Sunday 16 November 2014

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

I knew it was close, so I looked it up, and yes, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines came out on November 16th, 2004. This was several months after the release of the Gehenna book, so its plot concerning talk of the imminent Gehenna was rather amusing in retrospect.

It was pretty buggy on first release (there’s one level you can’t finish without the first patch) but still earned a lot of critical admiration. Even now, people are still tinkering with patches and mods, and in the case of one group reverse-engineering a system upgrade and multiplayer version.

To mark the anniversary in tonight’s Vampire: The Masquerade session, I made a smallish number of jokes... and had a major NPC show up, introducing a new plot thread... after running a Hallowe’en session heavily inspired by its most acclaimed level (as well as plans for the MMO).

One of my players got into the World Of Darkness through Bloodlines, and her first time GMing was a Vampire one-shot about someone trying to steal a sarcophagus... Has anyone else borrowed from it?

Also, the stealth and conversation options fall away badly in the last sections, but you still have to kill less vampires in the entire game than Christof Romuald does in the average building.

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