Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 12:37:47 -0400 
From: "Mark A. Baxter" <mb8p+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re:Vampire ideas

   I was looking through my gaming store the other day when I came
across the "Vampire Players Book" which was a guide to making vampire
characters.  I would reccomend it highly for GMs and players alike.  It
greatly expands the character generation system, with new clans,
abilities and (I particularly liked these)   the new concept of powers
and disadvantages which can be bought and spent for freebie points.
    As far as a plot idea.  I always wanted to run a Vampire campaign
and never had the time.  But I did have the time to think of the
campaign I would run if I could.  My idea was of a "vegetarian" Elder
(or perhaps methuselah), maybe a couple (man and wife) living in
seclusion in a small town (not more than 100,000 people absolute max.) 
the characters would be locals who the Elder had Kissed.  My conception
was either 1)a mad elder (have to live alone) who just left the
characters to figure things out for themselves, or 2)an elder (the
couple possibly here) who took in the characters and began to teach them
about "their" way of vampirism.  Whichever, one night (after the
characters have just begun to explore vampirism) a pack of vampires
descend on the Elder's home.  The elder has either 1)sent the characters
away somehow knowing what was to come (so they might not know it was
vampires, or they might return in time to see the death of their
teacher/creator)  or 2)the characters flee in the battle, with the pack
hot on their trails.  The rest of the campaign consists of trying to
understand the new world they live in.  
    If you do this campaign my advice is not to give the characters
clans or even MENTION clans.  The characters will have whatever powers
their players want, ditto personality, these are effectively caitiff
clan.  The second thing is DO NOT run a vanilla, by-the-book,
unimaginative, clan vs. clan vs. sabbat vs. humanity vs. werewolves
campaign.  What the hell, keep them on their toes.  Introduce some
ghosts, maybe a Cthulu-like monster, or a Clive Barker creation.  Just
don't make it anything like the book's campaign world.  The characters
are hunted in a world that they NO LONGER understand.  If they players
think they understand because THEY'VE READ THE BOOK and their characters
haven't. Then wake them up.  Rudely.  They'll like it.  Which isn't to
say you should just make the world total chaos.  You'll have to think of
an underlying organization to plot, and stick with it.  The characters
final triumph will be figuring out what it all means.  But this should
be a long time coming.  In the meantime run it like a road
trip/A-team/Werewolf (a very cool tv show from early in Fox history)
campaign.  This campaign works much better with small (2-4) groups.  
                        Net.Chaos.Kisses.Mark
Mark Baxter              |One is for sorrow,
<mb8p+@andrew.cmu.edu>   |Two is for joy,
ext #4690                |Three for a girl,
                         |Four a boy,
         I               |Five is for silver,
       Have              |Six is for gold,
         A               |And Seven's a secret
      Secret             |Never to be told.