ordo Dracul digs deep into the mysteries of the vampiric condition and reward research with power. Invictus and the Carthians grant social benefits. Everyone has a reason to fight.

Don’t beleive me? Lemme show you how I think the Clans would break down by player: Roomie: Daeva, Gangrel or Nosferatu (all great warriors). Dave: Gangrel or Nosferatu (monstrous warriors). Walter: Nosferatu or Mekhet (lurking mystery-solvers). Byler: Daeva, Ventrue, Nosferatu (Scary social power-houses). Cass: Ventrue, Daeva (social power-houses). Everyone can bring their own needs to the table, and have those needs met, in a way that I don’t think Werewolf or Mage would do (alas, especially for the latter, as I’m quite a fan, but I really think it would be Walter and I rooting for it, and nobody else understanding how to make it work)

Vampires

It’s dark outside. It’s dark, and it’s cold, and the wind tugs at the trees outside my window. It’s night, and I cannot sleep, because I am obsessing on the forbidden.

I am obsessing on Vampires.

You don’t talk about Vampire: the Anything with the Newton group, because they have already decided they are dumb: Dumb, pretty, whiney and weak. Why play as something that bemoans its awesome state when you could be ripping shit up as a werewolf or a changeling? But Vampire: the Requiem is different. Vampire: the Requiem is not Twilight. It’s not even Vampire: the Masquerade. And I think it’d be perfect for our group.

Speaking to Cass one day, she commented off-hand that while she loved to play “dark” creatures in her online games, she never played one in my games because “we always play as heroes.” Further, Walter and Roomie have yearned for a good horror game, a challenge to their skills and smarts. The two desires have led me inexorably back to the World of Darkness, which I must admit is quite solid in its current incarnation.

World of Darkness has many possible roles we could play. We could play as mortals, struggling to understand the madness of the night, or we could rage as howling werewolves. These, I think, would not appeal to Cass as much as Vampire would, giving her a chance to collect my NPCs for real, and an opportunity to revel in her darkside. Byler, too, fits better with vampires than I think he realizes. He always longs to play a man who has transcended and discarded his humanity along with his morals. He tried his hand at werewolf, and found them too boxed in, too samey. Vampire would give him a chance to lord it over mortals (if he was careful) and explore his own power his own way. Finally, Vampire has the “mystery” and “combat” that appeals to Walter and Roomie.

At its core, Vampire is about transgression, and you can boil these down to a few specific examples: my favorites are sex, drugs and violence. The connection between vampires and sex has been belabored in things like Twilight, and is probably the primary source of my players’ disaffection. After all, vampires are languid, decadent pussies who drape themselves in silk and half-naked women, right? Sometimes, though, I think they fail to remember the appeal of the latter (my games are legendary for their steaming-hot NPCs, and this would give them a chance to be wicked with them), and moreover, the vampires of the WoD are sexy because it gives them a predatory edge. The girl with the bright red lips and the long, lowered eyelashes has the same effect on a human that an angler fish has on other fish with its gleaming bait: they attract their prey and lull them into a false sense of security. Violence is slightly less obvious, but vampires are monsters, predators, killers. A beast hammers at the back of their mind, demanding blood and death, and their blood provides them with the power to kill kill kill kill kill! As for drugs, the blood itself is that. Vampires are addicted to it. They need it. But moreover, they can make other people addicted to it. It becomes a game of control, possession and corruption.

I think all three of these things will appeal to my players.

Unlife has consequences too, and these will appeal as well: Despair, Madness and secrecy. Despair, again, it what drives some of my players away. Why play a whiney bitch? But I think they fail to see how this despair comes about: there’s an inherent conundrum in the Humanity mechanic. On the one hand, you are driven by pragmatism to do “bad” things, and by idealism to refrain from such. Some people assume this means the system moralizes and preaches at you, but I think the point is to pull you in two different directions at once: Would you kill a man who needed to die even if it made you drop in Humanity? Madness follows naturally from despair, as the character descends slowly into inhumanity, but Vampire has even more, with other vampires messing with your mind, and your own dreams haunting you during torpor.

Secrecy, though, is probably what drives most of the fascinating gameplay of Vampire. A vampire must hide. If people knew what he was, they would kill him. So they cloak themselves in paranoia and mystery, lurking in the night, behind a veil of minions, carefully picking off their prey. The only thing tastier to a vampire than a human is another vampire, so vampires aren’t even safe among their own. As a result, you have tangled politics, but you have lies, deception, trickery and completely fabricated histories. Vampires live a long time, so just exploring the truth behind an array of elders would take up entire sessions, never mind the other mysteries the WoD has to offer.

The World of Darkness is very flexible nowadays, and I’m going to take advantage of that. One thing that I really would have liked from Werewolf was the spirit world, a surreal place of interesting horrors. But the more I think about it, why can’t I have that anyway? Vampires gained some Spirit Manipulating disciplines in the Book of Spirits, so why not feature them in the game? Plus we add some Hallows, some haunted ground where vampires might cross over into the “nightside” of the city. We’ll color it in shades of death, though, make it an Underworld filled with the victims of murder, mayhem and, of course, the players themselves. Plus interesting things to buy, trade for, discover. Shades of the Hedge from Changeling, only as designed by Tim Burton.

So that’s what I want. A sexy game with savagery, secrecy and madness. A twisted city that crosses Blade with Van Helsing, stretched over the surface of an underworld straight out of the mind of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman, like a cross between the Nightmare before Christmas and Don’t Rest Your Head, in a world peopled by luscious ladies and doe-eyed boys with tragic pasts, while the players struggle for power, held back only by their consciences and the curses of the night.

Oh, and I’ll have to give out tons of experience, since the standard WoD goes far too slowly for my tastes. But yeah, I think I can do this.