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.
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.
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