Vampire: The Masquerade

**Vampire: The Masquerade** is a tabletop role-playing game (tabletop RPG) created by Mark Rein-Hagen and released in 1991 by White Wolf Publishing as the first of several Storyteller System games for its World of Darkness setting line.

## Overview

Vampire: The Masquerade is the first World of Darkness game and the first Storyteller System game published by White Wolf. A major departure from the more power and heroics oriented games of the era, VTM is a game of personal horror. It is the parent and the most popular of all the World of Darkness games, and was the genesis of almost all the major ideas people associate with White Wolf.

In Vampire: the Masquerade, the players assume the role of vampires, immortal beings cursed with an unquenchable thirst for blood and vulnerability to sunlight – creatures forever bound to their inner Beast (the animal urges of hunger, fear and rage). It is a game of personal horror, as the characters are continually forced to walk a moral tightrope between their need to survive and the horrific means by which they ensure it.

### The Vampires of the World of Darkness

*Main article: Vampire*
Vampires are one of the three main supernatural races in the World of Darkness and the fundamental characters of Vampire: The Masquerade and its spinoff games like Vampire: The Dark Ages and Kindred of the East. The article above offers a closer look at vampires, with their physiology, their politics and their clan division.

In Vampire: The Masquerade, "Kindred" is the most common euphemism for a vampire. However, the term is mostly used by vampires who strive to maintain their Humanity. On the other hand, Sabbat vampires prefer the term 'Cainite' to refer to themselves - as many of them believe that the vampiric curse originated with the biblical Cain, after he murdered his brother, Abel. The term "kine" (i.e. "cattle") is the opposite of Kindred, and refers to human population.

### Vampiric Society

Most vampires live in cities, which are run feudally by the Princes; life in a city is one of constant political manipulation and paranoia, as the Cainites vie for food, territory, and power. But while they must dwell in close contact with their source of sustenance, vampires largely fear the exposure to the mortal world, and since the Inquisition the majority of these creatures have lived under the Masquerade – an enforced campaign to hide their supernatural existences from humanity.

In general, vampiric societies consist of two levels: sects and clans. Characters within the Vampire setting are members of one of the clans or minor bloodlines offered, and usually belong to factions associated with these or that reflect a general ideological stance the characters happen to share. For example, a Brujah may belong to the Camarilla, the Sabbat, or the Anarchs, but very few Tremere would be found among the Sabbat and even more rarely among the Anarchs.

Some clans and most of the minor bloodlines declare themselves independent from any sects. In addition, the Laibon, known as the Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom by Western Vampires, are not so much a sect as a cultural group bound together loosely by a powerful spiritual bond to the land and the people of Africa. While the Kuei-jin, also known as the Kindred of the East, share some superficial similarity to the western vampires, but they are actually an entirely different variety of supernatural beings, more related to Wraith 's Risen.