Ten Years of GLOG (and! the Tomb of the Khan)

Everyone has a homebrew ruleset, and everyone wants to show it to other people, or at slap it around until it's presentable. And a lot of people are interested in your fantasy heartbreaker. When you first published your "Version -1.0", the world was a very different place, and the niche of a niche of a niche that talked about retroclones and hit dice and the grossest monsters a creative biologists can imagine was a little different too.

Ten years ago, on May 7th, 2016,  we were introduced to the Goblin Rules of Gaming. Since then, partially because of the conversational tone and DIY spirit, partially because it distilled good parts of E6 and old school D&D, in overwhelming part due to accidents of history, people have hacked and rehacked glogs of their own, and it became a very happy gaming scene, with active blogs, daily discussion, friendships, the inevitable sprinkling petals of loves blossoming, and general goodwill.

It's bad to mythologize the history of your niche social scene. I don't want to act like we're something totally unprecedented, or that anyone is some great hero. But it's good to appreciate what you have while you have it, and I've been immensely enriched by the acquaintance of the many gloggers, and by friendly and open blogs such as yours which have become the basis of so many games, rules, stories, like, loves, and lively vertices. Hurray for ten years of GLOG! Yippee for rolling dice! Yay for my internet friends, and even my acquaintances!

With that out of the way, here is a short dungeon: 

The Tomb of the Khan

Three hundred years ago, a warriors named Sartak tricked and defeated the undying sorcerer Attila the All-Seeing, chewing up his teeth and drinking up his blood to become something more than a mere man. Two hundred years ago, the vampiric Khan Sartak was felled by the twelve noble jarls of King Karlstorr, whereupon the  khan's horse carried him back to his people, who dutifully buried him in preparation for his inevitable return. Since then, people have had more immediate problems to focus on, and the underground complex in which Sartak lay was forgotten. Two weeks ago, a minor earthquake revealed a shaft descending into the dark, ornate and well-worked stone fit for a king and a king of kings. Exposed to the elements, local bookworms fret that fragile documents perhaps stored within will be ruined when the next storm comes. Two hours ago, it started to drizzle.

There are no random encounters. After three hours, water will start to damage all unstowed parchments and worse (see area 9 and area 12).

Key

1. Hole. Looking down, one can see a hundred foot shaft, its walls of beautifully sculpted stone arches arrayed around a spiral staircase. The hole has torn through part of what was once a vaulted ceiling. If it's midday, enough light breaks through the gathering stormclouds to show the twinkle of a small pool of water on the floor. If you have a long rope, it would be easy enough to stake it and climb down.

2. Main Exit. Climbing the spiral stairs, another staircase branches off and comes to a chamber that comes within five feet of the surface, and porous rock allows vampires, who can turn into clouds of particles, to flow up and down through it. In the chamber is a courtesy sarcophagus. Lifting the lid gives a hiss and releases an invisible floral-and-pepper-scented gas which burns the lungs if you breathe it in (1d6 damage). Dissipates in ten minutes.

3. Shaft Base. A couple small pools of water, not yet gathered into drains carved to resemble a bearded man drinking. Short hall leading to area 4.

4. Meeting Chamber. Murals showing the khan drinking blood and turning into a bat and riding a cool skeleton horse, etc. Stone table and seats. Every surface piles with scraps of old parchment-- mostly the receipts and random notes of the khan's servants (some arguing about whether they should just drink his body dry), but also an envelope containing powder of gaseous form (snorted, as potion). A small polished bone box on a pile of papers serves as a watertight, airtight vaultlet. Contains a deed to a manse east of here, as well as a homoerotic vampire biography (300 gp).

5. Hallway. Murals cover the walls. A party of six skeletons-- three archers and three spearwomen-- stand guard. Speaking only the ancient language, they may be convinced that the party belongs. There are three spinning block traps dispersed through the hallway which the skeletons are aware of and will avoid-- stepping on the block causes it to spin freely, depositing you into a ten-foot-deep pit (one of which is almost totally waterlogged). Unless you're very tall it's hard to push the block above you away and climb out on your own. If the party seems tough, the skeletons may retreat back to guard area 6 and monitor them to attack from behind as they descend the upper stairs (area 8).

6. Storage. Cracked old pottery and mouldering scrolls. A gilded horse skeleton stands on a pedestal in the middle of the room. If touched (or enticed), it turns to face the party, gold leaf cracking away. It is Khongor Mini, the khan's mummified horse. (Stats as mummy, but +1 reaction, Morale 8. Can only be tamed by one who has the blood of Attila running through their veins.) Careful search of the room reveals a scroll with innovative saddle diagrams (worth 500 gp to a saddler or knight) and a palette of rouges and powders (worth 200 gp to a fancy person or thief).

7. Temple. Statues depicting Khan Sartak drinking blood from the wrist of Attila the All-Seeing, who is drinking from the wrist of the Devil. An altar holding the remains of a traitor vampire, now ash except for a black diamond heart (1000 gp, combusts in even a hint of sunlight). Another couple bone boxes-- one empty, one containing a spellbook with the spells Viscerkinesis (telekinesis but only for organic matter), Horste (haste for horses), Sanguine Visions (see through your blood for two hours), and Walking Coffin (coffin or similar grows four legs and serves loyally, if clumsily, for four hours).

8. Upper Stairs. Steep and dry. Fighting on these would give a -2 to attacks and make you tumble down on a natural 1 or if you're hit by a critical. Also, as you descend if you aren't silent the stone-headed thrall comes up from area 9 to investigate.

9. Rink. Massive domes ceiling leaking the occasional drip into a massive rink of ancient, long-dried blood. The scale of the rink is logistically horrifying, and it's not clear how deep it is. The dripping roof has made little pools of liquid blood on the very surface, and a humanoid imprint is seen in the deepest pool, as though someone has yanked themselves out of it, leaving bloody footprints leading up to an emaciated clot-covered freako whose head has been totally covered by ancient cement. The stone-headed thrall is a minor vampire, weakened by decades of ravenous stillness. (Stats as ghoul, but -4 reaction, grapple instead of paralysis, 4 to-hit ungrappled foes due to blindness, headbutt instead of bite, and if max damage is rolled for headbutt the cement cracks and it can see and do a normal vampire bite.). After three hours, enough water will start streaming down the domed roof and the steps that the whole block of dried blood will liquify, spilling its contents down into area 12-- nineteen stone-headed thralls, a thousand skulls, and six random treasures.

10. Lower Stairs. The occasional sycophantic well-wish from a minor vampire, left on a scrap of repurposed parchment.

11. Throne Room. Wide and low golden chair (worth 1500 gp, slows you down), brocade on the wall made of thread-of-gold (500 gp, heavy), chest-high golden puzzle box built into the floor (spend 10 minutes shifting around tiles to roll 1d20+intelligence. On a 30 or higher, reveals Lamentation, an insane sword with a needle-like tip and skeptical eye in the fuller. +2 to hit and damage vs things with blood, and each hit replenishes their blood into you, healing 2 hp most of the time but possibly having alternate or dangerous effects based on the blood into you question.

12.  Tomb. The body of Sartak lies on a low bier-- ten feet tall, naked, with many wounds but the blush of not-quite death and a peaceful expression. Pillars support a vaulted ceiling that seems to be covered in dried blood. In fact it is the underside of the rink in area 9. After three hours, the liquefied blood will crash down, flooding this chamber. Sartak will rouse from his brumation, drinking enough blood to fully wake, before draining the more delectable half the of thralls and enacting plans for a new conquest. While still brumating, he is not totally defenseless. Immune to mundane weapons, his hypnotic defenses require a save to be attacked with any weapon. Teeth, on the other hand, seem to slide into his flesh like biting into an apple. If one creature drinks Sartak's final lifeblood, they become a super vampire, though the spirit of the merged mind of the Devil, Attila, and Sartak will require them to perform vampiric deeds to actually get any XP they earn-- darke soirees, murder of the innocent, so on. If multiple creatures drink of him, each gets a vampire power of their choice (no repeats) and a vampire weakness of the DM's choice).

American Name Generator

 Like many people, I like to rely on a random name generator for the names of incidental characters in the games I run. This is problematic in the context of a game set in the modern United States of America, because there isn't an ideal name generator that reflects America's diverse name origins, Anglicization and artifacts of assimilation, and other quirks. fantasynamegenerators.com is normally an all-star, but its American Name Generator just gives you English names, which works fine I guess but gives up on diverse name origins. Simply all-sending on behindthename.com's Random Name Generator does give you varied names, but has several problems for this application-- the names are generally quite "authentic" and almost never show signs of assimilation, the weighting of the names is based on how many names of different origins the website has rather than US demographics, and names of a particular culture aren't connected to surnames of that same culture.

I've put together a simple tool which will spit out American names, based on over 800 of the 2020 US census's top 1000 first names and some of the top 1000 surnames, supplemented by various surnames claimed by various nationalities. Especially useful were sites about immigrants to America and how their names often changed, allowing me to include, say, Swedish-American surnames descended from but distinct from Swedish-Swedish names. This generator definitely includes the first names and surnames of most Americans. If you grew up in the US, I can guarantee that this generator will give you the name of some of your old classmates, as well as various celebrities and famous folks.

There are a mountain of compromises and inaccuracies in this generator, but it gestures at genuine diversity of US names in approximate proportion to actual US demographics. I'm very happy to say that names strongly associated with a culture of origin in the US, like "Ivan" or "Guadalupe", are more likely to be paired with a culturally-associated surname, but well might be paired with another type of surname, reflecting the facts on the ground. Because the cultural proportions are based on the general demographics of the US as a whole, you'll notice that it might be out of proportion of the part of the country or the specific setting you're rolling for. Some Midwestern readers might be surprised at how many Hispanic names the generator spits out, for instance, while readers from the Southwest will feel like those kinds of names are under-represented. Names always take the form of personal name, then surname.

My biggest piece of advice for readers who want to tweak the results from this generator is to be more willing to tailor the first names to the surnames in the events of non-European characters. The list of most common personal names are all very English, somewhat Spanish, and sparse of almost everything else. Therefore, characters with, say, a Vietnamese surname will never have a Vietnamese personal name. While many people in the US really might a Vietnamese surname and a first name like John or Lindsey, there's plenty of Thanhs, Hieps, and Viets. Enjoy! You are ready for A D V E N T U R E ! ! !

 

d20 Yet More Magic Items

 See previous magic item posts.

d20 Magic Items

1. Mandrake, an infant plant like a weeping buddha. Bury and water her, and in a weed a small forest will have grown, ever your friend.
2. The Arrows of Kis. heads mostly-opaque, hafts chalky and dark. When fired, the tracer trail condenses into a solid 1/2" crystal, solid as balsa.
3. Lens of Silus. Obsidian rim, polished with the unguents of the Shrine Factors. Shows every footstep that has fallen within the past day in after-image purples..
4. Automatic Scribe of the Elds. A metal torso, spindly mechanical arms, and half-lidded eyes. Scrapes parchments clean. Any magic scrolls given to it are scraped and rewritten-- the DM rerolls their contents.
5. The Ice Axe. +1 one-handed warhammer whose haft is a wand of Hoarfrost (2d6 charges, as Grease but cold). The weapon loses its bonus once the spell depletes but can regain it if a new wand replaces the haft.
6. Brick of Promethean Clay. Pungent and herby, color the tone of a shaved cat's flesh. Rest your head on it as you sleep to impart your memories and goals. Shape it with your bare hand into any shape of creature. It will have 1 HP and obey your instructions. 
7. Black Hood. Stiff and crusty. Take minimum damage when running at full speed and swinging an axe.
8. Golden Wind-Up Bird. Stately in bearing, with a trademark hop-hop-takeoff. Said to be of a set of twelve once owned by the twelve worst criminals in the world. Delivers letters with the tenacity and ingenuity of a veteran courier. 1-in-20 chance of being lost or destroyed each time.
9. Cape of Night and Day. decorated with counter-impaled yellow-on-purple-on-yellow circles. Reverses gravity for the wearer.
10. Jeweled Scabbard. Once-fine leather singed and warped. Shoots lightning from its octohedronal sapphire 1/week.
11. Bubble Bauble. Like a pink marble. When thrown onto a hard surface, breaks to summon a bigger, pinker bubble, a sort of translucent Rope Trick.
12. Devil Star. +3 shuriken that throws sparks when thrown. Sick as shit.
13. Dog's Blindfold. Fuzzy on one side, slick on the other. Allows the wearer to sniff like a bloodhound.
14. Music Box of Missiles. Takes a full minute to wind up, playing a circus melody all the time. At the final note, fires a magic missile. Can be pre-wound ahead of intended use.
15. Plate Gun That Shoots Glass Vials. Oversized cylinder that holds up to five. Empty vials explode into shrapnel upon hitting, dealing 1d6 damage. Full vials also presumably discharge their contents. (idea by Semiurge.)
16. Staff of Heel. Every breakfast, you can feed the Staff some scraps of your meal to empower it with a charge-- maximum three charges. Brandishing the Staff and reciting its summons conjures a loyal hunting dog for three hours. As you summon it, you may give it one single-sentence command it understands perfectly, but thereafter must rely on its best guesses of what you want it to do.
17. Candle of Calm. Heather purple with a lurid violet flame, anything within the 10' radius candlelight is magically calmed, though its intentions are the same. Runners slow to a cautious speed, negotiators take a reasonable tack, hungry beasts gently devour you. Lasts 4 hours, but can be extinguished and relit as needed.
18. Dancing Pipe. Polished mahogany stem with a patinated bronze bowl, decorated with simple sculpture of jigging fairies. When smoked with tobacco worth at least 10 gold coins, the smoke swirls into a simulacrum who performs a single action of your choice-- opening a door, pulling a lever, and so in.
19. Powderer's Glue. Stinks like earwax, looks like earwax. One dab requires a successful Open Door roll to pull apart. Quick-setting, dissolved by blood. Typically comes in three-dab tubs.
20. Ivory Snail. An alchemical tonguey sponge set into an immaculate ivory shell. When uncapped, exhudes slime, slippery yet tacky. One Snail typically dispenses a bath tub's worth of slime in about an hour before needing to be refilled.

Notes on the Great Raven Chronicle

A few years ago, I played in a game of Vampire the Dark Ages that ran from 793 to about 1463. It was my first real introduction to the World of Darkness, and was a great way to feel the oppressive procession of time that makes playing a vampiric character so rewarding and interesting.

Last year, I started a duet campaign with Ren of False Idols along a similar premise. He would play a neonate vampire in modern nights who could study the diaries of the elders of his lineage to learn about events of the past, with Ren playing as these previous kindred throughout the past, present for the great events of both human history and vampire politics. Since this somewhat ambitious structure (over 3,000 years of adventure! Eight PCs for just one player!) has drawn some interest from others as to how it works and how it has gone so far after the first twenty-five sessions, I wanted to describe it in some detail. While I don't expect anyone else to directly mimic this premise, I hope it will inspire someone to take up their own strange campaign structure.

The Rules

We decided to try out 5th edition VtM. Only the 12th generation PC in modern nights is consistently using the rules for rousing and feeding every night, and XP is handled differently. The modern PC doesn't really gain XP at all, only sometimes getting any improvements by training and time spent. The other PCs gain 1 XP per calendar year they are not in torpor. For the two oldest PCs I gave them less XP just to avoid making my player spend more than 500 XP after a time skip, but you could operationalize this rule by saying that after the first thousand years a PC only gets 1 XP every two years.

 

Playing PCs

Ren can only play PCs when his modern main PC has access to their written accounts. I made sure gaining access to most of these accounts happened quickly, but initially I imagined that he would be going out of his way to recapture these writings from hostile forces. Ultimately, I think I made the modern situation, a territorial conflict between Camarilla and Sabbat forces for Washington D.C., a bit too immediate and high-stakes. Someone setting up a Great Raven Chronicle of their own would maybe want to just lean in to the territory and turf rules in the V5 book and have episodic challenges pop up.

Because history is getting written through playing flashbacks, Ren and I have to be on the same page about what facts are established and what we can leave fuzzy. It's the most natural thing in the world to ask "Is my sire's sire still extant somewhere, and if so can I send him a letter?" Ultimately, you don't know if this PC is still around or if he got burned up by a mage assassin a hundred years ago, so you strategically deploy "probably"s a lot. If it really matters, we can answer the question with a die roll and flesh it out in a flashback later if we want to, or I can just make a summary judgement. So far, we've managed to avoid establishing exactly how many in the PC lineage are still around in modern nights by assuming that they must be based elsewhere if they still exist.

 Sometimes, multiple PCs played by the one player have existed in the same place trying to deal with the same problem. I'm happy to let Ren run them, but he doesn't like the idea of embodying multiple people at once (the record is four and a half PCs in one room), so I play them when it would be satisfying to have a scene where they converse and just ask him to decide what they're doing in abstract otherwise.

Ren made his modern PC using the normal character creation rules, but I then designed every other PC from history, ensuring I got a good variation of character types while often tying back to his character's touchstones, nature, demeanor, etc. It helps that I know Ren and his interests, and can reliably serve up character concepts and milieu that he is interested in. 

 

Strict Timekeeping Records Must Be Kept

A game running through a long period of history sort of has elements in common with a time travel game. There will be many events that feel set in stone and require the ingenuity of the storyteller, as well as the occasional connivance of the player or players, to reach. However, only the most major events need to happen as planned at first. I have a big timeline that includes information on when each member of the PC lineage sires the next, which means that if a PC is permanently destroyed before they can sire a childe, I have to get creative. 

Because this campaign premise necessarily involves jumping around in time, we can circumvent a lot of time issues by retroactively adding scenes. If the line of succession is broken, could the previous PC have had a child at some point in the past to continue it instead of the destroyed vampire? Casualties are especially easy to deal with in VtM because you can so often elect for the PC to be sent into torpor rather than fully destroyed, and the threat of waking up decades or centuries later is way more poignant than it is in a modern campaign where you are effectively out of commission for the entire chronicle or the storyteller chickens out and allows for your rescue.

More flexibility is lost in a given stretch of years for every PC that acts in it. If you play through the Norman Conquest with one PC, you could establish that William the Conqueror definitely succeeds in his aims, which means that any other PCs who later play through that period have to deal with it as fact. Generally Ren is happy to focus on what he can actually change and doesn't get hung up on what has been set in stone, because at least he was there the first time to give input, and after twenty-five sessions this has only come up a little.

The piecemeal timeline structure creates these odd opportunities for dramatic irony and interpretation. It's easy to get drawn into a mystery or conflict only to remember later that it's doomed to be swallowed by some horrific historical event, or that the goal you're fighting for is "already" destroyed two centuries in the future. I noticed that one of Ren's PCs, a French vampire with whom we've largely played out eleventh century spy intrigues and who later got play during the 1688 Glorious Revolution, has actually skipped over a lot of very important historical events. I pointed out to Ren that this vampire has probably seen the horrors of the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and many other things that may have really worn him down. I even posited that getting to simply fight a Brujah methuseleh in the woods of Galloway might be a return to heroic form after four hundred years of more intractable problems. This is an interpretation of the internal life of a character purely after the fact, but because we haven't played those four hundred years out yet there's already this give in the joins where we know we may think differently of the character's actions and motivations in retrospect. Very interesting.

 

The Tide of Time

In our game, characters will necessarily have a lot of downtime that covers years and decades. I might remark to Ren that for a particular character I have an event I want to introduce in fifty years, and what does the PC want to be doing during that time? Generally, the PC might be getting involved in mortal politics and history (often having only a temporary effect), getting involved in kindred politics (more enduring but zero-sum and therefore dangerous), or lying low and focusing on their own projects. If necessary, I'll call for a single roll to resolve any ambitions the PC lays out, then award XP (1 per year). Many of the character's temporal merits, like their human herd, their fame, or their resources are expended after I judge a sufficient time as passed, and Ren then has to spend some of his XP re-investing. 

Lately, I've taken to using what I call my "time wrench" table to make these downtime years feel more unpredictable. Essentially a random event table, it covers happenings the PC doesn't plan for. 

d10 Time Wrenches

• 1- new friend (mortal, possibly famous)
• 2- new friend (immortal)
• 3- hunt
• 4- jyhad plot against you
• 5- natural disaster
• 6- long-term dividends
• 7- juicy info
• 8- touchstone threatened
• 9- touchstone changed
• 10- vacillating loyalties

New friends give an opportunity to seed a connection to later historical events. They can also be useful when the new friend is inconvenient to have down the road, which feels about right for such long histories, where someone who seems solid in one decade ends up on the wrong side of a political schism or personal drama in the next. The vacillating loyalties wrench is a prompt to introduce seemingly abrupt changes of fickle humanity, ideally with one person or institution starting to aid the PC and one opposing them.

Hunts, plots, and natural disasters are a good way to keep the PC on their toes and concerned with their haven's safety, which can otherwise fall by the wayside in this game of long time.

 Long-term dividends and juicy info are catch-all buckets I use to show the result of activities from the PC's past or foreshadow information relevant to their projected future.

Touchstone threats and changes interact directly with 5e's touchstone system in pretty much the same way. Keeping hold of one's touchstone is difficult over time, and a touchstone may die of natural causes well before you roll any threat. Only if the PC has been tending to their touchstones should you allow them to carefully transplant their connection to something a bit less mortal, like a family or group. 

Degrees of Focus

Playing in this mode requires us to get a good feel how how much focus an event should have. Entire decades can be summarized in two minutes of discussion using the downtime rules, or play might provoke a scene, or there might be an important adventure of sorts that gets played out like in a normal chronicle. I don't have a strict procedure for deciding how much focus to apply, but generally the more kindred are involved in something, the more uncertain the outcome, the more directly related to a PC's life trajectory, the more detail it gets. 

Historical significance is not always game-significant, especially if we're not interested in modifying the trajectory of the event. Often it's more interesting to focus on a PC's particular struggles and conspiracies during a major even than on the major event itself. In our case, I don't think we're interested in radically shifting the events of World War II, for example, in part because as a whole it forms such an important part of the modern period that succeeds it in a way that wouldn't be fun for us to re-imagine. As such, that period is more likely to get a light focus for most of the PCs. I also take the position that there's so much history to cover for so many characters that it's good to keep a brisk pace.

 

Notes and Materials

To make the campaign work, I need to keep notes, but not scarily frustrating notes. The document I initially thought of as my "main" notes has almost all of the modern nights content. Because I like to do it this way, that means a list of every kindred coterie in the D.C. and Baltimore metropolitan area, down to each vampire and a couple facts about them. If you don't do that in your own VtM games, you probably don't need to do that here, but it helps me to look at some of the elders and introduce them to earlier eras. I also have two earlier versions of the kindred of that region from around a hundred and around two hundred years ago, which I can study to get a sense of the history of the kindred of the area. These versions can also see direct use with some of the later PCs. The document also has a full list of every PC, when they were sired, as well as a full list of a couple other major lineages that have interacted with them throughout history. This is mostly superseded by later notes. 

My side notes doc has all the cheat sheets and system references I made when I was teaching myself VtM 5e. It has the blood potency chart, which is especially important when the PCs will have differing blood potencies beyond what is normal for a standard Vampire chronicle. This doc also has session notes for every session, which are very terse. Many sessions only get three sentences or fewer. 

My final doc, a google sheet, has become my real main notes. It has a full list of discipline powers I made for my own reference, the clans over time page (more on that in a bit), homebrew rituals and procedures, scrap notes, a list of random kindred for if I need to throw one in somewhere, and the timeline. The timeline runs from the founding of Enoch through to modern nights. It has a column for major historical events and a column for each PC, to record what they're doing at that time. This has turned out to be a relatively compact way of tracking the events of play.

 I also get some use out of my various VtM generators. I have a PC generator, a blood resonance generator for when I remember to do that, a "travel gate" generator to inspire interesting events and obstacles for journeys, and a Noddist text generator to impart lore which obscures the ancient history of vampiric doings. Ren has enjoyed poring over the text summaries I write to try to look past the earliest records his characters have, but this is a form of fun that's only peripheral to the concept of the Great Raven Chronicle

 

Clans Over Time 

A source of great fun for me and consternation for Ren has been my "Clans Over Time" notes, which track changing vocabulary and identity of vampires through history. In different periods, different terms will be used for things like vampires, clans, caitiff, and so on, and especially elder vampires will be more likely to use outdated terms. This provides the sort of annoying friction that makes the player feel like he's a modern lick reading the account of some ancient Cainite.

I always really liked the dubious canonicity of a lot of established facts that vampires claim about themselves in the World of Darkness. You don't need to look far to find some worldbuilding detail that doesn't make sense, but in a way that makes you doubt the so-called historians of the world more than the designers of the game. Accordingly, I have this crazy chart detailing the different names that clans existed under in different periods, splinter clans, schisms, and a surfeit of detail to keep history feeling inconstant and confusing.

Because the game stretches back into the distant past, I've had to engage with vampire lore I normally couldn't be assed about. For once, the melodrama of the antediluvians, the relationship between Caine and Lillith, secrets kept by beings long-diablerized by modern nights are all vital and interesting topics, relevant to the campaign. Hating "metaplots", I've skimmed enough fan-wiki articles to interate on their most interesting ideas and make a mysterious world that's evocative of a lot of second- and third-order VtM lore but unique enough to my game that Ren can't accidentally spoil himself. 

 

Duet vs Group Play 

The VtDA game I played in had a standard brace of players who each controlled one PC, but might it be too much to run something like the Great Raven Chronicle with four to six players? It would probably be more sane to avoid giving every player eight PCs, but there are probably ways to live up to the premise of the game. In our game, Ren's lineage is always interacting with two other lineages, which consistently provide supporting characters throughout history. It would be sort of neat if you assigned multiple PCs in each of a couple lineages to the players, resulting in an average coterie that's a member of one lineage, their childe, their friend, and their friend's childe.

 Or maybe it can just follow one lineage, with each player alternately getting one member of the line and the rest filling in with ghouls, retainers, and allies as a sort of troupe play thing.

Or maybe the game can follow an ongoing coterie or broader organization, with players developing their own respective lineages as they go, but must divide XP between members of the lineage so nothing gets too out of hand.

 

Conclusion

 I am immensely lucky to have a player like Ren. As a collaborator, he brings energy, surprises, and love to every role he plays. And honestly after twenty-five sessions I am surprised by how little ground we've covered even as a brisk pace. There are certainly many weird and emergent properties of the campaign structure that we are yet to reveal, and I'm really excited to see where it goes. I hope this breakdown has been interesting, and that it may provoke still more innovation in your own games.