Vampire The Masquerade: How to embrace an enormous world finally after 20 years

By Chris Renshaw

Before I fully understood what D&D was, I knew about Vampire: The Masquerade. With the first edition releasing in 1991, just about anyone close to RPGs in the 90s/early 2000’s did. I was a Freshman in high school in 2000 when I saw a group of people at lunch playing a game together. I had recently discovered the world of RPGs and learned that this group was playing a combined “World of Darkness” campaign. For those unaware, World of Darkness is the universe that many of the RPGs put out by White Wolf Publishing take place in. This includes Vampire, along with others like Werewolf: the Apocalypse and Mage: the Ascension. The group I saw in high school had everyone playing characters acting together from each of the different games. If someone wanted to be a vampire, they’d use the Vampire: the Masquerade sheet, etc.  Of course, I wanted to get into it, but my parents saw the gruesome artwork in the books and decided that was not a good idea.  Instead, I would go on to get my start in RPGs with more scifi games like Star Wars and Battletech. 

This 5th Edition thing is popular

Every time I open this book, this page just seems to make an impact on me

Enter 2018, and everyone's obsessed with "5th editions"…or rather one specific 5e. Yet here comes White Wolf with a new series of World of Darkness books, starting with Vampire The Masquerade 5th Edition (the community seems to use V5 in short, so we'll go with that). Having been fascinated with the game since seeing those people in high school playing, yet never having the chance to try, I thought this could be the time to try the game out. Except…V5 didn't really rocket out of the gates. To myself, knowing nothing about the situation, it seemed like it more stumbled and fell on its face a few times. The more I looked into White Wolf and V5, the more I kept finding stories about how problematic the development of the book was. Yikes. I'm not going to make assumptions on whether or not White Wolf was doing these things intentionally, but some of the decisions that the company made just dissuaded me from trying the game out. 

Fast forward again to 2021, and development of V5 and the Vampire license had been handed over to Renegade Games Studios. I got the chance to review the newly released Vampire The Masquerade: Rivals card game and decided to give the game a shot. Turns out, I really liked it! So much that I decided to give V5 another chance, especially since Renegade had a better track record with RPGs. So I managed to get a review copy of the Core Rulebook, along with some of the other books that Renegade has released recently. 

Lore-dy Lore-dy look who’s almost 40

Just about 20 years after first being introduced to Vampire back in High School, here I am finally jumping into the World of Darkness. As of the time of writing this, I still haven't played the game, so I'm just going to be giving my opinions on the Core Rulebook on its own. The first thing I have to say is that this book drives the point home (or maybe the stake?) that the LORE is one of the biggest aspects of the game. The first 30 pages of the book are collages of different documents outlining different pieces of the bigger picture behind Vampires. Some people might not like that, but I loved it. If you can hook me with a good story, I will dive all in reading up on the backstory of the game. The artwork in the book also matches up with the lore and creates a beautiful presentation. You get the sense of how horrifying a place the World of Darkness can truly be. 

Lore can be a blessing and a curse for a RPG though: if you can get your players engaged with it, it really helps flush the game out. But I know there's several people out there who have experienced this: you are running a game and either through creating your own story or a pre-written adventure, you are in the middle of a session and something impactful happens to the story and NONE of your players have picked up on it because they haven't read the 100s of books that you had. It's an unfair expectation of your players, and it sucks no matter which side of the GM screen you are on. I still think that FFG's Legend of the Five Rings RPGs is one of the coolest RPGs I've ever run/played, but my group was never interested in playing because they didn't have the buy-in on the lore/story that I did. 

(Side note: I've been on the flip side of this - been a GM running a game where the players knew more about the universe than I did. I was running the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars RPG in college and my players just acquired a ship and were figuring out where they wanted to go next. I showed them where they were on a galaxy map and they noticed a system nearby and all got super excited and wanted to go there. The place in question: Nar Shaddaa. Having played several Star Wars games since, I get it now but at the time I had no idea why they were excited.) 

Vampire: A Solution - A terrible name for a new edition

So how do you fight this problem? Not sure I would have thought of this back in 2018 if I had started playing V5 then, but with these kinds of games, I feel like you have to use the game to present the story. As I write it, it sounds like a pretty "duh" thing to say, but sometimes obvious things have to hit us in the face before we see them. Assume your players know nothing. If there's something they need to know for your story - make it a part of the story! If their characters need to understand how two Vampire clans interact, maybe make them witness a bar fight happen between the clans behind them. Have the NPCs stay stereotypical things so that the players hear why the two clans hate each other. The "characters" might already have known these things, but now the players are keyed in. 

Wait, wasn't this supposed to be a review of the Vampire Core Rulebook? Yes and no. The actual "game play" of V5 is pretty easy, especially if you've played other indie RPGs. Essentially, you get a specific number of D10s based on the skills you are using and roll them. 1 through 5 is a fail, 6 through 10 is a success, with 1's and 10's being crit misses/hits respectfully. The GM will have a set number of successes that you need to pass the test, and if you get that many, you pass. I'm oversimplifying there, obviously (don't hate me Vampire fans), as there are things such as hunger that play into each roll - you are a vampire after all. Regardless, the biggest barrier to entry of a game like Vampire is going to be getting your players to buy in on the lore, and the Core Rulebook is representative of that. If your players are going to flip through the first 30 pages trying to find out where "the game" starts….then you probably need to find another game to play.

However, if you get players going "Whoa" after reading the first few pages, or if you seem glints in their eyes as you describe the way the world works, you might want to give the game a try. As for me, I've got some "actual" V5 reviews coming in the future, as I've been "that guy", digging through sourcebooks to learn more. But I need to play a game first - got any tips for me?

Note: I generally assume I know nothing. So if I've missed something, let me know in the comments. Or let me know on Twitter or Facebook. If you like these types of posts, consider subscribing to our patreon.