This episode covers the roleplaying game VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE 5th edition, developed by Kenneth Hite and Karim Muammar, published in 2018 by White Wolf Entertainment in association with Paradox Entertainment and Free League. The original Vampire: The Masquerade was designed by Mark Rein•Hagen and released by White Wolf Publishing in 1991. It dominated the RPG hobby in the 1990s and remains one of the biggest RPGs of all time.

Click here to see Vampire: the Masquerade 5th edition at DriveThruRPG
Click here to see the original 1991 Vampire:the Masquerade, which we also discuss and which is still on sale for a paltry $9.99. It’s a fascinating read for anyone who wants to experience the origins of the World of Darkness.

“It would have been like kicking a tiny puppy in a tiny corset” – Greg

This episode is brought to you with the support of Andy G from DC, one of our Kickstarter backers, who wanted to give a shout-out to their Delta Green group N-Cell. Thanks, Andy!

>>>THE AUDIO FOR THIS EPISODE IS CURRENTLY ONLY AVAILABLE TO THE PODCAST’S BACKERS. WHEN IT GOES PUBLIC IN DECEMBER, THE LINK TO THE RECORDING WILL APPEAR HERE. TO GET EARLY ACCESS, YOU CAN BECOME A SEASON 3 BACKER FOR JUST $20 BY CLICKING HERE.

 

SHOW NOTES

These are the show notes for the episode, where we delve further into things that we don’t have time to explore in detail in the podcast itself, usually with copious links for your rabbit-holing pleasure.

As well as being an industry-shaking success on release, Vampire: the Masquerade also spawned the rest of the World of Darkness RPGs, plus an early line of LARPs, tie-in novels, comic books and a pretty good CCG, as well as a number of computer games, and a live-action TV series – a medium in which it remains unique. (Other RPGs including D&D, Battletech and Heavy Gear have been turned into animated TV series.)

Greg wrote a couple of the aforementioned V:tM tie-in novels (A Hunger Like Fire and Marriage of Virtue and Viciousness) which you may be interested in checking out. Or, as he doesn’t get any royalties if you buy them, not.

James (who is writing these notes) doesn’t say very much this episode. Partly that’s because I was in a conversation with one guy who worked on the game and another who’s played it for years, and partly because Vampire has never got its pointy fingernails into my skin, I’ve never been engaged by its mechanics, lore or themes, and I’d prefer to let the people who know and like the game talk about it.

The infamous Shadowrun RPG promo video is on Youtube. You may think it’s aged badly but believe me, we mocked it pretty hard back in 1991 as well – though in those pre-internet days it was not easy to track down. VHS trading ftw.

Kindred: The Embraced was a 1996 Aaron Spelling TV series based on Vampire: the Masquerade. Ten episodes were scripted, eight shot and seven aired. Bits of it exist around the internet but it’s never been released on DVD or streaming. It’s pretty faithful to the lore of the game, but the fact remains that the best film based on the World of Darkness (and we use the word ‘best’ with extreme caution) is the Underworld series. I am still surprised that nobody ever nabbed a cheeky licence for an Underworld RPG. It would have sold.

The Vampire:tM – Bloodlines digital RPG was developed by Troika Games and released for Windows in 2004. Despite being notoriously buggy, it’s an intelligent, immersive and nuanced game that still has a considerable fan community. The story is inspired by White Wolf’s Time of Judgment supplements for the RPG, which brought the original World of Darkness to a conclusion. Later fan-patches have fixed most of the bugs (though not the wildly improbable breasts) and the version available at GOG runs well on modern machines. A sequel will reportedly be released in 2025.

Immortal: Invisible War was a 1994 coattails-rider that aped Vampire‘s structure to the point of mockery. Apparently a third edition exists, sort of, though the website appears to be in limbo.

Metacurrencies in RPGs was a subject we covered in season 2, episode 4.

The World of Darkness metaplot is explained here.

We discuss the externalisation and internalisation of horror. Sadly there isn’t enough space to go into that here, though (a) we’re happy to discuss it with listeners on the LND Discord, and (b) to my knowledge the only murders that can definitely be linked to a TRPG were committed by a group of Vampire players. 

Brief digression about Blade, an underrated trilogy of movies, the second one directed by Guillermo del Toro. It’s an early example of the template that made so much of the MCU work (and Blade is a Marvel character, of course): the story is completely absurd but structurally solid, the characters are great and played by actors who know it’s ridiculous but take it seriously, and the whole thing is a delightful rollercoaster.

Being Human was a BBC TV show that ran for five seasons, with 37 episodes total (2009-2012), getting better and bolder as it went. Starring Russell ‘American Horror Story‘ Tovey, Aiden ‘Poldark‘ Turner and Lenora ‘Avenue 5‘ Crichlow (Andrea Riseborough, who I mentioned in the episode, was in it but only for one episode – I blame rapid googling and apologise for the error.)

The Ages of Fictional Vampires. Vampires were originally creatures of folklore, with widely differing backgrounds and origin myths which often centred around threats, diseases or curses. The vampires were not named as individuals, they were just an other. This changed as soon as they started appearing in fiction and getting names, usually aristocratic ones. (The metaphor of the nobility sucking the blood of the working class is not exactly subtle but remains very potent.)
The First Age: Vampires as antagonist characters, charismatic adversaries. Begins with The Vampyre by John Polidori (1819), the other product of the writing challenge that produced Frankenstein; its most famous example is Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
The Second Age: Vampires as protagonists, usually tragic, often angsty. Begins with Barnabas Collins by Marilyn Ross (1966), actually a pseudonym for prolific Canadian author W. E. D. Ross, better known as Tex Steele. Most famous example: the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice, which started in 1986.
The Third Age: Vampires as sparkly love-interest. Not threatening, not particularly inhuman, not very mysterious, occasionally brooding, often emo. Mostly this is using diluted forms of existing tropes just because they’re tropes. Most famous example: the Twilight novels by Stephanie Meyer (2005–8).
The Fourth Age: Crap vampires. Usually humorous, parodic of the vampires of the first two ages, layered with faux-lore from V:tM that has seeped into the mainstream. Examples include Dracula: Dead and Loving It (Mel Brooks, 1995), and What We Do In The Shadows (movie directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, 2014).

The Timothy Bradstreet full-page art in the first edition of Vampire: the Masquerade did a huge amount of work to set the tone, as did the linked narrative told through the smaller pieces of art that appeared on almost every page-spread. One of the best pieces of narrative and atmosphere creation in any RPG, and one that the latest edition sort-of tries to achieve with its opening multi-page collage of texts, and then mostly gives up the attempt.

Bill Paxton in Near Dark. Iconic. He even looks like a piece of Bradstreet art. We recommend you click to embiggen.

Not The End, which Greg mentions, is a bag-building fantasy RPG out of Italy with a free set of Quickstart rules.

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (released 25 December 2024) is something we’ve talked about before. The original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, directed by F. W. Murnau in 1922, was a knock-off of Dracula that went harder and further than the original source material or any other early vampire movie; Egger’s remake looks terrific. But if we’re talking about remakes and Nosferatu, we have to mention Shadow of the Vampire (2000), set during the making of the original Nosferatu movie, as Murnau (played by John Malkovich) slowly realises that the actor playing Count Orlok (Willem Dafoe) may be closer to the character than anyone guessed. Highly recommended. Dafoe is also in the Eggers version, which is an interesting bit of casting.

And one should not discuss Nosferatu without mentioning Herzog’s 1979 version starring Klaus Kinski, which is on Youtube.

Night’s Black Agents, the anti-vampire RPG also by Ken Hite, is a game we’ve discussed before, in season 1 episode 4. Hunter: the Reckoning was White Wolf’s own version of the same idea: you play humans hunting down the supernatural denizens of WW’s earlier RPGs. It was well received and is also available in a new edition based on the Vampire 5e ruleset.

Greggs, the ubiquitous UK high-street baker chain and home of the steak bake, mentioned in passing, is smaller (has a lower market-cap) than Games Workshop.

Bach’s Toccata and Fugue is also iconic, not least for its use inthis scene from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with James Mason showing off his submarine’s enormous organ.

 

The hosts of this episode were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, with audio editing by Ross and show notes by James. We hope you enjoyed it. If anything in this episode has spurred your interest then we invite you to come and discuss it on our Discord. 

If you click on any of the above links to DriveThruRPG and buy something, Ludonarrative Dissidents will receive a small affiliate fee. You will not be charged more, and the game’s publisher will not receive less, it’s a win-win-win. Thank you for supporting the podcast this way.